1 YOU ARE THE 1% Just how much can you achieve?Read more at location 386
Note: 1@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IL DIVARIO E L ILLUSIONE OTTICA DEL CAROVITA. IL MOLTIPLICATORE DI FELICITÀ Edit
When the Occupy Wall Street movement gained traction in late 2011, disaffected citizens of the Western world quickly adopted the term ‘the 1%’ to refer to the top 1% of income earners in wealthy nations, primarily the United States.Read more at location 387
References to the 1% versus the 99% – i.e. the rest of the population – quickly became shorthand for the income gap in America.Read more at location 390
while typical household income grew by less than 40% between 1979 and 2007, the income of the richest 1% grew by 275% in that same time period.Read more at location 392
These facts can lead those of us who aren’t in that 1% to feel powerless, but this focus on the top income earners in the United States neglects just how much power almost any member of an affluent country has. If people focus exclusively on American inequality, they’re missing an important part of the bigger picture.Read more at location 395
Sources: Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots; PovcalNet (http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm?1), Numbeo (www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/)Read more at location 409
If you earn above $52,000 (£34,000) per year, then, speaking globally, you are part of the 1%. If you earn at least $28,000 (£18,200) – that’s the typical income for working individuals in the US – you’re in the richest 5% of the world’s population. Even someone living below the US poverty line, earning just $11,000 (£7,000) per year, is still richer than 85% of people in the world.Read more at location 411
Sure,’ you might say, ‘the poor in developing countries might not have much money, but that money can pay for so much more because the cost of living in those places is cheaper.’Read more at location 418
When I was in Ethiopia, I ate at one of Addis Ababa’s fanciest restaurants, and the bill came to about $10.Read more at location 420
However, that graph of income inequality has already taken the fact that money goes further overseas into account.Read more at location 422
You might assume that ‘$1.50/day’ means that every day the extreme poor live on the equivalent of $1.50 in their local currency. But it actually means they live on an amount of money equivalent to what $1.50 could buy in the US in 2014. What can $1.50 buy you in the United States? A candy bar? A bag of rice?Read more at location 424
Perhaps, you think, people in poor countries can live on less than $1.50 a day because they produce a lot of their own goods.Read more at location 426
Again, however, this has already been taken into account in that graph.Read more at location 428
You might wonder how anyone can live on so little money. Surely they’d die? And the answer is … they do. At least, they die much more regularly than those of us who live in developed countries.Read more at location 430
In other dimensions, their lives are just as lacking as you’d expect, given their earnings.Read more at location 433
Most households own radios but lack electricity, toilets or tap water. Less than 10% of households possess a chair or a table.Read more at location 437
In the US, because there is no extreme poverty, there is no market for extremely cheap goods. The lowest quality rice you can buy in the US is far better than what you could buy in Ethiopia or India.Read more at location 439
The room I rented in Ethiopia for $1 a night was far worse than anything I could rent in the US.Read more at location 440
The very worst housing you can buy in the US is far better than the mud-brick houses typical for those living below the $1.50/dayRead more at location 441
Because we are comparatively so rich, the amount by which we can benefit others is vastly greater than the amount by which we can benefit ourselves. We can therefore do a huge amount of good at relatively little real cost.Read more at location 445
Let’s very simplistically suppose that by some social actionRead more at location 447
we make ourselves $1 poorer and thereby make an Indian farmer living in extreme poverty $1 richer. How much more would that $1 benefit the poor Indian farmer than ourselves? It’s a basic rule of economics that money is less valuable to you the more you have of it.Read more at location 448
In order to work out the relationship between level of income and level of subjective wellbeing,Read more at location 453
Figure 3, which shows the relationship between income and subjective wellbeing both within a country and across countries.Read more at location 455
Source: Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, ‘Subjective well-being and income’Read more at location 457
For someone earning $1,000 per year, a $1,000 pay rise generates the same increase in happiness as a $2,000 pay rise for someone earning $2,000 per year, or an $80,000 pay rise for someone already earning $80,000 per year.Read more at location 463
Imagine if your boss called you in and told you your salary would double for the next year. You’d be pretty pleased, right?Read more at location 466
Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beer for $5 or buy someone else a beer for 5¢. If that were the case, we’d probably be pretty generousRead more at location 476
This idea is important enough that I’ve given it a name. I call it The 100x Multiplier.Read more at location 478
GDP over time Source: Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy 1–2030 ADRead more at location 489
from the evolution of Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago until the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago – the average income across all countries was the equivalent of $2 per day or less.Read more at location 491
Even now, over half of the world still lives on $4 per day or lessRead more at location 492
Sometimes we look at the size of the problems in the world and think, ‘Anything I do would be just a drop in the bucket. So why bother?’ But, in light of the research shown in these graphs, that reasoning doesn’t make any sense.Read more at location 497
