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Comment by RoutinePlayer | Hacker News Reader

But isn't the implication that half of all adults in the world have MORE than $2300 actually more incredibly awesome?

Yes, I agree that the number sounds great to me. People forget that 70% of the world's population lives on less than $10/day. When you're making $100k+ at your fancy first world tech job maybe $2300 sounds terrible. But when $2300 is 230 days pay, it's amazing. And that number has got to be really high from a historical standpoint, since historically there was really only royalty and abject poverty.

It really isn't all that awesome, because that isn't very much net worth at all. At a minimum, you'd want everyone's net worth to be at least the average value of a car, I'd think.

I wonder how this compares historically, adjusted for era. Any idea?

Young people tend to have less assets than old people. Graduate from college with the median debt (~30K) and now you have net negative worth for a while. But this does not mean you're poor, and it certainly correlates with much higher net worth when older.

Buy a car, which now has immediately lost value (in general), and you may have negative net worth for some time. But this is not bad, nor is it long term poor.

As such, I don't think wanting everyone's net worth to be the average value of a car is realistic. Maybe averaged over a lifetime, or some such non-time-static metric would be better.

>It really isn't all that awesome

70% of the world's population lives on less than $10/day. And that is a significant improvement over most of history. If it's really half of the world that has $2300 that sounds very promising to me. I guess "awesome vs not awesome" really amounts to "compared to what?" Compared to the fantasy in my head of how life could be, it's terrible. Compared to real world history, it sounds pretty good.

"According to researchers from Credit Suisse, the richest 1% owned 50.8% of the world’s wealth in 2016"

That should be a wake up call.

And to be in the richest 1% you have to just make around $30k/year.

That’s income not wealth.

It depends where you are I guess. In general, it's still more of a bad news than a good news.

yeah it’s really something that half of all adults have more wealth than the cost of a shitty beater car

Not really. Obviously money spends differently in different places, but the sum of EVERYTHING that someone owns being less valuable than my computer, cell phone and the cash in my wallet is very bad.

Never mind the idea that there's still an extreme minority of the population in possession of an obscene ratio of the world's wealth is "awesome" in the sense that it "inspires awe that our society has continued to allow this to happen" but that doesn't mean it's good.

But isn't total wealth relative to the economy one lives in? I'm thinking of Steven Pinker and his latest book "Enlightenment Now", where he discusses some staggering stats about world poverty that are really worth considering. Of course things can definitely be much better. But it seems we actually have been making tremendous progress along this line, so the article's negative connotations may be a bit misplaced.

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