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Fri Jan 30, 2015, 10:00 AMFLPanhandle (3,567 posts)What Would Global Wealth Equality Look Like?http://observationdeck.io9.com/what-would-global-wealth-equality-look-like-1680832610Every adult on earth would have $56,000 to their nameAs of mid-2014, in a world of perfect wealth equality every adult would have a net worth of $56,016. The majority of that ($35,197) would be financial assets, including roughly $900 in cash and about $13,000 in stocks.Each adult would have another $30,076 in "tangible" assets: property, vehicles, consumer electronics, Pokémon cards, etc.That's $65,273 . . . but unfortunately, spreading around the wealth also means spreading around the debt, and each adult's share of the global household debt (not government ) would come to $9,257. (Public debt would add another $11,000 each.) I guess at this point we're essentially all borrowing from each other? Or maybe wealth-equality-world is like an Usula K. Le Guin story, and there's one lonely child locked up somewhere with 70 trillion dollars in IOUs.We'd all be making the equivalent of $21,000 a yearIf there was global income equality and employment equality as well as wealth equality, each adult on earth would take home (before taxes) a whopping $21,000. This figure isn't directly comparable to the wealth numbers, as it comes from the World Bank's data page instead of Credit Suisse, and uses PPP ("Purchasing Power Parity") dollars. (As with all calculations on this page, I used Credit Suisse's "number of adults in the world" figure from their data sheet: 4,699,383,000.)Using PPP is actually better in many ways for this kind of comparison . . . that $21,000 is equivalent to the purchasing power of $21,000 in the USA. So if you went somewhere where $21,000 USD could be stretched a little further, you'd have a proportionately lower income, leaving your domestic purchasing power the same.($21,000/year is equivalent to having a full time job paying $10/hour, $2.75/hour more than the current US Federal Minimum Wage.)Swiss pain would be Malawian gainThe average adult in Switzerland has a net worth of $581,000 USD. Average. A good chunk of that has to do with the value of the Swiss Franc compared to the US dollar, but still . . . the country that birthed Helvetica isn't doing too badly. With such a wealthy baseline, dropping to $56,000 USD would leave the average Swiss adult with less than 10% of their former wealth.The biggest beneficiary of this hypothetical wealth equalization would be Malawi, which currently averages per capita adult wealth of only $176. For the average person living in Malawi, having $56,000 USD would mean an increase of roughly 32,000%.Now, no one is actually for an even spread of wealth world-wide, but this is interesting.
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A meaningless stat, it is apparently based on dividing the entire world monetary supply by the number of adults.
...and in a few weeks, the rich would be richer and the DUmmies would be poorer....again.
Those who live hand to mouth will end up that way even if they hit the lottery.
Without a doubt but it seems to be too paltry an amount to satisfy their normal feeding frenzy on what they deserve just because.It would seem that since much of the wealth would be going to peoples of rather dark complexion they must really hate them to not sign on to it whole heartedly!
