I’m skeptical of the accuracy of the income distribution chart. The Wikipedia page linked to below shows GDP per capita for every country. Many countries that we think of as “poor” are actually “middle income”. For example, Malaysia is at 16K, Colombia is at 10K, Thailand is at 9K, and China is at 8K. Obviously these mean values are somewhat misleading because of inequality, but still. I lived for many years (in grad school) at an income level of only about 2x the average income of a person living in Thailand, so I think the fact that I don’t feel rich is well-grounded in reality.
I was going to say, “double the (global) median income still sounds pretty rich.” But the median income for individuals in the US is $42,693, and I would consider double that to be well-off but not Scrooge McDuck-style rich.
I’m skeptical of the accuracy of the income distribution chart. The Wikipedia page linked to below shows GDP per capita for every country. Many countries that we think of as “poor” are actually “middle income”. For example, Malaysia is at 16K, Colombia is at 10K, Thailand is at 9K, and China is at 8K. Obviously these mean values are somewhat misleading because of inequality, but still. I lived for many years (in grad school) at an income level of only about 2x the average income of a person living in Thailand, so I think the fact that I don’t feel rich is well-grounded in reality.
http://tinyurl.com/d5n87
Edit: there is an issue with the LW markup and Wikipedia’s URL naming convention, so I included a TinyUrl instead.
I was going to say, “double the (global) median income still sounds pretty rich.” But the median income for individuals in the US is $42,693, and I would consider double that to be well-off but not Scrooge McDuck-style rich.
I’m pretty sure that’s not median individual income, but rather median household or mean individual income.
Thanks, I think you’re right. Looks like 2005 median individual income was $28,567, so it’s unlikely to have gone up so much in seven years.