
Global Rich List - macalicious
http://www.globalrichlist.com/
======
apsec112
This is an interesting idea, but the numbers are bogus. It says 2% of the
world (130M people) makes more than $25,000. This is, however, the median
American personal income, so we know that at least 150M Americans make at
least that much, _plus_ all the people who do so elsewhere (probably at least
another 150M, counting UK, Germany, France, Japan, etc, all the wealthier
countries).

~~~
lsd5you
I don't think all Americans are in work ...

edit: Brief searching gives around 135 million Americans in work (this number
maybe excluding farm work).

~~~
apsec112
That's for everyone, not just workers. The figure for Americans who work with
some non-zero salary is $29,000.

~~~
lsd5you
Since we've established that less than half of the population are in work, it
follows that the median for everyone is 0...

------
speeder
Too bad this is broken...

It does not accept negative wealth (well... I own about 2000 USD in personal
objects, have no investments, and still owe about 10k USD in student loans...)

If you input a negative number, it assumes it is positive, you can even try
stripping the minus (or adding a minus) and clicking the button again, it
won't even calculate again and will assume it is the same number.

------
citricsquid
I feel conflicted about donating to charity, Kiva(.org) is my money-for-good
vehicle of choice but sometimes it feels as if my money could be better spent
donating to charities that help people that can't afford to eat, eat. Long
term spending of money to help people better themselves and those around them
is the more sustainable model but short term helping people that are starving
have access to life essentials has a greater impact and is more compassionate.
If only it was simple as "I have $xxx, how can I have the greatest positive
impact?".

~~~
arjunnarayan
Part of the nuance of the issue is the difference between "give a man a fish"
versus "teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime". There is a moral
dilemma between spending money now to feed 100 people versus teaching one
person to fish for a lifetime. That is a tough dilemma to solve. But different
charities approach this in different ways.

The philosophy behind Kiva is to help people build sustainable businesses in
poorer countries which have semi-functioning states (say poorer Latin American
countries prone to dictatorships but still have some notion of property rights
and trials for murders). This has the potential to bring entire communities to
a more well-off state. Is it a good use of money? Undoubtedly. Are you better
off giving that money to better charities that target people with more acute
needs? Probably.

Here's another example: you might have seen criticism of the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation for spending lots of money on eradicating polio. The argument
is that instead of spending upwards of $1000 a head on eradicating Polio (cost
divided by number of annual polio deaths), they could spend that at $10 a head
on reducing malaria deaths. The counter argument is that _eradication_ is a
huge win because once you've eradicated polio you can stop all future payments
on Polio containment (which is in the billions of dollars annually) because
you've permanently solved the problem, for present and future poor people. It
turns out that the net present value of all those future payments equaling
zero (just as today we spend zero dollars on small pox containment and
treatment and vaccination now that we've eradicated it) makes it worth it to
actually spend a disproportionate amount of money on polio vaccines on the
ground (as the Gates foundation is doing), even if the marginal dollar saves
less lives today than if we put it into malaria vaccines.

If you're interested in this line of work, the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation is probably one of the best charities out there, since they
actually grapple with these questions. But they're not actually capital
starved (they're spending money as fast as they can). To answer that meta-
question, you should look at GiveWell, which is probably the best meta-charity
(they actually evaluate charities, and also factor in things like scalability,
so they rank charities but also state how much money they think that charity
needs before your marginal dollar should be allocated to the next one on the
list since the first one will have enough money to accomplish their goals).
They also look at how well run the charities are at actually accomplishing
what they want to accomplish, etc.

In short, if you want to do the most good in a utilitarian sense, you can't do
any better than going to GiveWell and donating to charities as per their
recommendation. Honestly, if you needed to calculate a joint probability
function over total human utility, and wanted to target your dollars at
maximizing that function, Holden Karnofsky (the guy at the head of GiveWell)
is exactly the person you should be asking.

~~~
Sealy
I agree with you that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is one of the best
charities out there however I'm stunned that they do not (openly) accept
donations:

 _Q. Does the foundation accept donations? A. From time to time, people
generously offer to contribute money to the foundation. We prefer that people
give directly to our grantee organizations rather than to the foundation if
they want to help advance the causes we’re passionate about._

Source: [http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-
Informatio...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-
Information/Foundation-FAQ)

~~~
a3n
I suppose it's a tax management tool for the Gates, besides being an excellent
charity. I don't mean to take away at all from the good they do, but why else
wouldn't they accept donations except to not muddy the tax waters?

~~~
iamshs
Because then people will use the "name that gets associated with Bill Gates
upon donating", to further their own cause and popularity. Besides, they are
rich enough to sustain their charity's causes, I am pretty sure they know
about budgeting.

------
leeoniya
things like this rub me the wrong way. you cannot compare income levels
between countries with vastly different costs of living.

sure, first world countries will have a higher standard of living overall, but
putting $25/hr in US up against $0.08/hr in Ghana is a misleading comparison
of purchasing power.

case in point: in Ghana you can probably buy a castle full of servants on 80
acres for $25/hr.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
"For currency conversion we use Purchasing Power Parity Dollars (PPP$) in
order to take into account the difference in cost of living between countries;
PPP$ are also less susceptible to short term fluctuations."

