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Earth is an unequal place.
It always has been, and maybe it always will be. But, few people are truly aware about the extent of Earth's true inequality.
This video is an exploration into the real world and the real reality.
Let's begin with the global population of humans currently in 2019: approximately 7.7 billion people.
There also exists approximately 317 trillion U.S dollars
in global wealth across the world. In a perfectly equal world, if all of this wealth was evenly
distributed to all 7.7 billion of us, would mean that everybody regardless of age
would have $41,169 to their names.
But we don't live in a perfectly equal world. So to understand the reality of the situation more,
let's shrink all of those 7.7 billion people down to only one hundred people to better represent
everybody and place them all in a single-file line in order of how much money they have.
The first staggering thing to notice here is that the first seventy people in this line all have net worth below $10,000.
In order to break into the top fifty percent of people in the world,
you only need to have $4,120. The first seventy people in this line are essentially all
inside of the global lower-class and they only control three percent of the world's wealth between them.
Most of these seventy people are located in places like India, where the average adult net worth is only $7,000, or in Africa,
where the average adult net worth is only $4,000. The next twenty-one people in the line represent to the global middle class,
with net worth averaging between $10,000 and $100,000.
Even still though these 21 people are underrepresented,
because they control only about 12% of the global wealth pool. In order to break into the global top 10%,
you need to acquire a net worth of $93,170.
So moving on, the next eight people in the line are the first people who could probably be considered to be very well off.
These eight have net worth ranging between
$100,000 and $800,000, and would be considered the global upper-middle class.
Most of these eight people are found in places like Europe, where the mean average adult has a net worth of
$145,000, or thirty-six times higher than an average
African adult, or in North America where the mean average adult has a net worth of $404,000.
This means that average Americans,
Canadians, and Europeans are well inside of the global top 10%.
Together, these eight people control 38% of the entire world's wealth,
but even they don't have anywhere near as much money as this guy does - the richest person in the group of
100. He represents the top 1% of the global population, and he controls a mind-boggling
47% of the entire world's wealth, or nearly half.
In order to break into the global 1%, you need to have a net worth of at least $770,000.
No average person in any country on earth is inside of the top 1% Club.
Inside of the top 1% are approximately 42 million U.S dollar millionaires, who are located across the world, representing
0.6% of the global population.
But even further up than that, at the very top echelons of the 1%, are the billionaire class. As of
2018, there are 2,208 billionaires across the world, with a combined wealth of 9.1 trillion U.S dollars.
If the wealth of billionaires was measured as a yearly GDP, they would have the third largest
economy in the world, ahead of Japan and Germany combined. And the wealth of the billionaire class
has been steadily increasing over time. Just two years ago in 2017,
the billionaire class was worth "only" $7.67 trillion dollars, and just as recently as 2000,
the billionaire class wasn't even worth one trillion dollars. At the very, very top of the billionaire class are 10
individual people: the 10 wealthiest people in the world.
The top eight of these men - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet,
Bernard Arnault, Carlos Slim,
Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg - have a combined wealth greater
than the bottom 50% of the human population, or 3.85 billion people.
What's also interesting though is the way that extreme wealth and people tend to congregate in the same few parts of the world.
An ultra-high net worth individual is a person who has a minimum net worth of $30 million, and most of them
(70%, to be exact) live in just these 10 cities across the world:
Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong, Paris, London, New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Half of these mega-concentrations of the world's wealthiest are cities inside of America,
which struggles with its own economic inequality problem.
In 2017, the net worth of every single household in the United States added together to 94.7 trillion US dollars.
If we took this and divided it equally to all
124 million households inside of the country, that would be
$760,000 per American family.
The reality is obviously much different, though. The bottom 50% of American families average only an
$11,000 net worth, while the wealthiest 400 Americans have more money than all of them or
163 million Americans combined. in order to break into the top 1% of Americans,
you need to have a net worth of at least $10,374,000,
and in this country the top 1% of Americans controlled roughly 38% of the country's wealth.
While considering the 1% at the global scale control more like 47% of the wealth,
The United States is actually doing better at economic equality than the world averages.
But if you want to see what the worst country in the world for economic equality is like, you needn't look any further than
South Africa, labeled by the World Bank as the most unequal country on earth.
Here, the bottom 60% of the country controls only 7% of the nation's wealth,
which is actually a little better than the global averages but the top 1% of South Africans control an overwhelming
70% of the entire nation's wealth,
which is much more severe than the global average.
The country where the wealthiest 1% control the least amount of the nation's wealth is Norway, where the top 1%
only control 21% of the country's total wealth.
While the distribution of money may be pretty unequal in the world
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