5 ms·
Global Rich List
- xianshou 13y agoJarring background. More jarring information. Interesting fact: being a 1-percenter in the US ($370k in 2010) makes you a .02-percenter on the worldwide scale.
- cyphersanctus 13y agoInteresting. There's one bug though, when you select another country like Colombia, for instance, you have to enter the value in its currency. When you do, in that case 1k usd is 2 Million, the calculation seems to convert that to millions of dollars. Its not entirely clear which money format you should use.
- pasquinelli 13y agoi can't enter my debts. i can't have a negative home equity. you should be able to supply your debts on both the income and wealth pages.
- dualogy 13y agoImplying you're the target audience.. ;)
- JumpCrisscross 13y agoAdjust your income by subtracting the annual cost of servicing your debt and wealth by subtracting the present value of the debt.
- tokenizer 13y agoGreat app. Too bad a 1 percenters like me can't calculate my apparent wealth however. Income works fine, but when I put in the data for wealth (no house, minimalistic materials, and meagre bank accounts) it gives me the error code: "Are you sure about that?"... Apparently, you cannot hold less than $1,500CAD of wealth, nor can you be classed within the bottom 22%. The income bottom limit is $400CAD, which is much better. It's kind of funny how the stats don't feel so guilty when entering the lower limits. For a $400CAD yearly income: " In 1 hour you make $0.21 Meanwhile, the average labourer in Indonesia makes just $0.50 in the same time. "
- igravious 13y agoHonest question, if you earn so much (1% you claim) where does all your income go? You're supporting others? You're paying off student loans? Your rent is really really high? Anyway. If you've no accumulated wealth just enter your income and then marvel at the disparity between you and the 99%.
- citricsquid 13y agoHe probably means the global 1% which is ~$30,000 per year, in a lot of first world places that is far from enough to build up wealth without behaving frugally.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- randomdata 13y agoEven when observing only the USA, a top 1% personal income starts at around $200K, which isn't unheard of for a developer position. A recent poll about age places the majority of HN readers early in their career where debt is usually high and assets have not had much time to accumulate, so a top 1% US income and no assets does not seem like an impossibility either.
- petersalka 13y agoYep, same here. I live in Sydney AU and the app also put me in the top 1% richest people in the world by income. When I did it by wealth, the result was: "Your personal wealth is equal to the combined wealth of 0 people in Myanmar." and "1% of your wealth could feed a family of four in Ethiopia for 0 months." There's no doubt that we live way more comfortably than most people in Myanmar do but it's clear that being born with wealth to start with helps no matter where you live.
- vacri 13y agoI have a slightly-lower-than-median wage in Aus and only $20k in assets (car, some furniture). This puts me at 0.9% for income, but 27% for wealth, which is quite a strange disparity - evidently there are a lot of people earning much less than me with much more in the way of assets. While I am not financially astute, I'm also not terribly bad, throwing that money away on lottery tickets and whatnot. Buggered if I know how I manage to drop 26 percentage points - how are all those much poorer people managing to save so much more than me, especially considering that by the time you're out of the top 1%-by-income, you're below $30k.
- leeoniya 13y agothings like this rub me the wrong way. you cannot compare income levels between countries with vastly different costs of living. sure, first world countries will have a higher standard of living overall, but putting $25/hr in US up against $0.08/hr in Ghana is a misleading comparison of purchasing power. case in point: in Ghana you can probably buy a castle full of servants on 80 acres for $25/hr.
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago"For currency conversion we use Purchasing Power Parity Dollars (PPP$) in order to take into account the difference in cost of living between countries; PPP$ are also less susceptible to short term fluctuations."
- leeoniya 13y agoim no economist, but i cant help but feel thereis a huge flaw with PPP comparisons between first and third world countries. if someone made $0.08/hr in the US, they would starve. homeless people make a lot more than this in the states. but somehow, people manage to raise whole families on those wages in third world countries. what am i missing?
- matchu 13y agoI think that's exactly what PPP is about, though: income is converted to how much you have the power to purchase, so it's designed specifically to equalize that comparison. Or maybe I'm misreading.
- a3n 13y agoYou're missing the forest for the trees. It's an awareness tool, not an economic analysis.
- leeoniya 13y agothe tool does count trees though. i find it relevant to discuss whether it counts 1e2 trees or 1e6, or a seemingly unsurvivable wage with one that in reality sustains families.
- citricsquid 13y agoI feel conflicted about donating to charity, Kiva(.org) is my money-for-good vehicle of choice but sometimes it feels as if my money could be better spent donating to charities that help people that can't afford to eat, eat. Long term spending of money to help people better themselves and those around them is the more sustainable model but short term helping people that are starving have access to life essentials has a greater impact and is more compassionate. If only it was simple as "I have $xxx, how can I have the greatest positive impact?".
