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Coping with Corporate Greed
We need to redistribute the wealth
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I remember attending a fireside chat at a former company where the CFO smugly announced, “We have over $650 million dollars in the bank untouched.” The room filled with nods and murmurs of approval. I couldn’t join in however. It felt weird to hear a CFO boast about hoarding wealth while the gig workers who sustained the company struggled to earn a living wage. Days before this chat, I read an article highlighting how San Francisco mishandled and poorly tracked funds allocated to support the unhoused. In 2022–2023, the city spent around $676 million on this issue — almost the same amount that that company had idly sitting in a bank.
It got me thinking: How much money do other companies have sitting around untouched?
Why isn’t this wealth being circulated? What social good could be achieved if it were? Could we feed the hungry and house the unhoused? The answer is yes. With the profits of just a few corporations, we could solve these issues hundreds of times over. Let’s examine the data to understand how.
The Cost Breakdown
The actual numbers here will vary slightly due to the ability to collect and track accurate data.
Approximately 1 in 10 people are hungry. That’s roughly 828 million people. If someone sees this data and thinks, 9 out of 10 aren’t hungry, that’s pretty good, it should be known that the world produces enough food to feed 10 billion people, which is more than the current global population of around 7.8 billion. Inefficiencies and inequities in food distribution leave many people without access to sufficient food. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) also reports that around 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted globally each year. This is roughly a third of all food produced for human consumption and could feed those who are hungry four times over. No one should be hungry. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that we would need around $40 billion dollars a year to end global hunger by 2030.
The World Economic Forum reported that, in 2021, 150 million people were unhoused globally…
