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Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

> To make the Global Top 1% you have to earn $32,400

It always troubles me when people throw this global piece into it. This global number is absolutely meaningless outside of a regional and often even city based economy.

The quality of life someone can purchase for their family with a $34,000 salary if we live in SF is a terrible and incredibly rough quality of life.

When people speak about the 1%, they are typically speaking colloquially about the 1% from any given region.

The quality of life one can purchase for their family with a $34,000 salary in NYC is still just awful when compared to quality of life of the richest people in China or the richest people in India.

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Anyone living on $34K in NYC has the option of living like a peasant in China, India, or even poorer countries. If you don't want to emigrate, you can do Peace Corps or other volunteer work and have all your expenses paid for, as well as still knowing that your American citizenship and all your assets will still be here when you get back. Relatively few people take advantage of this option. A very, very large number of people living in those countries are willing to risk everything for a shot at immigrating to the U.S. and living on a lot less than $34K in NYC.

That should tell you something about the relative desirability of these lives for most people, even if the dollar amounts are unreliable.

(BTW, the richest people in China and India are very rich, oftentimes richer than their counterparts in the U.S. - the article said that 50% of the occupants of the Boulevard Penthouses were from China. So that's not really a fair comparison. Take a population of 2.5B and compare it with a population of 300M and even if the means of the former are much lower, the outliers are likely to be higher.)

> Anyone living on $34K in NYC has the option of living like a peasant in China, India, or even poorer countries. If you don't want to emigrate, you can do Peace Corps or other volunteer work and have all your expenses paid for, as well as still knowing that your American citizenship and all your assets will still be here when you get back. Relatively few people take advantage of this option. A very, very large number of people living in those countries are willing to risk everything for a shot at immigrating to the U.S. and living on a lot less than $34K in NYC.

Using an entire paragraph to simply restate the old saying "If you don't like the US of A, you can just get the hell out" doesn't make the argument any more compelling than it is as a simple sentence.

Some of us would prefer to rather than point at the worst nations and say "Welp, guess we should stop asking questions because at least we don't have it that bad." that we should look at places who appear as if they may be doing better and ask "What are they doing differently from us? And can we emulate any of their policies to improve our own society?"

Looking for new information in order to possibly optimize systems is logical from my perspective.

But if you believe people should not be allowed to ask these questions unless they're first willing to "get the hell out" I suppose that is your prerogative.

You'd still be living way better than the global 90%, who are living off rice and sleeping on dirt floors. I get your comment though, it's really inconvenient when people make you consider reality.

This calculator adjusts for cost of living: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i/

Earning at least $55,000 per year in the US with a household of one adult puts you in the top 1%.

$32,000 puts you in the top 3.4%, which is still pretty good.

Again, when looking at wealth disparity, these numbers immediately lose their meaning once you begin to remove regional and local context.

We must take into account what quality of life that salary will purchase for the location in which the worker actually inhabits. Not what that salary would purchase somewhere the worker doesn’t live.

With your example the US based salary of $55,000 is not 1% in the US. In the US a one percenter salary begins at ~$389,400/yr. The quality of life you can purchase with a salary is incredibly location specific.

A salary becomes meaningless once you remove location specific variables. This is why salaries vary for the exact same job depending on what city you live in—a network analyst in SF will likely make more than a network analyst in Keokuk, Iowa. Generally we try to get salaries to have equivalent purchasing power based on the local economy in which the worker will actually be existing.

We can’t meaningfully look at wealth gaps and disparities if we remove all context of what quality of life a local job’s salary can purchase in that specific locale.

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