What Would Global Wealth Equality Look Like?

[FLPanhandle]

http://observationdeck.io9.com/what-would-global-wealth-equality-look-like-1680832610

Every adult on earth would have $56,000 to their name

As of mid-2014, in a world of perfect wealth equality every adult would have a net worth of $56,016. The majority of that ($35,197) would be financial assets, including roughly $900 in cash and about $13,000 in stocks.

Each adult would have another $30,076 in "tangible" assets: property, vehicles, consumer electronics, Pokémon cards, etc.

That's $65,273 . . . but unfortunately, spreading around the wealth also means spreading around the debt, and each adult's share of the global household debt (not government ) would come to $9,257. (Public debt would add another $11,000 each.) I guess at this point we're essentially all borrowing from each other? Or maybe wealth-equality-world is like an Usula K. Le Guin story, and there's one lonely child locked up somewhere with 70 trillion dollars in IOUs.

We'd all be making the equivalent of $21,000 a year

If there was global income equality and employment equality as well as wealth equality, each adult on earth would take home (before taxes) a whopping $21,000. This figure isn't directly comparable to the wealth numbers, as it comes from the World Bank's data page instead of Credit Suisse, and uses PPP ("Purchasing Power Parity&quot dollars. (As with all calculations on this page, I used Credit Suisse's "number of adults in the world" figure from their data sheet: 4,699,383,000.)

Using PPP is actually better in many ways for this kind of comparison . . . that $21,000 is equivalent to the purchasing power of $21,000 in the USA. So if you went somewhere where $21,000 USD could be stretched a little further, you'd have a proportionately lower income, leaving your domestic purchasing power the same.

($21,000/year is equivalent to having a full time job paying $10/hour, $2.75/hour more than the current US Federal Minimum Wage.)


Swiss pain would be Malawian gain

The average adult in Switzerland has a net worth of $581,000 USD. Average. A good chunk of that has to do with the value of the Swiss Franc compared to the US dollar, but still . . . the country that birthed Helvetica isn't doing too badly. With such a wealthy baseline, dropping to $56,000 USD would leave the average Swiss adult with less than 10% of their former wealth.

The biggest beneficiary of this hypothetical wealth equalization would be Malawi, which currently averages per capita adult wealth of only $176. For the average person living in Malawi, having $56,000 USD would mean an increase of roughly 32,000%.




Now, no one is actually for an even spread of wealth world-wide, but this is interesting.