While it’s relatively easy to find out where I compare to US citizens, I was curious how my level of income compares to the world as a whole. For the record: I’m single, and make about $50,000 a year.
The specific number I’m looking for is the percentage of people below and above my income worldwide.
Quoted from above site^^^
‘‘98.5% of the worlds population earn less than $50,000 per year,and their total share of the worlds income is less than79.2%.The other 1.5% receives 20.8% of the world’s income.’’
I pretty much knew that already. I was just curious as to exactly how much richer I was.
I would have guessed that I was richer than 95% of the world; the 98.5% figure suprised me a bit, until I considered the level of poverty (and population) in Africa and much of Asia.
Nametag
It probably makes more sense to look at Purchasing Power Parity. (PPP) This give a median income of about 2500 USD/yr.
To put this in perspective, in the U.S. the “poverty level” for a family of four is about 18,000 USD/yr. So the median world income is equivalent to about 55% of the U.S. poverty level. To put it yet another way, living on the median world income would be very roughly like a single parent supporting three children on a minimum wage job.
These numbers are deceptive because they underestimate the “background” wealth in the developed world, especially in the U.S. There are a great deal of services, amenities and resources freely or cheaply available to all that dramatically improve the quality of life in the developed world, e.g., reliable water supplies and electricity, freeways, libraries, health care infrastructure, efficient distribution systems in the forms of supermarkets, etc., etc. Homeless people in North America are probably “wealthier” than a great many people in developing countries.