Branko Milanovic is one of my favorite researchers.
His "Elephant Curve" is well-know. His book "The Haves and the Have-Nots" is excellent.
I used his dataset to replicate his results to show inequality in an interactive form here:
His "Elephant Curve" is well-know. His book "The Haves and the Have-Nots" is excellent.
I used his dataset to replicate his results to show inequality in an interactive form here:
However, let's not kid ourselves. Cost of living in India is equally or ever more cheap. $1-$2 for lunch a day? Rent is only $200/month? My god that's cheap for people earning $20,000/yr as opposed to someone even in Mississippi.
The real losers anywhere are the bottom quintile in a highly unequal society.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/15/this-...
I don't know how you could live in the US if you just made $2k/yr. Even if rent was entirely free. I'm a grad student and eat a lot of lentils, rice, eggs, and beans. $2k a year is pretty easy to blow through on just food (That's $167/mo, which is doable but not reasonable). What am I missing that is being captured here? I literally don't know anywhere in the US (I've lived in some pretty cheap and desolate areas) that you could do $2k for just rent in a year. I mean the poverty level is like $12k and you have to find really really cheap housing and eat a lot of lentils and rice to survive on that.
What am I missing? Is 50% of the world that malnourished? Are things like food and rent not being explicitly bought and thus not included? Combinations?
This I fully believe. But also having lived under $15k/yr, I can't fathom how that placed me in the 93(ish) percentile. I could understand being in the 70th percentile just by merit of things like having a cellphone and internet but half (48.9%) the world's population is on the internet (up from 36.6% in 2013) and 35% of people have smartphones (66.5% have mobile devices). So there's something that I'm really missing. I do know that internet and cellphones weren't as ubiquitous in 2013, but if that's what's accounting for the different then there's been a huge and rapid shift but I'd also argue that something is wrong.
Clearly there's something I'm missing here. Because with my past experience this suggests to me that living paycheck to paycheck and being malnourished in the US(living in the <13th percentile in the US) still puts you over the 90% mark (world). I assume this would be similar in Europe. I mean I know we have a SIGNIFICANTLY higher quality of life here, but this suggests to me that 80% of the world has to be extremely malnourished. Lines like this confuse me
> Almost a third of the people had less than $1,000 to spend for the whole year, that's less than $3 per day on average!
Because I can understand that if you're in India or southeast Asia and those are $3 US. But I literally cannot figure out how that would be possible in the US. Assuming everything you have and eat is coming out of your pocket.
I'm really just curious. I'm going to go ahead and assume the economists know more about economics than me. I'm legitimately just trying to make sense of this.
In piketty's world the "utopia" we now live is a result of anti-capitalist forces that destroyed or reorganized wealth during the chaos of the 20th century.