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Comment by whybroke | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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?

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