Next time you're feeling poor, check out the Global Rich List for a little perspective.
If you are squeaking by on US$25,000/year, you're among the top 10.8% of humanity in wealth. If you're making $36,000, you're in the top 4.33%; $75,000, you're in the top one percent worldwide!
If you've made it to $100k, you're among the 0.66%; and should you be earning $150,000, you're in the top 0.33%, which is occupied by just 20 million people on the globe.
There isn't much point in keeping going but I decided to run the numbers on $175,000, which is the best editorial-related job I've been offered over my career. That would have placed me in the top 0.17% worldwide and made me the ten millionth richest person alive.
Hmmm.
None of this may make sense when one is unemployed, and earning virtually nothing, except that the table scraps one picks up in this culture easily projects out into the top five percent of people on the planet.
One of the best things about having spent a couple years in a very poor country, Afghanistan, teaching English in the Peace Corps, is that I learned how privileged my life was even when I had a bank account of zero.
The freedom we have to earn money in any number of ways, plus our access to credit, and our valuable citizenship rights in the wealthiest land in history are birthrights too many Americans take for granted.
Annual salary may be the easiest way to assess your relative wealth, but for an even more comprehensive portrait try adding up your assets (and liabilities). The resulting pyramid reveals that within our own country, the distribution of wealth is as skewed as it is when we compare ourselves to the rest of the world.
The latest figures I could locate indicated that the national median net worth (half of us have more than this, half have less) is $86,000.
But the top ten percent of Americans have a median net worth of $830,000 while the bottom twenty percent have under $8,000. In fact, the top one percent of the U.S. population -- roughly 3 million people -- has as much wealth as the 100 million poorest Americans combined!
So much for the myth of equality. Numbers like these do not lie.
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1 comment:
David
Your numbers are interesting, but if you had a point in mentioning equality, it escaped me.
The effort to find a material value system to determine EQUALITY in America is counterproductive. If you were speaking of equality in terms of fair distribution of wealth, you will have to go elsewhere on the globe to find productive employment of income or ownership as measurements. Be warned; as you move beyond the democratic societies you will only find vastly wider margins between the few who have and the many who have-not.
Counterproductive? I confess that I'm measuring my response here. Perpetuating the myth of equality measured by material outcomes is really reckless in our culture. It promotes a concept which distorts the central philosophy on which this nation was founded, and upon which our continued growth as a people absolutely depends. The degree of wealth you enjoy is entirely up to you, not your neighbor.
“That we hold these truths to be self evident...” began the single most profound change in human history. A nation of people proclaimed as a bed rock belief that all men were equal in fundamental ways, and that, as importantly, that equality issued from an authority ABOVE men. They constructed their highest law to hold that belief inviolate, especially from the laws of men.
They did this in the midst of a world, their own included, which in many ways repudiated the notion. While most of the signatories of that proclamation didn't live to its ideal, they were yet less hypocrite than visionary as a group. In spite of their own condition of that time they recognized the irrefutable truth of the words, come what may. In spite of personal misgivings, they signed that document and accepted the risks they knew the act carried. Many of those who signed did pay dearly for it in the end.
The words, we know, were not carelessly strewn across the parchment. They were wrenched out of long and difficult discourse among some of the most learned of the day. They were deliberate in their structure and precise in their meaning. In spite of every naive effort to the contrary, those words still inspire to this day.
And look at what has resulted so far: We live in the midst of the most abundant society in history. We live in the most diverse society in history. We live in a society which has grown from many years of inhuman slavery to finally cast it down at a terrible human cost. That happened when the inevitable confrontation came - because we could no longer avoid our founders' proclamation. No man or group of men could long sustain laws which violated that concept. We've grown through long years of blatant and persistent discrimination since, to a time now that many would not have thought possible just a few decades ago. Dr. King's movement, for one, was impossible to deny because of the words in that founding document. “...endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The maturation of our culture will continue as long as we nourish the commitment to those founding words with proper appreciation.
The meaning of those words never included anything remotely like a requirement for all men to have equal shares of any THING. It did not imply establishment of government systems to take from some and give to others to thereby create equality. The suggestion of such nonsense flies in the face of liberty. After all, what liberty will YOU have when other men dictate how equal your property must be? It perverts the ideals that have inspired millions to make the sacrifices required to come to this country from everywhere on the planet. Millions are still struggling to get here (legally) today. They will continue to come as long as we hold to our core beliefs.
We've come too far on that slippery slope of government mandated redistribution of wealth already. Socialist systems have FAILED every time they've been tried. The plain truth of this was known 232 years ago, how can we forget today?
Dan
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