“Dude, 6 billion people earn less than you, quit complaining!”

However, for once I would like to be backed up by actual facts, rather than hearsay and conjecture. So I decided to do some research…

The Result

What I came up with is shown in Table 1. Pretty eh?

So now I can say, with all the confidence that a fully researched number can provide, the following:

“Dude, 6.9 billion people earn less than you, quit complaining!”

The Devil is in the Details

Who would have thought finding a graph or a dataset of population vs Income per person would be so hard?! Googling for over an hour resulted is nothing. Apparently this is the sort of stuff that PhD’s write papers about.

Luckily for me I had recently stumbled across gapminder. I took their 2005 population and GDP per capita PPP datasets, added some excel magic and generated the table below.

Now, this table has one major gotcha:

The Income is an average per country.

For example, the USA has an average income of $41,674 per year. If you earn more than that, then I would assume you earn more than the entire population of the USA. You have to watch out when dealing with them pesky averages!

This also explains why it seems that no-one earns more than $100,000 a year, it seems that averages have never heard of Bill Gates, or the Sultan of Brunei.

You Didn’t Actually Answer the Question

Oh didn’t I? Sorry, I have a habit of explaining my answer instead of actually answering it.

According to Table 1, I must be earning between 99.98% to 100.00% more than everyone else in the world.

Guess that means I’m pretty damned rich eh?