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>"To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. " .... The m

• tomjakubowski 5y ago
  The median salary tells you nothing about impoverished Americans. 20th percentile household income in the USA in 2018 was $25k. Comparing incomes between countries as straightforwardly as this ignores differences in cost of living, too.
• oscardssmith 5y ago
  You aren't accounting for purchasing power. In most countries, medicine costs half as much (or less), education is much cheaper, and the cost of food and housing is much lower.
  • leoc 5y ago
    And in many of those countries expensive things like cars and smartphones are usually discretionary items, not absolutely or near-absolutely necessary to get and keep a job, pay taxes, get your children to school and so on.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    > You aren't accounting for purchasing power. Which is pretty easy to account for if one is being serious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity
    • wutbrodo 5y ago
      And Milanovic does so in his figures. It's "unserious" (and bizarre) to assume that an economist failed to make this adjustment, and then claim that it's super easy to do so; the latter statement should mean that your baseline assumption is that PPP adjustment was performed.
  • wutbrodo 5y ago
    > You aren't accounting for purchasing power. In most countries, medicine costs half as much (or less), education is much cheaper, and the cost of food and housing is much lower. Milanovic's figures do account for overall purchasing power. It would be pretty amateurish of an economist not to. The distribution of the price level among verticals is a separate question though, and it's possible that it's suboptimally skewed in the US
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  What quintile do you think the median salary is in? Hint: it’s not the bottom one. The bottom quintile of US households made anywhere between $0 and $25,600 in 2018, with the mean being $13,258. All of these numbers are well outside “global 1%” range you quoted. And that’s before we begin to adjust for cost of living, because you can’t just compare income without considering the cost of food, housing, health care, and transit.
• sudosysgen 5y ago
  That's not possible. There are 7.5 bullion people in the world, so 1% is 75 million people. Ipso facto it's impossible for most people in the US to be the one percent because 170 million is more than 75 million.