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  • Earth is an unequal place.

  • It always has been, and maybe it always will be. But, few people are truly aware about the extent of Earth's true inequality.

  • This video is an exploration into the real world and the real reality.

  • Let's begin with the global population of humans currently in 2019: approximately 7.7 billion people.

  • There also exists approximately 317 trillion U.S dollars

  • in global wealth across the world. In a perfectly equal world, if all of this wealth was evenly

  • distributed to all 7.7 billion of us, would mean that everybody regardless of age

  • would have $41,169 to their names.

  • But we don't live in a perfectly equal world. So to understand the reality of the situation more,

  • let's shrink all of those 7.7 billion people down to only one hundred people to better represent

  • everybody and place them all in a single-file line in order of how much money they have.

  • The first staggering thing to notice here is that the first seventy people in this line all have net worth below $10,000.

  • In order to break into the top fifty percent of people in the world,

  • you only need to have $4,120. The first seventy people in this line are essentially all

  • inside of the global lower-class and they only control three percent of the world's wealth between them.

  • Most of these seventy people are located in places like India, where the average adult net worth is only $7,000, or in Africa,

  • where the average adult net worth is only $4,000. The next twenty-one people in the line represent to the global middle class,

  • with net worth averaging between $10,000 and $100,000.

  • Even still though these 21 people are underrepresented,

  • because they control only about 12% of the global wealth pool. In order to break into the global top 10%,

  • you need to acquire a net worth of $93,170.

  • So moving on, the next eight people in the line are the first people who could probably be considered to be very well off.

  • These eight have net worth ranging between

  • $100,000 and $800,000, and would be considered the global upper-middle class.

  • Most of these eight people are found in places like Europe, where the mean average adult has a net worth of

  • $145,000, or thirty-six times higher than an average

  • African adult, or in North America where the mean average adult has a net worth of $404,000.

  • This means that average Americans,

  • Canadians, and Europeans are well inside of the global top 10%.

  • Together, these eight people control 38% of the entire world's wealth,

  • but even they don't have anywhere near as much money as this guy does - the richest person in the group of

  • 100. He represents the top 1% of the global population, and he controls a mind-boggling

  • 47% of the entire world's wealth, or nearly half.

  • In order to break into the global 1%, you need to have a net worth of at least $770,000.

  • No average person in any country on earth is inside of the top 1% Club.

  • Inside of the top 1% are approximately 42 million U.S dollar millionaires, who are located across the world, representing

  • 0.6% of the global population.

  • But even further up than that, at the very top echelons of the 1%, are the billionaire class. As of

  • 2018, there are 2,208 billionaires across the world, with a combined wealth of 9.1 trillion U.S dollars.

  • If the wealth of billionaires was measured as a yearly GDP, they would have the third largest

  • economy in the world, ahead of Japan and Germany combined. And the wealth of the billionaire class

  • has been steadily increasing over time. Just two years ago in 2017,

  • the billionaire class was worth "only" $7.67 trillion dollars, and just as recently as 2000,

  • the billionaire class wasn't even worth one trillion dollars. At the very, very top of the billionaire class are 10

  • individual people: the 10 wealthiest people in the world.

  • The top eight of these men - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet,

  • Bernard Arnault, Carlos Slim,

  • Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg - have a combined wealth greater

  • than the bottom 50% of the human population, or 3.85 billion people.

  • What's also interesting though is the way that extreme wealth and people tend to congregate in the same few parts of the world.

  • An ultra-high net worth individual is a person who has a minimum net worth of $30 million, and most of them

  • (70%, to be exact) live in just these 10 cities across the world:

  • Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong, Paris, London, New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

  • Half of these mega-concentrations of the world's wealthiest are cities inside of America,

  • which struggles with its own economic inequality problem.

  • In 2017, the net worth of every single household in the United States added together to 94.7 trillion US dollars.

  • If we took this and divided it equally to all

  • 124 million households inside of the country, that would be

  • $760,000 per American family.

  • The reality is obviously much different, though. The bottom 50% of American families average only an

  • $11,000 net worth, while the wealthiest 400 Americans have more money than all of them or

  • 163 million Americans combined. in order to break into the top 1% of Americans,

  • you need to have a net worth of at least $10,374,000,

  • and in this country the top 1% of Americans controlled roughly 38% of the country's wealth.

  • While considering the 1% at the global scale control more like 47% of the wealth,

  • The United States is actually doing better at economic equality than the world averages.

  • But if you want to see what the worst country in the world for economic equality is like, you needn't look any further than

  • South Africa, labeled by the World Bank as the most unequal country on earth.

  • Here, the bottom 60% of the country controls only 7% of the nation's wealth,

  • which is actually a little better than the global averages but the top 1% of South Africans control an overwhelming

  • 70% of the entire nation's wealth,

  • which is much more severe than the global average.

  • The country where the wealthiest 1% control the least amount of the nation's wealth is Norway, where the top 1%

  • only control 21% of the country's total wealth.

  • While the distribution of money may be pretty unequal in the world

  • the distribution of knowledge

  • doesn't have to be. You just watched through probably 6 or 7 minutes of me explaining some realities about our society,

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