"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.

Anna said, “I don’t know. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three
hundred.”

“Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latestForbes 500 reports?”

Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo
was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world in general. He tapped another
taped-up page. “The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.”

Anna said, “I wonder how they define surplus value.”

“Profit,” Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. “You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value
created beyond the pay for the labor, is still there.”

Anna said, “There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1,950 hours a year.
I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.”

“Three weeks of vacation a year,” Frank pointed out. “Pretty normal.”

“Yeah, but that’s the average? What about all the part-time workers?”

“There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.”

“Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.”

“You work overtime.”
“Yeah but I don’t getpaid for it.”

The men laughed at her.

“They should have used the median,” she said. “The average is a skewed measure of central tendency.
Anyway, that’s…” Anna could do calculations in her head. “Sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty
dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.”

“What’s the average income?” Edgardo asked. “Thirty thousand?”

“Maybe less,” Frank said.

“We don’t have any idea,” Anna objected.

“Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?”

“About ten? Or is it less?”

Edgardo said, “Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks.
You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and