If you are not underwater financially then you personally have more wealth than the bottom 1.44 billion

The Oxfam Poverty and Wealth report has been getting a lot of coverage for a fact that it states that the top 85 billionaires have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the world. They also spin it with "working for the few". They imply that the rich are making the poor work for them. The vast majority of the billionaires do not employ the poor. The Google guys employ about 80,000 well paid [in terms of upper middle class salaries and a thousand or more who have good stock options.] Bill Gates had employed a few hundred thousand and Microsoft. The poor were there before either company existed. Go back a few hundred years and pretty much everyone is poor.

Bill Gates has predicted that there will be almost no poor countries by 2035. A few countries will be held back by war and politics, Gates said, citing North Korea, or geography, such as landlocked nations in central Africa. Still, he predicts that more than 70 percent of countries will have a higher per-person income than China now, and almost 90 percent of nations will be above today’s India.

The credit suisse report was based on the work of James Davies and Anthony Shorrocks.

In 2009 on the Davies and Shorrocks papers notes, wealth of US$8,635 was needed to be in the top half of the global distribution, and US$518,364 to be in the top one per cent globally.

They had a presentation to the World Forum in 2012.

The bottom 20% have negative wealth. The -0.2% of the bottom 10% is more than the +0.1% of the next 10%. Therefore I and anyone who does not have negative income has more wealth than the bottom 1.4 billion who have a -$100 billion or so collectively.

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