Where do the wealthiest 1% live?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> There's a quite famous post on Tianya community (one of the most prominent Chinese online community). There's a sub forum on Tianya specifically for people to showoff their wealth.
1) And one day, some guy start showing off his watches (IWC watch.)
2) Other people step in and start competing with him - more watches
3) Luxury cars (Lambos)
4) More Luxury cars, diamond rings
5) Then, things start to get interesting, some guy post this: Government approved mining permit. You ever heard about how Chinese coal mine owner could afford a dozen Hummers, private jets? Yeah...
6) And then, another guy post this, bank account with nearly 1 Billion Yuan (about 150 Million USD).
7) And the post got quiet for a bit until this guy show up, posting bunch of land ownership certificates (the little white note says: all fking go home!)
8) And the post got quiet for a long time, and then this guy step up and end the discussion once and for all:
It's an invitation to 中南海 ( Zhongnanhai ), and official envelopes of CPC ( Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China ).'
Here you have a very interesting social power structure of China:
Level 1: Luxury goods (Phones, Watches, Cars, jewelry)
Level 2: Possession of raw materials (mines, oil, steel...)
Level 3: possession of large amount of money
Level 4: possession of land.
Level 5: Access to the power core.
The guy might not even belong to core power, but the mere access to it, you have that kind of connection is valued more than any material wealth. There's your basic Chinese social structure in one sentence.
You can bypass the issue with a URL trick (?share=1)
The information restriction and distortion imposed by the ruling party will simply destroy its own capability of processing information in the long run. Not a good thing for people live on the land. I wish it would not happen.
So true! I flew east for hours and never saw the place. My sister supposedly "moved" there, but then a year or so later I saw her -- in Australia!
Kim Dotcom is in trouble with the law. Allegedly he lives in this "New Zealand" place but what authorities are seizing his assets? USA.
There must be a evil cabal who has inserted this "country" into so-called "educational" materials as a way of controlling youth. They've even gone as far as creating a seat at the UN general assembly for them. And defaced the name of the AAC biscuit. Stop the conspiracy!
Are these rich people? If you live in Boston, New York or California you can have that net worth and just be getting by. It doesn't feel like you live a life of priveledge, or you have some kind of power over the world that other responsible employed adults don't have. It's hard to feel like that sort of wealth is really a social ill.
Wealth isn't just access to servants and lavish meals, it's access to anything other people want but can't afford. A house in San Francisco is such a thing, even if it doesn't have carved ivory statues and a moat.
This suggests possibly massive disruption in wealth structure once augmented reality puts remote interaction on par with local interaction. If your day-to-day expenses are significantly more decoupled from your income how will spending patterns in the top 5% change? Would luxury spending increase, or perhaps individuals would be able to invest more and retire earlier?
Second, absolutely yes. This has been the dream of telecommuting for, what, a decade? But rather than increasing discretionary income, remember that perfect telecommuting brings with it increased competition, which drives down compensation. So you would probably not see 2014 San Francisco tech salaries being paid to all those remote workers. A real part of today's high SV salaries is simple cost-of-living adjustment that would be unnecessary with remote hires in Nowhere, USA.
That said, it is much more common to exclude the net asset value of your primary residence in a 'net wealth' computation as it isn't nearly as useful to compare 'rich homeless people' as it is to compare people who are wealthy beyond simple home ownership.
It would be interesting to see the map where primary residences were excluded. (and the numbers, which is to say how much wealth outside of your home you need to qualify as the "rich".) And once you've done that, consider excluding $250K * kids as 'college money'[1]. Then you start to realize that "rich" means different things to different people.
[1] That assumes a lot of course, but still median 4 year tuition * kids might be useful too.
Well, yeah, there are lots of wealthy people in California. It seems like you're saying "it's so normal to be wealthy in California, so they aren't really wealthy". Sure, maybe you aren't relatively wealthy compared to your neighbours, but that doesn't change the fact that you're wealthier than 99% of the world.
> you can have that net worth and just be getting by
Only if you define "just getting by" by "having a normal lifestyle compared to your peers". But then most of the people in any range will be "getting by", by definition, including the 0.1%.
There's no need to confuse
"these people are wealthy" (for some arbitrary but quite reasonable definition of "wealthy")
with
"these people are privileged" or "these people should feel guilty" (both of which involves all sorts of value judgement)
> Obviously billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg are part of the 1%. But who else is? According to Credit Suisse, another 47m people
There are 7 billion people in this world. 1% of that is 70 million, not 47 million.
Never trust journalists writing about statistics (or anyone who hasn't studied statistics, they probably have no idea what they're talking about) (on second thought, don't trust people who have studied statistics either; they now enough to manipulate you).
> "More specifically, since children have little formal or actual wealth ownership, we focus on wealth ownership by adults, defined to be individuals aged 20 or above."
[1](page 5): https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi...
You can live like a poor student in Poland for very cheaply but an upper/upper-middle class lifestyle (a couple of nice new luxury cars, always having the latest iphones/ipads, fancy clothing/watches/jewelry, a nice house/apartment in a good location, etc) will cost the same or more in Warsaw as in Berlin or Vienna.
I have been to shanghai, and agree that it is not cheap.
However, other than special-case-outliers like Aspen and Davos, nowhere I have been is more expensive than Zurich.
It's like, crazy expensive.
And you would be surprised how much it doesn't. Costs in SH are high, and there are a lot of millionaires in the city even if that money is mostly gray.
Keep in mind that prices in China are lower at the low end, and higher at the high end. So ya, you can buy that cheap meal for cheaper, but if you want a BMW, you have to pay 2x/3x more. I do all my high-end shopping in the states when I go back once or twice a year (and I don't own a car).
For the 0.1% or higher (whose wealth is sufficient for them to take advantage of globetrotting) absolute numbers might be important.
'The 1%' is not simply a matter of wealth; a person with $500K in the UK and in Nigeria are not really equivalent. The former is just a person who owns a normal home in the South East outright, the latter may well be in a position of power.
This article is in response to the recent Oxfam report which talked about the wealth of the global 1%. So in that context the absolute wealth, in the way that Oxfam measured it, is relevant.
Isn't this just trying to correct for people using their wealth inefficiently?
The graphic shows 4.9% of the 47MM regarded as "the 1%" live in Italy. Although I do not debate that the chart is factual, I will pose question to you, as a skeptic audience: have you done business in Italy within the last 100 years? Have you heard of your friends or your friends of friends doing business there?
Innovation prevails. Regardless of the rate of compounding interest.
China with only 1.6 million is downright shocking. You read about new billionaires in that country all the time. I guess the wealth is only flowing into a very small number of hands.
They're partly the reason why the Canadian number is so high.
Home ownership, along with vacationing, is a core value of Canadian society. When you look at the average cost of a home (quite high) in Canada, along with this article defining "The 1%" as anyone with wealth of $798,000 or more, it's easy to see why there are so many Canadians.
Did we really think there are tens of millions of Daddy Warbuckses?