Can someone do the math for me?

I earn $40k per year.
Half of all humans live on less then $2.oo per day.

Therefore, in terms of the human population, I would guess that I am in the top 10% of wage earners on the planet.

Would top 10% be accurate or is more information needed?

You need to know the distribution of incomes.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

Way to go moneybags!

:hi:

If all things were truly equal, we'd be considered "rich" -- but its all relative to our fellow countrymen.

After I went to Lagos I realized how absolutely horrible it is to not have that. That's "rich" by world standards.

Someone in the 2nd percentile of income here has more money than someone in the 98th percentile in India. It's one of the reasons I'm less quick to criticize corporate capitalism than a lot of people on this board are.

I make a bit more than the US median income, and through Kiva I lend $25 to one Indian or African business owner every month. I spend more than that on coffee in a week, and that's a large enough capital investment for them that they are having to issue bonds for it. Those aren't the poor people in those countries; these are business owners. And the amount of money I could scrape together from loose change around my apartment is a significant capital investment for them.

The corporations that grew up here in America, where they had to pay wages to a prosperous middle class (because of union contracts) now see $5 a day as their wage goal. Think of all the profits they could make then! So they move as many operations that they can to the lowest wage countries as they can and wonder why Americans don't seem to be buying as much of their products as they once did.

...that a lot of our prosperity currently comes from keeping these people in the developing world poor, and that corporations are a large part of doing that.

I think the goal depends on the corporation (Koch Industries, incidentally, isn't actually a corporation, though it owns several). In general they want to see lower wages, though Ford's logic that their employees need to be able to buy their products still applies. The race to the bottom hasn't hit everywhere and at least in the places I've lived (which, I freely admit, are ridiculously affluent even by US standards) a lot of the companies have no interest in participating in it.

compared with the rest of humanity?

I am very grateful to be able to turn on my faucet and have as much drinking water as I want. In 30 years the liquid of the future will be water and not oil.

That knee-deep pile of trash (a lot of it is American and European trash, incidentally) stretches on for about 6 miles in three directions (the fourth direction is the ocean, or I think in this case the lagoon -- these poor people are also being hit with climate change faster than we are, too, because apparently it doesn't suck enough there already).

Clean water is a wonderful thing, as you rightly point out, and most of the $2/day crowd can't get any.

www.kiva.org

There are some complaints about it, as a warning; in some regions it's in danger of becoming like payday loans here. Still, it's a good idea IMO, you just have to judge the individual businesses. There are several other microlending sites; just Google for them. As always, do your homework; there are some shady sites out there too.

It is all reletive..Earn a thousand dollars a day and pay $6.00 a gallon for milk.

Bag of lentils + bag of barley + gallon of water: about $2.50. Say $0.50 for fuel to light your fire. With a day and a half's money at $2 per day, you've got food for four days.