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Most people, actually, if you're sitting here surfing the net on your laptop.

Also $60K puts you in the global 0.19% according to http://www.globalrichlist.com/ It's definitely rich on a world-wide scale, and no, you don't need to compare only the third world. Even in developed countries that must easily be in the top 20%. But hey, it's easier to complain when you think you are poor.

I always think that anyone who resorts to saying that you're rich relative to Haiti and such is a tool of the 1%. Hey no worries that the middle class is dropping like a rock and the American dream of owning a house is slipping away, quit complaining because relative to Haiti you're actually quite rich.

The key word is "relatively". 30 to 44 is indeed older than we could have expected.

What are those expectations based on? That age range corresponds to people who would have been in college between the start of the World Wide Web and the launch of Facebook (after being raised in an era of piracy via cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and floppy disks). That's the era that gave us Napster and practically brought piracy mainstream. If I had to guess what age range was pirating the most, that would be it. I'm actually surprised that the percentage is so low.

Also $60K puts you in the global 0.19% according to http://www.globalrichlist.com/
It's definitely rich on a world-wide scale, and no, you don't need to compare only the third world.

And having a penny would make me the richest person on Mars. A subsistence farmer with little or no income could have a better quality of life than someone making $60,000 per year in San Francisco. Having more money means squat if the cost of living is higher; location matters.

The key word is "relatively". 30 to 44 is indeed older than we could have expected.

Also $60K puts you in the global 0.19% according to http://www.globalrichlist.com/
It's definitely rich on a world-wide scale, and no, you don't need to compare only the third world. Even in developed countries that must easily be in the top 20%.
But hey, it's easier to complain when you think you are poor.

Relatively speaking, You are wealthier than you think!

These numbers are deceiving, chosen for propaganda rather than enlightenment. For example, if this number makes you feel poor: "'Half the world' wealth is held by the top 1% of individuals PBS", then check out how you stack up. If you're a programmer in the US and you contribute regularly to your 401k, then you are in the top 1%. Rich hypocrite.

Secondly, it's easy to make these wealth numbers deceptive (we're not talking about income here). For example, if you have $1 saved in assets, you are richer than 20% of the population below age 65. Source Again, you rich hypocrite.

So stop looking at crap numbers you get from people who are trying to deceive you.

In reality, 1% of the world's population holds approximately half of the world's net wealth.

People who argue with you about that on the internet are probably already in the global 1%

Why are you purposely pretending not to understand what people are saying? They are basically always referring to the 1% of their own country. You're moving goalposts, and then pretending that everyone else is with the Orange County argument.

And even so, I don't think he'd have to exclude himself because he's not the top 1% of Orange County -- because there's a 99% chance he isn't in the top 1% of the US (assuming he's from the US, and assuming that slashdot's 1%er commenters are in proportion to the greater population). With this said, Cost of Living, tax differences, and government benefits are real factors that makes the actual worldwide 1% a little fuzzy.

In addition, you're quoting income numbers, not wealth numbers. Just because you have a higher income than 99% of people, doesn't mean you have a higher wealth than 99% of people.

Also, the 1% of the world is $34k from what I've read: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new..., http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/...

This other source says $47.5k: http://dailycaller.com/2011/11...

This site puts it at around $32.5k: http://www.globalrichlist.com/

So there's a variety of estimates, and note most of those sites are actually explicitly making the same point you are so they aren't biased against you. Where's 22k coming from?

First, being part of the top 1% is not a right, and neither, by definition, a possibility for everyone.
Next, the typical US surgeon or lawyer is in the top 1%. You only need about $780k in net worth to be in the top 1%. source: http://www.globalrichlist.com/...

Any professional with a good job will save more than that through his lifetime. Remember this number includes real estate value.

It's hard to calculate things like total wealth of the world, but this site calculates that you're in the top 1% if you make $40k per year.

This says he's in the world's top 0.02% percent. Unless he has a lot of debts, he's very well off.

And that's in the US only. Worldwide it is about 32k$

$32,500 per year puts you in the top 1% worldwide. Given that you need an income probably around $120,000 to afford this car, you're right - it's not a 1%er car, it's a 0.1%er car...

