Does $60,000 make you middle-class or wealthy on Planet Earth?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: August 26, 2018 at 07:59:04 EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Does $60,000 make you middle-class or wealthy on Planet Earth?
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Does $60,000 make you middle-class or wealthy on Planet Earth?
> By Heather Long, Leslie Shapiro
> Aug 20 2018
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/20/does-make-you-middle-class-or-wealthy-planet-earth/>
>
> The world is on the brink of a historic milestone: By 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be “middle 
> class,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas.
>
> Kharas defines the middle class as people who have enough money to cover basics needs, such as food, clothing and 
> shelter, and still have enough left over for a few luxuries, such as fancy food, a television, a motorbike, home 
> improvements or higher education.
>
> It’s a critical juncture: After thousands of years of most people on the planet living as serfs, as slaves or in 
> other destitute scenarios, half the population now has the financial means to be able to do more than just try to 
> survive.
>
> “There was almost no middle class before the Industrial Revolution began in the 1830s,” Kharas said. “It was just 
> royalty and peasants. Now we are about to have a majority middle-class world.”
>
> Today, the middle class totals about 3.7 billion people, Kharas says, or 48 percent of the world’s population. An 
> additional 190 million (2.5 percent) comprise the mega-rich. Together, the two groups make up a majority of humanity 
> in 2018, a shift with wide-reaching consequences for the global economy — and potential implications for the 
> happiness of millions of people.
>
> So how much money does it take to meet Kharas’s definition of middle-class? It depends on where you live and, more 
> precisely, on how expensive things are where you live. Kharas’s definition takes into account the higher cost of 
> meeting basic needs in places such as the United States, Western Europe and Japan than in much of the developing 
> world.
>
> In dollar terms, Kharas defines the global middle class as those who make $11 to $110 a day, or about $4,000 to 
> $40,000 a year. Those are per-person numbers, so families with two parents and multiple children would need a lot 
> more. It’s a wide range, but remember that he adjusts the amounts by country to take into account how much people can 
> buy with the money they earn. For example, earning $12,000 for a family of four in Indonesia would qualify for the 
> global middle class, but it would not in the United States.
>
> Am I in the global middle class? Use the Washington Post calculator to see where your annual income falls on the 
> global spectrum.
>
> What about in the U.S. middle class? The median household income in the United States is just over $59,000. That’s 
> right in the middle for the United States, but it ranks in the 91st percentile globally for a family of three, 
> according to Kharas’s research, putting that U.S. family on the high end of the global middle class. (If you want to 
> see whether your income qualifies for the American middle class, check out this Washington Post calculator here).
>
> "Americans have a hard time realizing the American middle class is, in a global perspective, pretty high up,” said 
> Anna Rosling Rönnlund, who founded the Dollar Street project to photograph families and their lifestyles around the 
> world.
>
> Where are these new residents of the middle class coming from? Kharas estimates 140 million to 170 million people a 
> year are moving into the middle class every year. (More-exact estimates are difficult to come by; not all countries 
> keep uniform records, and in some places the data is years out of date.)
>
> India and China have been driving much of the middle-class boom in recent years. Now, Kharas said, Southeast Asian 
> countries such as Thailand and Vietnam are poised for a middle-class surge.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-a538de84&post_id=20180826080712:8E3AD640-A928-11E8-97D1-865F6E131710
Powered by Listbox: https://www.listbox.com