Landmark #3: Wealth and Poverty

Global Income Levels

Rich & Poor

The graph below shows a rough approximation of the distribution of income worldwide. Most people live on an annual income between $750 and $7,500, which is generally enough to provide a good standard of living. On the left edge of the graph, over a billion people live in absolute poverty, lacking sufficient food and clean water. The right side of the graph shows the consumer class, where over a billion people like me enjoy much more wealth than we need to get by, consume resources at an alarming rate, and consistently fail to take action to address world poverty.

Income Distribution Worldwide

Vital Signs

This small sampling of statistics may help give you a better feel for the magnitude of world poverty:

• Some 1.2 billion people lack water safe to drink -- one out of five people.
• About 36,000 children die each day, largely for lack of food and clean water -- 14 million per year.
• 1 million women die each year from preventable reproductive health problems.
• About 1 billion adults, one in five, cannot read or write -- 70% of these adults are women.
• About 130 million children of primary school age are not in school -- 70% of these kids are girls.
• One in three children is malnourished.
• 100 million people in the world are homeless.
• 500 million people eat too much, and another 500 million people eat scarcely enough to stay alive.

The Bottom Line
There is tremendous inequity in the relative levels of wealth worldwide. Twenty percent of the world lives in absolute poverty, while another twenty percent lives in stunning wealth.

You can copy freely from this site. This work has been dedicated to the Public Domain by the author, Brian Douglas Skinner.