~~~
leeoniya
im no economist, but i cant help but feel thereis a huge flaw with PPP
comparisons between first and third world countries.

if someone made $0.08/hr in the US, they would starve. homeless people make a
lot more than this in the states. but somehow, people manage to raise whole
families on those wages in third world countries. what am i missing?

~~~
a3n
You're missing the forest for the trees. It's an awareness tool, not an
economic analysis.

~~~
leeoniya
the tool does count trees though. i find it relevant to discuss whether it
counts 1e2 trees or 1e6, or a seemingly unsurvivable wage with one that in
reality sustains families.

------
tokenizer
Great app. Too bad a 1 percenters like me can't calculate my apparent wealth
however.

Income works fine, but when I put in the data for wealth (no house,
minimalistic materials, and meagre bank accounts) it gives me the error code:
"Are you sure about that?"... Apparently, you cannot hold less than $1,500CAD
of wealth, nor can you be classed within the bottom 22%.

The income bottom limit is $400CAD, which is much better. It's kind of funny
how the stats don't feel so guilty when entering the lower limits. For a
$400CAD yearly income: " In 1 hour you make $0.21 Meanwhile, the average
labourer in Indonesia makes just $0.50 in the same time. "

~~~
petersalka
Yep, same here. I live in Sydney AU and the app also put me in the top 1%
richest people in the world by income.

When I did it by wealth, the result was: "Your personal wealth is equal to the
combined wealth of 0 people in Myanmar." and "1% of your wealth could feed a
family of four in Ethiopia for 0 months."

There's no doubt that we live way more comfortably than most people in Myanmar
do but it's clear that being born with wealth to start with helps no matter
where you live.

~~~
vacri
I have a slightly-lower-than-median wage in Aus and only $20k in assets (car,
some furniture). This puts me at 0.9% for income, but 27% for wealth, which is
quite a strange disparity - evidently there are a _lot_ of people earning much
less than me with much more in the way of assets.

While I am not financially astute, I'm also not terribly bad, throwing that
money away on lottery tickets and whatnot. Buggered if I know how I manage to
drop _26_ percentage points - how are all those much poorer people managing to
save _so much_ more than me, especially considering that by the time you're
out of the top 1%-by-income, you're below $30k.

------
whiddershins
I love it, what an effective message.

I think there is a bug in the form validation, if I put commas in my net
worth, it gives me a completely different value than if I don't. Probably
should intelligently strip out non numerals, or even reject non-numeral
entries, since people of different nationalities use periods and commas
differently.

Also, reading the methodology, very interesting, but I am intuiting it isn't
so accurate. My net worth is higher vs average for U.S., and my income is
lower vs average for U.S. but the site ranks me in the opposite direction when
I change my entry values.

------
ryandrake
It doesn't seem to recognize negative numbers. So if you're like the 1 in 4
Americans who have zero or negative net worth, the "wealth" part of the app
won't work.

* [http://www.epi.org/press/news_from_epi_th_great_recession_ex...](http://www.epi.org/press/news_from_epi_th_great_recession_exacerbated_existing_wealth_disparities_in/)

~~~
dice
I also noticed that. I'm hoping to get up to zero net worth in the next couple
of years, though...

------
xianshou
Jarring background. More jarring information.

Interesting fact: being a 1-percenter in the US ($370k in 2010) makes you a
.02-percenter on the worldwide scale.

------
sytelus
I love how they hid a currency conversion fallacy by putting example of can of
cock instead of glass of water. This website will make a walmart worker feel
super rich than a person working in similar large store in Ghana even if both
have more or less same quality of life.

------
cyphersanctus
Interesting. There's one bug though, when you select another country like
Colombia, for instance, you have to enter the value in its currency. When you
do, in that case 1k usd is 2 Million, the calculation seems to convert that to
millions of dollars. Its not entirely clear which money format you should use.

------
aroman
Interestingly, the "Maximum income" (USD/year) is 2,200,000,000 (2.2 billion).
Specifying a yearly income of 2B/year, however, puts you at #1 according to
this. Why 2.2B? Seems rather arbitrary.

~~~
simcop2387
Likely a 32bit int rounding issue? 2147483648

~~~
aroman
Ahh, that must be it. Strange they'd cap it at 2.2B instead of their actual
MAX_INT equivalent.

------
pasquinelli
i can't enter my debts. i can't have a negative home equity. you should be
able to supply your debts on both the income and wealth pages.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Adjust your income by subtracting the annual cost of servicing your debt and
wealth by subtracting the present value of the debt.

