Has anyone calculated analogy ranking US income brackets & country GDP?

April 14, 2020 1:10 PM

I was considering making an analogy between the income brackets in the USA and the GDP ranks of the countries of the world. So that you could say, "If the United States were the world, and you make $x, then you, by analogy, would be Honduras." Have you ever seen a chart like that or know of datasets that could easily make that comparison?

You could also do it with wealth instead of GDP. Obviously there's no need for rigor since this is just a silly analogy.

(I wanted to make the argument that if you want the USA to be a libertarian state, look at Planet Earth, where every country does whatever they can get away with. "You are asking to replace congress with the United Nations, except you don't get to be the US, you would be -- Honduras" -- or whatever would be an appropriate nation to compare someone with by their relative wealth.)

Seems like this kind of thing might have been done somewhere before and it's not actually worth the trouble to try calculating it myself. But worth bugging y'all about it, I guess!

NOTE: I am not asking how my income rank in the USA would compare with my income rank among all the people of the world, which is what I get when I try googling for this kind of thing.

posted by straight to Law & Government (4 answers total)

It's hard to say exactly. The US GDP is about 22 trillion. They do break it down 'per-capita', which basically means 'per person', and that number is $63k. However, income is not distributed 'per capita', so I don't find that number to be particularly useful (for really anything). Honduras for example is $2.5k.

So the difficulty is creating income gradients to correctly give the right percent of GDP to each income gradient, and then to determine those per-capita for multiple countries. I couldn't find a breakdown of income that would be useful to get that number for even the US, much less anywhere else.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:11 PM on April 14, 2020

Best answer: One possibility is to match up your rank in income with a country's rank in GDP. For example, say your income is 25th percentile in the US. (I'll assume that you can figure this out somehow.) See the list at Wikipedia's article "List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita (I'm using the IMF list) . You'd want the country that's 75% of the way from the top of the list, which is 75% * 185 = 139, giving Cambodia.

By this same metric, you get the correspondence of percentiles to countries. (The list would vary depending on which country GDP list you use.)
5th %ile - #176, Sierra Leone ($1,765 per capita)
10th %ile - #166, Mali ($2,569 per capita)
25th %ile - #139, Cambodia ($5,004 per capita)
50th %ile - #93, Indonesia ($14,841 per capita)
75th %ile - #46, Seychelles ($33,118 per capita)
90th %ile - #19, Australia ($54,799 per capita)
95th %ile - #9, Switzerland ($67,558 per capita)

To me this seems to work decently in the bottom and middle of the distribution. However this really breaks down at the upper end because there is no country that's ten times as rich as the median country. (Qatar has the highest GDP per capita, at $138,910, which isn't quite ten times Indonesia at the median.) But there are plenty of people making ten times the median income.
posted by madcaptenor at 2:49 PM on April 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: That's the kind of thing I was wanting to do, looking at rank order, but I don't want per-capita income because I'm comparing the wealth of the United States vs. the wealth of Honduras to get at how much more wealthy and powerful a truly rich person would be compared with a person who might be considering this question.

I think list of countries by net worth is what I was looking for. And then if I could find a more fine-grained breakdown of wealth percentiles in the US, I could roughly match them up by rank order.

Even then, there is still the problem you mentioned madcaptenor that the difference between the top 1% and the next 5% of countries is nowhere near the difference between the top 1% individuals vs. next 5% individuals.

So if I'm in the 40% percentle of wealth, my influence in a society ruled by something like the United Nations might be that of Nepal.
posted by straight at 8:49 PM on April 14, 2020

It actually seems to work better when you use totals instead of per-capita numbers, precisely because you get a bigger spread at the top - the top 1% of countries (US and China) have nearly half the wealth, because they get boosts from their large populations.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:21 AM on April 15, 2020