{"id":155,"date":"2005-03-14T07:28:00","date_gmt":"2005-03-14T15:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/rich\/"},"modified":"2005-03-14T07:28:00","modified_gmt":"2005-03-14T15:28:00","slug":"rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2005\/03\/14\/rich\/","title":{"rendered":"Rich!"},"content":{"rendered":"

So it turns out that I’m quite wealthy. Not because of any recent windfall, just because I’m a middle-class citizen of a country that is really rich, compared to other countries. Think of it this way: if your annual income is $1,000, you’re solidly in the top 50% of people in the world. Personally, I’m in the top 1% of wealth, with only about 40 million people richer than me worldwide (compared to about six billion who are poorer).<\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

Go check your own position at the Global Rich List<\/a> (via 3 quarks daily<\/a>). The idea, of course, is to guilt you into giving more money to charity. I’m a strong believer in donating to charity, but am remarkably guilt-free about being well-off myself. (We won’t get into other things I feel guilty about, like the final exam I gave to my GR class.)<\/p>\n

Of course, maybe we could actually do something about it. Jeffrey Sachs<\/a> thinks we could end extreme poverty worldwide for a mere $150 billion per year. As Daniel Drezner<\/a> says, this is something we should be talking about more. (He also says that academics can be bloggers<\/a>, which is good to hear. There does, however, seem to be some risk of alienating your senior colleagues.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So it turns out that I’m quite wealthy. Not because of any recent windfall, just because I’m a middle-class citizen of a country that is really rich, compared to other countries. Think of it this way: if your annual income is $1,000, you’re solidly in the top 50% of people in the world. Personally, I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}