> > People in the South aren't paying
>> $1000 for a dinky one bedroom apartment, are they?
>
>(you can get a 1br for $1k?!?)
Yeah. I'm sitting on one right now.
But the stats I'm basing that on come from Branko Milanovic at the World Bank, who used purchasing power parity exchange rates, which attempt to equalize buying power across national borders. At market exchange rates, the numbers would have been even more extreme.
Here are some factoids from Milanovic's paper that I cited in LBO #93:
>* The richest 1% of people in the world receive as much as
>the bottom 57%, or in other words, less than 50 million
>richest people receive as much as 2.7 billion poor.
>
>* Someone with an income equal to US$25,000 is richer
>than 98% of the world population.
>
>* The poorest tenth of Americans have average incomes
>higher than 2/3 of the world.
>
>* The richest tenth of Americans about 25 million people
> have aggregate incomes equal to the poorest 43% of
>people in the world, almost 2 billion people.
>
>* The ratio between the average income of the world's top
>5% and world's bottom 5% increased from 78 to 1 in
>1988 to 114 to 1 in 1993.
Doug