Rich Lists

People are funny about money, that's what they say.  Websites like Glassdoor exist purportedly to allow you to see if you're being paid fairly by your employer by comparing the salary of others with your own - although personally I don't buy into that reason, I think most people who use the site do so out of curiosity and yes to be nosey.  People want to know how much money other people have, and they don't want anyone to know how much they have themselves.

Whether people will openly admit it or not, there is a desire to "rank" everyone in the world into one hypothetical rich list that comprises every living person.  The rich lists themselves produced by various publications are perhaps the closest we come to acknowledging this curiosity publicly - except it doesn't feel as personal when you're talking about billionaires.  I firmly believe however if someone is curious enough to want to know who is at the top of that list, and where various celebrities etc rank within it, then they have wondered where they themselves would rank on a worldwide rich list.

If you live in a country typically described as being part of "western society" then the chances are you are part of the 10% in terms of global wealth by virtue of your birth.  You might be very close to the bottom in your own country, but from a global narrative you're already very high on that list.  Within those individual countries when you break down the distribution of wealth, it's quite surprising how quickly you can climb up the rankings and with very little wealth needed in relative terms.  Take the UK for example, in 2016/17 to be included in the top 10% bracket you had to earn £44,300 after tax, for an income bracket that includes billionaires that's surprisingly low.  Likewise, if you want to narrow it further, to be included in the top 1% you had to earn £111,000 after tax in the same tax year to be included within that bracket, which again is surprisingly low for an income bracket that includes billionaires and would also put you in the top 0.06% globally.

You can go even further on a global scale, if you earn just £10,000 per year after tax, [$13,219] you would be in the top 12.12% globally, and ranked approximately 727,360,24th in a hypothetical global rich list.  If you're curious about these numbers and would like to see where various figures would fit in then you can use the global rich list to find out more.

What I find interesting about this whole idea of ranking everyone in the world, is the perception some people seem to have with regards to where you "should be" on that list.  I've seen people on social media openly discussing the wealth of some celebrities who have risen and fallen in terms of wealth, the thing that made me reflect on their comments was the apparent disbelief that someone with money might end up without money.  This seems incredulous when you think about it, after all your own wealth has likely fluctuated quite a bit through your lifetime, sometimes you are ahead and sometimes you are behind, the thing that remains constant however is your relationship to money itself which for most people never changes - i.e. you either have the mentality of a spender, or that of a saver, people who are of one mentality rarely transition to the other, unless some event of great significance occurs in their life that makes them fundamentally question their relationship to money - illness, injury, redundancy, pregnancy, parenthood, to name a few although having said that, you can experience all of these things and still not alter your relationship with money at all.