Lifestyles of the Globally Average

February 26, 2009 6:22 PM

Standard of living comparison around the world? What is the "average" or "median" lifestyle?

Asking for a friend, who emailed me this question:

"The idea is often repeated that everyone in N America (who lives indoors, maybe) is among the top 90th percentile of World Wealth. That the difference between a yuppie lawyer couple living in Vancouver's West Side and a single mother in a basement suite in the East End is only about 3-4 percentile points -- when compared to the rest of the world.

My question is this (assuming, as above, that such figures still have any viability at all) -- who, out there in the great wide world, is living at the 50% level?

Who are these people? What are their lives like? What is the 'Gross Happiness Level' of their social/economic existence? I'd like to think that these are important questions, because the details of these people's lives may well provide us with a view/vision of our own future -- IF everything that's going down now turns out to be going very well . . ."

I remember seeing, once upon a time, an interactive web site that would let someone know where the fell on the scale of global riches, but my google-fu fails me now. Anyone know if that's still around?
Any other sources are welcome too.

(I recognize that these kinds of comparisons can be contentious at times, but hopefully we can helpfully find a place for my friend to start.)

Thanks!

posted by Sublimity to society & culture (12 comments total)

Speaking in generalities, the median person is probably the median person in India or China.

While I haven't been in either country, of the two I'd rather be Chinese given the arguably more functional state, rationalized economics, and less fractionalization of nationalities and classes.

China has an and adjusted per-capita GDP of $6,000 while India's is half that.

CIA says the global per capita GDP is $10,000 but that is an average not a median.

It takes money to make money in this world, so if you don't have your own capital goods (an axe, a boat, or a Macbook) you've got to labor for someone else who does. This generally pushes wages down to the margin of survival given a surplus of available workers to jobs.

Going with $3000 per year seems about right for the median income. Note one mitigation of living in a poor place is that usually the rents are dirt-cheap too. I could survive on $3000/yr if only my rent was $50 or whatever.
posted by troy at 6:51 PM on February 26

This site has some good data. They say that 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 a day, which would tend to support your friend's assertions.
posted by crapples at 6:52 PM on February 26

Hard to know exactly what you're getting at. Are you looking at median income? Because that would simply give you the

But here are some numbers for you.

Median household income in the US in 2007 was $50,000. That means that 50% of the households in the country makes less than that per year. With two income-earners, that means that more than half of the people in the US earn around $25k/year. By contrast, the top 2% of the country earns in excess of $250,000. A detailed discussion can be found here.

Compare this to Malawi, which has a GDP of $800 per capita. Most Malawians belong to the 50% of the population of the world that makes less than $2/day.

Federal disability benefits in the US pay $687-ish/month. Over the course of a year, with no other income, a person living on that alone would receive the equivalent of a decade of income of a person in Malawi.

This isn't an entirely fair representation, it must be admitted. Much of the world's most desperately poor engage in subsistence agriculture, and thus their "employment" doesn't register in the world economy: things grown on individual farms and consumed on individual farms aren't generally counted. Transactions conducted in a barter economy aren't really counted either. As such, the fact that 50% of the world "lives on less than $2/day" does not mean that they consume less than $2/day, it simply means that the transactions they engage in with currency amount to less than that.

Still. The disparity is pretty dramatic. World GDP is estimated at about $54.5 trillion in 2007, and possibly as high as $70-78 trillion in 2008. That's $11k-13k per capita. The US poverty line for a single person was $10,400 in 2008, and the discussion in that link indicates that some argue this underestimates poverty in the US by as much as 30%, meaning that if one simply earns the average world GDP per capita in this country one would be officially considered impoverished.

All that by way of saying that I'm not sure you can get a good read on what you're looking for because costs of living vary so widely. Yeah, you can make a lot of money by global standards and still be considered poor in the US, but even at an income ten times that of a Malawian it's almost impossible to have a roof over one's head, let alone stay well-fed. A semi-prosperous Malawian farmer "earning" $4/day may well have a more stable economic existence--issues of war and civil unrest aside--than a homeless guy in New York who makes several times as much.

At any rate, I hope those numbers are helpful.
posted by valkyryn at 7:00 PM on February 26 [2 favorites has favorites]

Dang fragments...
posted by valkyryn at 7:01 PM on February 26

This site has some good data. They say that 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 a day

That cannot possibly be true. The OECD countries (basically, "the developed world") adds up to 16% by itself.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:13 PM on February 26

Although it's over 10 years old, the book Material World is a really cool look at exactly how people of median income and household size live in countries around the world.
posted by katemonster at 7:39 PM on February 26 [2 favorites has favorites]

This site has some good data. They say that 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 a day

That cannot possibly be true. The OECD countries (basically, "the developed world") adds up to 16% by itself.

Why not? If you read the linked page, it indicates that 95% of the population in the developing world lives on less than $10 per day (with reference to a paper from the World Bank). 95% of 84% is 80%.
posted by ssg at 8:07 PM on February 26

Along the same lines but more recent, the book Hungry Planet, by the authors of Material World mentioned above, will give you a snapshot of lifestyles around the world.
posted by Gyan at 8:40 PM on February 26

Seconding Material World as the best answer to your specific question.
posted by Wild_Eep at 9:25 PM on February 26

I looked up some statistics a few years ago and concluded that the average Brazilian was close to the world median. You might want to look at gapminder.
posted by lukemeister at 8:31 PM on February 27

According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Norway is the best place in the world to live for the 4th straight year, followed by Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. The United States comes in 9th. The UN uses not only GDP per capita, but literacy rate (virtually 100% in Norway), longevity, crime rate, as well as "cultural freedom". This includes such things as the extent of accepting immigrant cultures into their own.
posted by Daddysugar at 7:53 PM on February 28

Here's a story that illustrates the difference between everyone reading this website and the rest of the planet: I was in a van in an Indonesia shooting the breeze with the driver and I asked him, if he could go anywhere, where would he go. He said he would to go to the Sistine Chapel and see the frescos. The difference between him and me, and you, and everybody reading, is that barring physical disability every single one of us could do that if we wanted to. For some of us, it might take a long time - ten, twenty years even - to save up the money and go. But we could do it. Maybe we'd have to eat ramen, live with roommates, and ride the bus for decades but if we REALLY wanted to we would eventually find ourselves looking up at God pointing at Adam.

The Indonesian driver could not save the airfare over the course of his life and there are no opportunities for him to improve his situation. Now I guess it's barely possible if he really had a boner for Michelangelo, he could hang out in bars in Kuta until he met an Italian and romance the Italian enough to get a trip to Rome.... and I've met people like this, peasants who romanced their way out of a rice paddy in Vietnam or a factory in Estonia and ended up in San Francisco or London. But it's not really the same!

I don't think the rest of the world has that much to teach us about the future because it's not really about material wealth at all. It's about how you perceive and construct yourself and the opportunities available to you. I have always thought the idea that the West will roll over and give up our freedom to go to Italy if we damn well want to and are willing to work for it is insane. When people really realize what a loss in standard in living means - that it doesn't just mean you get poorer but that you *cannot get richer* - they are going to stop being willing to pretend like they care about the suffering billions of the world. Harsh but true.
posted by daisydaisy at 10:32 PM on March 2