Wealth on earth
This is a tl;dr (and somewhat visual and simplified) version of a very detailed report by Credit Suisse- “Global Wealth Databook 2015”.
Wait, what’s wealth anyway?
Your wealth is the sum of all your possessions, net of any debt you may have. To make sure we can compare wealth globally, the research ‘translates’ all possessions to their $US values.
Your wealth is in fact a combination of your financial and non-financial wealth. Financial wealth is usually represented by a contract or a paper that indicates that you own something, like a Bank deposit, a Share or a Bond. Non-financial wealth is a physical property like land, building or a machine. Your wealth is the sum of both, minus debts.
So how much wealth is there in the world?
As of 2015, the entire wealth of all people on earth was $250 Trillion. This isn’t exactly an easy number to digest, so here’s a brief illustration:
To simplify matters, I created the following ‘super-coin’ that represents $1 Trillion (1,000 Billion):
250 such coins represent all the value of the wealth in the world:
And how many people are we talking about?
There are close to 5 Billion adults in the world. That’s also a big number… Lets imagine that the following person represents 10 Million people (± the population of NYC):
Here’s the entire adult population on earth:
We have 250 super-coins and 500 reps. So if the world was entirely egalitarian the wealth of each adult was about $50,ooo:
Enough theory. Hit me with the reality
The research is dividing wealth to four buckets:
Here’s how it looks if we paint the people reps by their corresponding bucket color:
For example, there are ±34 people who’s wealth is greater than $1M. How greater? The average is $3.3M for the wealthiest bucket.
- Average wealth of the $100,000 to $1M bucket is $280,000
- the average of the $10,000 to $100,000 bucket is $31,000
- and the under $10,000 average is $2,000
If we add up the wealth of the people belonging to each bucket, we get an interesting picture. Here’s the super-coin painted by bucket color:
Here’s how it looks when combining all the info above (the lame drawing of ‘the cake’ is the world’s wealth):
- 0.7% of the people in the world owns 45% of its wealth
- 7.5% owns another 39.5%
- 21% owns 12.5%
- the rest (71%) own 3%
Credits to CREDIT SUISSE AG Research Institute. Their research is the basis for all the info above.
And thank you Google Drawing for serving as the canvas to my lack of talent and still make it look reasonable.
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