Maybe, but I know what it's like to live with dirt floors, without any running water or even a well in your yard. You can check it out, but in all likelihood you are probably already in the 1%, so yeah you are rich.

Yeah, your rent is higher, but you are probably so rich you turn on the faucet and pour potable water down the drain waiting for it to heat up, without even thinking about it. Most likely you have carpet or wood floors, not concrete or dirt. If you live somewhere hot in the US, you probably have air conditioning. You probably have a car. You probably never worry about not having enough food. You can go on vacation in Hawaii if you feel like it.

If you have a median US college degree income and you don't feel rich, it's only because you've gotten used to the feeling of being rich, just like we've all gotten used to the feeling of electric lighting, but that is magical.

$7.5 million isn't rich

Uh, yes it is, if you're living on this planet. Your own math shows that! $125k annually is in the richest 0.07% of the world's population. It's more than 76 times the median income for Earth humans, according to Branko Milanovic.

Honestly, even in the USA, just 4 million in assets is rich. Affluenza rich. You'd pretty much have to be both insane and incompetent to fail to increase your wealth once you had 4 million in pocket. Hell, hire one honest accountant with an above average IQ and your 4 mil will easily keep both of you in cheesesteaks and hookers for your lifetime...

Here, you might find this an interesting tool for evaluating what "rich" is.

If twelve dollars an hour ($11.70 or so) is the threshold for the poorest 20% of a country, most countries in the world would happily trade places with you. global rich list

I just learned that $32,400/yr in the US makes you a 1 percent-er. There must be an awful lot of people on government aid for the 1% level to be only 2.8x the US single person poverty level.

As a counterpoint to the one I made, you show me a ratio of what forms of taxes people pay separated by state?

I got an idea; hop on your buggy whip and ride it to this page:

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5033e47e6bb3f7ab5a000004-900/the-top-10-pay-about-70-of-the-income-taxes.jpg

Or this one:

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5033e3e3ecad049417000002-900/here-are-the-income-taxes-paid-by-the-respective-income-percentiles-note-how-little-the-bottom-half-pay-blue-note-how-much-more-as-a-percentage-of-the-whole-the-top-5-are-paying.jpg

Honestly, how is it that the top 1% pay 30% of all taxes, yet the socialists decry that they aren't paying their fair share? Yeah, they're not paying they're fair share, they're paying 30 times their fair share! But we're the 99% right? That means we should only have to pay 1%, amirite?

Funny things you can do with numbers by the way. Did you know that if you have more than $47,000 in income per year, you are in the top 1% of global income earners? It's true.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

How come you're entitled to the earnings of the top 1%, but the rest of the world isn't entitled to your earnings?

I don't think you can call a teacher's salary high by any standard

How about this standard?

Generalizing is always a bad idea ;-)

On a global scale, you may well discover that you are the 1%.

You probably are.

Yeah, I'm sure he was planning on giving you and all your friends 20 cents.

Have you actually checked your position on the global "rich list"? You might actually be part of the 1%. I am, and I don't have anything to do with the finance market. I probably don't even make very much money compared to a lot of slashdotters, because I'm happy working in a small/medium business rather than being in a Fortune 500 or whatever.

Hehe. The funny thing is that most 4channers and Slashdotters will probably be in the top 5% or so when you take the world population into account..

The US median household income is about $48K. According to http://www.globalrichlist.com/, someone making $48K annually is in the top 0.99% worldwide. So half of Americans are "one-percenters". I think the average well-established (10+ years experience, good track record) software engineer makes over $100K, which puts them in the top 0.66% worldwide.

To make the top 1% in the US (in terms of household income, which isn't the same as wealth), you have to have an annual income in excess of $300K, which puts you on the top 0.001% worldwide.

To be in the top 5% worldwide you need an annual household income of $33,700 or higher. I suspect that very, very few slashdotters who have full-time employment fall below that level.

For, you are saying that you are ok now despite you are WORSE OFF than a serf in all kinds of things.