- JumpCrisscross 13y agoThe Robin Hood Foundation, a charity which aims to "find, fund and partner with programs that have proven they are an effective remedy to poverty" [1] in New York City, has built robust metrics, at least on par with the Bill & Melinda Gates and Bloomberg Foundations. They work rigorously to identify where their dollars "have the greatest positive impact". More on Robin Hood's metrics: https://www.robinhood.org/metrics https://www.robinhood.org/metrics. Disclaimer: I donate to the Robin Hood Foundation [1] https://www.robinhood.org/about https://www.robinhood.org/about
- nowarninglabel 13y agoThat's something I've pressed for here a lot at Kiva, showing how positive your impact is. Last year, we started rating our partners on "catalytic"-ness, which is somewhat of a proxy for impact, and now 33% of our loans are rated highly catalytic. There's some studies which have shown impact both of microfinance in general and some that include our specific partners, but in general not nearly enough studies. And I'm sure with enough data, we'd find that microloans can have one of the greatest impacts, but that there are certainly situations where charitable giving can be even more impactful under the right circumstances. The problem is studies are hard to do right and expensive, and thus it's hard to get data on what is most impactful. From an engineering perspective, I'd love to solve this problem, but it seems to be one of those problems that requires more of an academic solution.
- daeken 13y agoAll I have to say is: thank you. Thank you to every single person involved with Kiva in any way. Every month I have an auto-deposit into my Kiva account, and I'm always excited to jump in and distribute the funds. The team I'm in (http://www.kiva.org/team/nerdfighters http://www.kiva.org/team/nerdfighters) is open to anyone and has themes where each month we fund women, people from specific nations, etc and work together to make sure that the recipients' loans are filled. It's both fun and helps decrease world suck. Keep up the good work -- to you and the rest of the team at Kiva. You rock.
- ryandrake 13y agoIt doesn't seem to recognize negative numbers. So if you're like the 1 in 4 Americans who have zero or negative net worth, the "wealth" part of the app won't work. * http://www.epi.org/press/news_from_epi_th_great_recession_exacerbated_existing_wealth_disparities_in/ http://www.epi.org/press/news_from_epi_th_great_recession_ex...
- dice 13y agoI also noticed that. I'm hoping to get up to zero net worth in the next couple of years, though...
- nick2021 13y agoI feel like these sites aren't accurate. It's not fair to say the guy in Zimbabwe only earns $.53/hour compared to my $40+, because everything in Zimbabwe is much cheaper. For instance a nice apartment in San Diego is $1,600+/month. I'd really like to see how I compare to other 1st world countries. In other words don't compare California to some super poor country in Africa. If the cost of living and goods were the same in both countries then fine, compare otherwise don't.
- speeder 13y agoToo bad this is broken... It does not accept negative wealth (well... I own about 2000 USD in personal objects, have no investments, and still owe about 10k USD in student loans...) If you input a negative number, it assumes it is positive, you can even try stripping the minus (or adding a minus) and clicking the button again, it won't even calculate again and will assume it is the same number.
- aroman 13y agoInterestingly, the "Maximum income" (USD/year) is 2,200,000,000 (2.2 billion). Specifying a yearly income of 2B/year, however, puts you at #1 according to this. Why 2.2B? Seems rather arbitrary.
- simcop2387 13y agoLikely a 32bit int rounding issue? 2147483648
- aroman 13y agoAhh, that must be it. Strange they'd cap it at 2.2B instead of their actual MAX_INT equivalent.
- whiddershins 13y agoI love it, what an effective message. I think there is a bug in the form validation, if I put commas in my net worth, it gives me a completely different value than if I don't. Probably should intelligently strip out non numerals, or even reject non-numeral entries, since people of different nationalities use periods and commas differently. Also, reading the methodology, very interesting, but I am intuiting it isn't so accurate. My net worth is higher vs average for U.S., and my income is lower vs average for U.S. but the site ranks me in the opposite direction when I change my entry values.
- apsec112 13y agoThis is an interesting idea, but the numbers are bogus. It says 2% of the world (130M people) makes more than $25,000. This is, however, the median American personal income, so we know that at least 150M Americans make at least that much, plus all the people who do so elsewhere (probably at least another 150M, counting UK, Germany, France, Japan, etc, all the wealthier countries).
- lsd5you 13y agoI don't think all Americans are in work ... edit: Brief searching gives around 135 million Americans in work (this number maybe excluding farm work).
- apsec112 13y ago(For better statistics see gapminder.org, it's quite fascinating)
- pcl 13y agoCool site; thanks for the link. For all of us on mobile browsers: http://www.gapminder.org http://www.gapminder.org
- anovikov 13y agoOf course it's more than that, EU's average GDP per capita is 70% of that of the USA, population is over 150% of U.S., and income is more evenly distributed down here so losers are better off than in USA. And there is also Japan where the vast majority of 120+mm population get way more.
- sytelus 13y agoI love how they hid a currency conversion fallacy by putting example of can of cock instead of glass of water. This website will make a walmart worker feel super rich than a person working in similar large store in Ghana even if both have more or less same quality of life.