[Arnor]

I'm confused...

Sniff test:

    World pop: ~ 7,000,000,000
           1%: ~ 70,000,000

    Population of the US ~ 300,000,000
    Median income in the US ~ $50,000

So you can come up with well over 70 million people in the US with incomes greater than $50,000. How then can the global top 1% cut off be $35k?

[maxerickson]

Median personal income in the US is ~$35,000, I think you must have looked at household. That $35,000 doesn't include people under 25. So the "7 billion" median would be even lower.

[Arnor]

You're right that I was looking at household income. Thanks for the correction!

Still, that number doesn't seem accurate for the cut-off for the global 1%

2010 census has over 180,000,000 Americans over age 25. So assuming that there are people making more than $35,000 outside the US, this number still smells fishy...

[maxk42]

Well the household income is not the incorrect number to look at. You just have to divide that by the number of people in the household. Children, elderly, disabled and others don't typically work. That makes the income-per-individual lower than the "individual income" which only counts those that are participating in the workforce.

Quickly looking at Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... ) I see that the median household income is $50,233 and there are 116,011,000 households in the US. A quick googling shows there are about 316.1 million people in the US, yielding an average of 2.725 people per household. Dividing $50,233 drops our previous income figure down to $18,434.12 per person.