No, no. I am better off than a serf in nearly every way. I just spent the last hour applying gold-leaf to my living room lamp, as a personal craft. What serf could do that? I am easily in the top 1%. Wealth inequality is at best only a single component of social justice.

So, what you are saying is, you actually WOULD prefer to be a serf?

Let's see $2.20 a day * 260 days a year (although I doubt they give them too many days off)
= $572 bucks a year

Let's plug it in The Global Rich list....
http://www.globalrichlist.com/

= 4,429,714,286
You are the 4,429,714,286 richest person in the world!
You're in the TOP 73.82% richest people in the world!

According to this you are making less than 1000$ p.a. then. You should ask for a raise.

How rich are you

Nice troll there. The average American has an income of $50,233 which places them in the top 0.001% of the richest people in the world.

If that qualifies as "abject poverty" then how the hell do you describe the 99.999% of the world living below it?

I think the people that make a decent (by local standards) living from working for overseas companies would disagree with you.

The only people that are hurt by globalisation are the rich Westerners, i.e. the people who can most afford it. If you've got somewhere to live, money for 3 good meals a day, clothing, and education, then you're pretty damn well off.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

For: http://www.globalrichlist.com/
It keeps the previous % for anything entered less than $100.

If you enter $110 it tells you you're 98.28%.
If you enter $100 it stays with whatever the previous % was - whether it was previously 98% ($110) or 0.6% ($100K)

That site is bullshit, apparently my wages put me in the top 1% of people on this planet, but I cant afford to buy my own house, i'm constantly juggling money to pay for food and have the bailiffs around to chase on unpaid utility bills. Any simplistic measure of income is absolutely useless without correlating it to the actual cost of living.

So you're making $47,500 or more each year, and you're having problems paying utility bills? Time to rethink your budget. No matter where you live, I promise you there are people working twelve hour days, seven days a week as wait-staff who somehow manage to live on a fraction of that. In all likelyhood the police who patrol your streets, the teachers educating your city's children, your garbagemen, they're all living on less than you.

Maybe things are tight, but I'm betting you live pretty comfortably. Do you have reasonably nice apartment? Do you have the luxury of not having a roommate, or if you do that roommate is your significant other? Do you own a working car or truck? Do you eat out regularly? Do you bother clipping coupons? Do you have a television? Is is larger than 25 inches? Do you pay for a cable or satellite television signal? Do you have a high speed internet connection at home? Do you have a cell phone? Do you have a computer purchased or assembled from new parts in the last 3 years? Do you have health insurance? Obviously you're not going to have all of these, but I'm guessing you have the majority of them.

Yes, you have a higher cost of living. But you also have a much higher standard of living than the majority of people in the world.

Actually, even if you're making minimum wage ($5.15 in most states), you fall within the top 15%, according to this site. The real shell game being played here is the use of the global population as a statistic when the cost of living varies so greatly across the globe. A guy making $100,000 in California isn't really as rich as a guy making $100,000 in Kansas. And there are a lot more of those guys in California.

This 2% b.s. is a pretty meaningless statistic, all things considered. You only need to be making 44k a year to hit that.

$44,050/yr is a 98th percentile wage according to the site you gave. However, the OP is about _WEALTH_ not _WAGE_. There is a subtle difference between the two. Find a site that maps ASSETS to percentile, not WAGE, and then you have my attention.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

The numbers sound staggering, but the majority of the world's population are dirt poor (of course something should be done about that). If you live the west and don't believe me, enter your income here and find out for yourself.

From the article: "...we have to ask ourselves -- is there anything that we really need good old fashioned Real Life for any more? Is a life of doing things and meeting people as our primitive ancestors in the late 20th Century knew it becoming redundant?"

Let's assume that a billion people on Earth have the money and time to be online regularly. (this is probably more than the real number) That leaves more than five billion without such a thing. There are significant percentages of people in rural parts of the world (from Africa to America and everywhere in between) who don't even have electricity, telephones, or real plumbing. And let's not even talk about food and medicine.

The upshot? If you have the capacity for living most of your life online, and you can take all that real-life survival stuff for granted, you are enjoying a life of luxury. And the best part is that, online, you will almost never encounter those poor starving folks, so you can safely ignore their existence (just like you do on your way to Starbucks). Enjoy!

