Good morrow. This post brings you some spurious Wikipedia–based social statistics in special honour of April Fools Day, ca 1307, when, for instance, European feudalism meant staggering inequalities of wealth between the rich and the mass of the people (plus such other gems as crusades, torture, capture of valued hostages for ransom etc.)
Nothing like our world today, of course.
The Wikipedia pages that provided the resources for this table were the list of billionaires and list of countries by GDP(PPP)
Granted that it would be hard to judge the accuracy of any of the figures. They’ve been gathered from a range of sources, all of which are pretty spurious, by anonymous researchers. Plus, these calculations have been done by someone with only a vague grasp of what a billion and trillion are, and that’s not even counting the discrepancy between the British and US billion/trillion. However, you can check the calculations. (Of course, they were done with the help of software sold by the number 1 billionaire’s former company.)
| Total wealth of all countries (IMF version) | $73,573,193,100,000 if you add up the individual countries |
| Number of billionaires | 946 |
| Total wealth of listed countries divided by total wealth of top 101 billionaires | 1% |
| Total wealth of listed countries divided by total wealth of all billionaires | 3% |
| Average wealth of top 101 billionaires | $14,218,811,881 |
| Average (net worth) wealth of all billionaires | $3,699,788,584 |
| Net worth of the top 3 as Percentage of world’s GDP | 0.26% |
| Net worth of the top 3 as Percentage of European Union GDP | 1.26% |
| Net worth of the top 3 as Percentage of USA GDP | 1.28% |
| Countries on list whose GDP is less than the average top 101 billionaire’s wealth | 55 |
| Countries on list whose GDP is less than the average billionaire’s wealth | 25 |
| Countries on list whose GDP is less than the richest billionaire’s wealth | 110 |
| Countries on list whose GDP is less than the richest 3 billionaires’ combined wealth | 128 |
| World population | 6,453,628,000 |
| World’s GDP divided by population – i.e average human share of world’s wealth | $11,400 |
| % of world population that are billionaires | 0.000015% |
| Factor by which average billionaire’s wealth exceeds average annual share of world’s wealth | 324,534 |