Do you not know that it costs a great deal of money to move, particularly abroad?

Are you really unaware that European countries don’t want freeloading broke immigrants, any more than we do, not even white Americans? And they don’t want to share jobs with us, either.

Or were you planning to subsidize my move, and find me employment in one of those countries – and anyone else in my position? If not, with all due respect, STFU.

It is not possible for a thirdworld resident to arragne hir affairs so that they don’t have to spend the entirety of that single daily dollar they make on bare survival.

Bellatrys: hhm. Move? Canada, Sweden and Finland are all nice places.

Living one pay check away from living under a bridge, not being able to afford health care or medicine, and not having reliable transportation in a northern winter, is nearly as miserable in a first world society as elsewhere. True, I happen not to live in a combat zone, but urban disaster areas here are only a relative improvement. And even the vaunted successes of the west – clean safe water and lack of enviornmental contaminants – are relative to your wealth and demographics here.

By the way, I am interested in that study that gives you “economic points” for example for being married—which is worth $$$—or having more than 5 friends, etc. in terms of human happiness. I lived for a time in Indonesia and the family I stayed with made probably less than $1000 per year as a whole. They lived in some respects much better overall than I do in NYC now, I must say, with a large communal family in one compound, and they probably worked fewer hours than I do now as an isolated Manhattanite in a tiny cubicle, I mean, apartment.

Can those people be compared to, say, a family in Sudan being driven out of their homes by the government and executed by a militia?

http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032004/perinc/new11_000.htm

I read that the 50th percentile of individual incomes for males in the U.S. is somewhere between $25,000 and $27,500, which according to the Global Rich List calculator works out to the 90th percentile of world incomes, and the 75th percentile of individual incomes for males in the U.S. is somewhere between $47,500 and $50,000, which according to the calculator puts them in the wealthiest 0.9%. (I am startled to note that the income range from $47,500 and $50,000, the 75th percentile for U.S. men, is the 90th percentile for U.S. women in the U.S., and while the median income for males is between $25,000 and $27,500, for U.S. women the median income is down between $12,500 and $15,000!)

Those numbers seem funny to me. The U.S. accounts for about 4.5% of the world’s population. A quarter of U.S. males and a tenth of U.S. females – that adds up to about 0.8% of the world’s population – fall in the top 0.9% of global incomes. So eight out of nine of the world’s citizens with incomes greater than about $50,000 would be Americans.

That doesn’t sound right to me, especially with the appreciation of the Euro these last few years. I suspect that the Global Rich List calculator is income-wise comparing you, the individual worker, with not just the other workers of the world but all the world’s citizens, including dependent children and retirees.

one of the small links on the website gives more info, and states that it is all about individual income. So what you need to do is to turn your household income in “equivalised” incomes, by using so-called “equivalence scales”. Economists have a whole literature on what the apprioriate equivalence scales are; I don’t have any literature here at hand and haven’t used this technique for years, but of the top of my head, such a set could look like 1 for the first adult, 0.7 for the second adult, and between 0.2 and 0.5 for each child, depending on their age. The idea behind these scales is that multi-person households can share many goods (like a fridge, or rooms), and that kids cost less than adults. By adding all income in the household up, and dividing by the sum of the scales, one tries to compare households of different size.

The latest developments in this literature are equivalence scales for disabled people, who often need much income to reach the same level of well-being.

The peer group reference mechanism you’re describing was used in:
Jonathan Kelley; M. D. R. Evans. 1995. “Class and Class Conflict in Six Western Nations” American Sociological Review 60: 157-178.

you can find the piece in jstor

It seems to make a relatively large difference between being about the (a) 50 millionth (b) 25 millionth or© 450 millionth richest person in the world.

Are two of the people I’m “richer than” my kids? While technically true, I think they probably have more stuff than I do.