Quick check: in terms of income, how do you rank globally?

(Go ahead, mod me as a troll... I've got karma to burn.)

Instead of funding the development of in-country production facilities to make AIDS medicines for local distribution, they fund the purchase of western manufactured medicines.

As for male and female brains being different, that is not really an object of discussion - here is an old-ish article discussing the issue:

You forgot to add that all important disclaimer; On average.

On average, a lot of things are the case. On average, most people are only in the 50th percentile ability wise. On average, the sun shines for 12 hours each day anywhere in the world. On average a person annual income in the world is ~$6000.

The average value of a set of data, sometimes doesn't tell you a whole lot. The difference between the averages of two data sets sometimes tells you even less. In fact, it can sometimes be misleading, as when you combine or compare data, strange things can happen.

You really should have studied harder in school, and learned some things that others find valuable. Weird Al isn't rich by a longshot, so it sounds like you're on the left side of the income bellcurve. I'm sorry.

What do I own? For both music or video it averages about $5 a disc (on sale, ebay, cdbaby, Costco...)

Priced more than that? I somehow find other distractions to fill the time.

For me (and I am in the uber-top % of wage earners, per this site) it just isn't worth more than about $2-3 for a whole CD of music or $4-5 for a DVD. For others it might be less - but it is worth something. Downloading stuff for "free" isn't free - it takes time, burning it to discs cost money, and hey, you have evidence of a felony laying around now... who needs that?

I do have an iPod - But I have spent $0 at iTunes. Why? Because CDEX and my own Discs work just fine, thank you.

All my CDs and DVDs are from eBay, Costco, the "bargin bin" at Circuit City, etc. Full-retail just doesn't cut it. Even the annoying "join-now-get-X-discs-free" clubs work out to about $6/disc if you join, do the minimum, and quit.

Whatever happened to the concept of "making more profit on volume?" Media companies are missing out on a lot of sales, IMO, with their current pricing strategy.

While broke kids will always download stuff "for free", regular honest folks will buy tons of stuff at "Wal-Mart" prices - or not at all, when it comes to non-essential items like music and videos.

Maybe there are more manufacturing moguls than I realize, but when I think of high earning folks, I think of professionals like doctors and lawyers who earn good livings. For the really rich, I think of entertainers and sports figures - none of these people earn their money because someone earns low wages. There are plenty of people who make good money in insurance, real estate, advertising, etc.

Oh, and your stock broker example? They make money selling stuff like goog, msft, ebay, orcl - yeah those companies all exploit their workers (gee those names also come up promenently in the list of the absolute richest folks.)

Even if someone with low-wage employees does earn six or seven figures, it is probably not because of that fact. That's all I was saying.

BTW - did you know that earning the lowly sum of $14,000 a year puts that wage earner ahead of 87% of the people in the world? See this calculator.

This is just a neat way to get away from charity. According to http://globalrichlist.com/, they are among those billions who earn less than 2$ a day, and are therefore not expected to donate.

you know what rich means.

See here: http://www.globalrichlist.com/

--

The Global Rich List?

Me too, so afterwards I always go here to make myself feel better. Of course then I end up feeling guilty. You can't win...

Oh the woes of affluenza... A cup of Starbucks costs $3, outrageous! Your Direct TV bill is $50/month, egad! A large screen plasma HDTV costs $5000, the humanity! A Lexus costs $50k... Face it, you live better than Caesar or Charlemagne. You're among world's top 0.719% richest people, living in a land of plenty. I don't think it's fair to begrudge India because it has a low cost of living.

$45k/year puts you in the top 1.72% richest people in the world. If you're in the top 2%, is it reasonable to complain about your life style? At $45k, you probably own a TV, microwave, hot tub, two cars, DVD player, PC, PS2... Imagine what kind of college savings you could accumulate for yor kids if you put as much money as you spend just on cable TV monthly into savings with compound interest. The average Joe in India makes $500/year. I think we can cut them some slack for trying to make a better life for themselves.

And to help everyone keep a sense of perspective The Global Rich List