The Economist tries to tally up the world’s rich people, and discovers there are more millionaires than Australians:
Credit Suisse [. . .] uses a less stringent (and more obvious) definition: a millionaire is anyone whose net assets exceed $1m. That includes everything: a home, an art collection, even the value of an as-yet-inaccessible pension scheme. The Credit Suisse “Global Wealth Report” estimates that there were 24.2m such people in mid-2010, about 0.5% of the world’s adult population. By this measure, there are more millionaires than there are Australians. They control $69.2 trillion in assets, more than a third of the global total. Some 41% of them live in the United States, 10% in Japan and 3% in China.
How did these people grow rich? Mostly through their own efforts. Only 16% of high-net-worth individuals inherited their stash, according to Capgemini. The most common way to get rich is to start a business: nearly half (47%) of the world’s wealthy people are entrepreneurs.
You do not have to be a genius to build a million-dollar business, but it helps if you are intelligent and extremely hard-working. In their book “The Millionaire Next Door”, Thomas Stanley and William Danko observed that a typical American millionaire is surprisingly ordinary. He has spent his life patiently saving and ploughing his money into a business he founded. He does not live in the fanciest part of town — why waste money that you can invest? And his tastes are so plain that you can barely tell him apart from his neighbours. He buys $40 shoes, and his car of choice is a Ford.
It shouldn’t need to be pointed out that a millionaire today isn’t the same sort of person as a millionaire 30 years ago: with rising housing costs, anyone living in a paid-off home in downtown Toronto is already well on the way to being a millionaire. A multi-millionaire of the 1970s occupied the lower end of the range of what today is probably the billionaire club. Today’s millionaire is a well-off professional or middle class person, not a globe-trotting plutocrat.
