There’s a site to work out how rich you are compared to others in the world.
http://www.globalrichlist.com

You only have to earn US$868 a year to be wealthier than half the entire planet. Are these results a bit on the pessimistic side to make us feel guilty and want to ‘donate’ to the charity that pops up with your answer?

‘Rich’ fails to take into account local prices too.

beurgh. I don’t earn that much with my scummy saturday job

You do need to take into account the local wage amounts too. You wouldn’t feel rich is you earned that much and lived in hollywood, but you’d feel VERY rich if you lived in the poorest parts of africa.

I think it’s your choice whether you give to charity or not, that’s why I hate the people who come door-to-door etc trying to make you feel guilty about not giving. Ah well.

I agree that where you earn that money will obviously affect your wealth, Hollywood vs Africa. But that’s kinda my point. I think they deliberately didnt use a very good model for ‘wealth’ and instead just used how many pounds/dollars you earn to determine how rich you are. What about co-operative communities that hunt and gather together with no exchange of cash?

Anyway, I think it’s hoax-like in that they have selectively used statistics to push their side of a debate.

yeah, sorry, I did just repeat what you said didn’t I?
My apologies

Anyway, I vote hoax too

...There’s something wrong with it.  I put in my yearly salary, and it said I make xx dollars/hour.  But it was WAY more than I made per hour.  I kept getting the yearly smaller and smaller to reflect my actual hourly wage.  (Or near my hourly wage.)  So…I dunno if it’s doing some funky calculations for taxes, or maybe guessing a wrong hours worked….But my hourly wage doesn’t reflect my yearly salary there.

Anyone else have issues?

Yep, Maeg.
It was about

It says there are only 107,565 people richer than my parents - which is TOTALLY untrue.  There have got to be more people than THAT making more money than my parents who net about $200k/yr.

Maegan - 26 October 2005 12:23 PM

It says there are only 107,565 people richer than my parents - which is TOTALLY untrue.  There have got to be more people than THAT making more money than my parents who net about $200k/yr.

maybe it’s just the people who’ve been on this program thingy….

.... or maybe it’s just aload of bull****

...Although, I guess technically it appears they are using the population 6billion as their reference for “people”.  Of those 6billion, it’s not taking into account children, non-working adults, and retirees.  I’m betting what they’re doing is taking every “per capita” amt for every country and then multiplying it by it’s number of residents…etc, etc…

Well I suppose in their little way they’ve just told me I’m rich, but they can just feck off.

Until I live in a 3 bedroom house I won’t even consider myself middle-class.

I did a little math, and they have me working about 6 hours a day, 5 days a week to get my hourly rate (this includes vacation and holidays). A little off, if you ask me. The math they use to determine how many people are “better off than you” appears very wrong, too.

http://money.cnn.com/2004/11/16/pf/millionaire_households/

According to this article, there were 8,200,000 households in the US that had a net worth of more than $1,000,000 US. If you put in that you make $1,000,000 US per year, it puts you in the top 0.001% in the world, which I doubt is true. This would be “about” true if the 8.2 million millionaires in the US were the only ones on the planet. But they are not. Using the current exchange rate of USD into Euros of 1 : 0.8283, I compared what it said I made in USD to Euros. It turns out that I am much “wealthier” when I state my income in USD than it does when I state my income in Euros (to the tune of I am suddenly richer than 4,400,000 people when I earn dollars).

This site would be more effective if they cleaned up the math. I believe that it is possible that the site is intentionally skewing the math to make people living in the United States feel more guilty, which might make them more likely to donate AND donate higher amounts.

To be fair, people who have decent jobs in the indutrialized world are very well off. It certainly does cost fewer dollars to live in the undeveloped world, but you don’t have the housing, medical care, clean water, abundance of food, transportation and communication that you do in industrialized countries. That is the trade off. Which would you rather have?