The 8 richest people in the world according to investopedia have a combined net worth of about $1,369 billion. Divide that by 3.6 billion and it is about $380 per person. Idk what the average net worth of the poorest half of the world’s population is, but I doubt it is below $380.
TL;DR: I’m calling bullshit.
You can’t imagine that half of the world’s population lives on less than $360? You sweet, summer child…
The way net worth works, many people are negative. Meaning they have more liability than assets.
Hmm, that is actually an interesting point. If it is negative, does it bring down the sum in this? If so, how much of the world is my net worth greater than? A billion? Two?
I don’t know, I do know when you compare gross wealth something ridiculous like half the USA is in the top 10 percent. That of course takes nothing like Purchasing Power Parity or Required Goods, (like a functioning car) into account. You’ve got to be very careful with these kinds of statistics.
One thing we know for sure though, you can take 99% of a Billionaire’s wealth and they’d still never need to work another day in their life. And it’s not even like they’d need a strict budget to make that happen. (A lot of “financially independent” people got enough dividend stocks to bring in 100K a year and retired, they need a strict budget to keep not working.)
Well, my parents grew up in poverty. And based off what they’ve said, 380$ net worth sounds too high, unless it’s an average. At least back then (even adjusted for inflation btw).
People really don’t understand how poor true poverty is, and why things from poor countries are so much cheaper. I have literally seen families that subsisted off of dump sites.
Also, children usually have 0 net worth for obvious reasons, so if we include children that stat is ready to reach. Especially since children are counted in the world population after all.
According to this wikipedia page - Median wealth per adult globally is estimated at $8,654 for a total population figure of 5.5 million, quite a bit less than the global population estimated at 8.1 billion. I’m guessing because this is “per adult” rather than per person. The children of the world are all on the low end of the wealth spectrum and probably would be a large share of the 3.6 billion.
Also questions can be asked about how they value wealth, do we consider debts, etc…in which case there’s a lot of people with zero wealth or less, as well as a lot of people who don’t have bank accounts and whose wealth is hard to measure is any ordinary sense. Point being, this particular comparison is kind of meaningless without more context. There’s probably ways you can do it to get an even larger number than 3.6 billion.
But a more useful and perhaps more surprising metric is that 8 people have as much wealth as 158 million median people. Which is still ridiculous, like those 8 people are worth a Russia’s entire population’s worth of people. And not just of poor people, but your average adult person who likely has a job and may even be considered on the well-to-do side within some poorer countries.
It’s an interesting stat. Is this individuals or households? Is it “head of household” or is it also counting minors?
Regardless, there’s enormous disparity.
The median wealth in India, according to Wikipedia, is $3755. There’s probably hundreds of millions of people there who fall into the less than $380 category.
Again, Wikipedia, but Africa has just over 700M inhabitants with a median $1242 wealth. That’s $879B. For everyone on the continent. 8 people have 1.5X more wealth than an entire continent full of people.
But maybe it’s not 3.6B people. Maybe it’s 3B or only 2B people. It’s still not OK.
In the first place, looking at wealth is pointless. I could make a thousand dollars a day and as long as I spend them immediately on services, (e.g. permanently living in an expensive hotel, renting a supercar) I could have net worth of $0 while living like a king. On the other hand, a struggling business owner may have millions in equipment and still have trouble putting food on the table. “Wealth” is not a good indicator of anything.
