Richest 1% Is Likely to Control Half of Global Wealth by 2016 | Hacker News Reader

Richest 1% Is Likely to Control Half of Global Wealth by 2016

nytimes.com

31 pointstomek_zemla24 comments

Considering that about 2 billion humans have a negative net wealth due to debt, this is not surprising. If you don't have any debt, you are already richer than the poorest 2 billion humans combined!

For more details why this statistic should not be trusted, see here: http://www.iea.org.uk/node/9980

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910476 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8912298.

The global cutoff for the top 1% in annual income is $34,000. (Not a typo.) Different than wealth, but still revealing.

So, who are the 1%:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/04/news/economy/world_richest/

I always wish in these articles they would single out the top 1% of the 1% - It definitely shows more of the issue since most doctors would be in the top 1%.

When you say "1/100,000th of the population has xx% of the wealth" it showcases the issue at hand in a much clearer view.

If you take the global richest 1%, pretty much everyone on this website gets included. The cut-off point is at around $35,000 a year.

>The cut-off point is at around $35,000 a year.

That doesn't sound true. Can you back up your argument with facts' data?

Google search for top 1% of income in the world:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2082385/We-1--You-ne...

My guess is that he's mixing income with wealth (just a guess though).

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business-tech/120331...

Various sources from the past couple years cite between $34,000 and $37,000.

More than two-thirds of the population of the earth makes less than $1,000 a year, so this shouldn't be very surprising.

I'm confused...

Sniff test:

    World pop: ~ 7,000,000,000
           1%: ~ 70,000,000

    Population of the US ~ 300,000,000
    Median income in the US ~ $50,000

So you can come up with well over 70 million people in the US with incomes greater than $50,000. How then can the global top 1% cut off be $35k?

Median personal income in the US is ~$35,000, I think you must have looked at household. That $35,000 doesn't include people under 25. So the "7 billion" median would be even lower.

You're right that I was looking at household income. Thanks for the correction!

Still, that number doesn't seem accurate for the cut-off for the global 1%

2010 census has over 180,000,000 Americans over age 25. So assuming that there are people making more than $35,000 outside the US, this number still smells fishy...

Well the household income is not the incorrect number to look at. You just have to divide that by the number of people in the household. Children, elderly, disabled and others don't typically work. That makes the income-per-individual lower than the "individual income" which only counts those that are participating in the workforce.

Quickly looking at Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... ) I see that the median household income is $50,233 and there are 116,011,000 households in the US. A quick googling shows there are about 316.1 million people in the US, yielding an average of 2.725 people per household. Dividing $50,233 drops our previous income figure down to $18,434.12 per person.

Stock != flow

Rather than seeking contrived numbers to reinforce your preconceive notions, you could actually spend a few seconds on google to figure it out. The article talks about ownership so:

Net world wealth $263,242bil [1]

World population 7bil [2]

Thus you need roughly $2million in assets to be in the world 1%

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_wealth

[2]https://www.google.com/search?q=world+population&ie=utf-8&oe...

How did you get $2 million from that? What distribution did you assume? According to [0], net worth of $1 million would put you in the top 0.7%.

[0] http://www.international-adviser.com/ia/media/Media/Credit-S...

I'm answering the contrived $35k income claim above. That claimant is likely not going to pay much attention to a 150 page document from any source let alone one that goes contrary to his opinion.

Thus one needs a proof short enough to get through that barrier of near instant disbelief.

A very rough sanity check shows: $263,242bil / 2 / ( 7*10^9 / 100 ) = $1,880,300 ie approx 2million

Obviously this is a highly simplified approximation, of necessity for that audience.

Equally obvious, it is vastly greater than $34k.

You're making the assumption that the bottom of the 1% and the top of the 1% have the same amount of wealth which is completely wrong. Nice superiority complex though. The $35k number is for the #70,000,000th wealthiest person.

According to your claim there would be 70 million millionaires in the world. Sanity check there?

But it depends how we define wealth - if you define it by income it's going to cast a wider net than if you define it by assets.

My view is we should define the 1% by assests

Negative View: 1% of people control half of global wealth.

Positive View: 99% of people control half of global wealth.

I guess it's a matter of perspective?

Neither sounds very good.

It's ok.

You belong to the group of people who control half of global wealth :)

the half-full glass analogy doesnt quite work here.

97/100 times your brakes will work.

3/100 times your brakes will fail.

this is two ways of saying there's something severely wrong. it's not a matter of perspective unless the situation itself is subjective. a half-full glass is not - in isolation - worse than one that is full without context.

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