{"id":7342,"date":"2011-01-22T12:12:03","date_gmt":"2011-01-22T16:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=7342"},"modified":"2011-01-22T13:20:33","modified_gmt":"2011-01-22T17:20:33","slug":"how-many-rich-people-are-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/01\/22\/how-many-rich-people-are-there\/","title":{"rendered":"How many “rich people” are there?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Economist<\/em><\/a> tries to tally up the world’s rich people, and discovers there are more millionaires than Australians:<\/p>\n

\n

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 \u201cGlobal Wealth Report\u201d estimates that there were 24.2m such people in mid-2010, about 0.5% of the world\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s wealthy people are entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThe Millionaire Next Door\u201d, 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. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[315],"class_list":["post-7342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1Uq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7343,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7342\/revisions\/7343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}