Read here for an explanation of the graphs and its source:
Here the population of each country is divided into 20 equally-sized income groups, ranked by their household per-capita income. These are called “ventiles,” as you can see on the horizontal axis, and each “ventile” translates to a cluster of five percentiles. . . .
Now on the vertical axis, you can see where any given ventile from any country falls when compared to the entire population of the world.
For example, trace the line for Brazil, a country with extreme income inequality.
Brazil’s bottom ventile — that is, the poorest 5 percent of the Brazilian population, shown as the left-most point on the line — is about as poor as anyone in the entire world, registering a percentile in the single digits when compared to the income distribution worldwide. Meanwhile, Brazil also has some of the world’s richest, as you can see by how high up on the chart Brazil’s top ventile reaches. In other words, this one country covers a very broad span of income groups.
Now take a look at America.
Notice how the entire line for the United States resides in the top portion of the graph? That’s because the entire country is relatively rich. In fact, America’s bottom ventile is still richer than most of the world: That is, the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American income distribution is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s inhabitants.
Now check out the line for India. India’s poorest ventile corresponds with the 4th poorest percentile worldwide. And its richest? The 68th percentile. Yes, that’s right: America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest.
This tells me two things. First, obviously, all Americans are living high above the world average, but it also tells me that as we continue to globalize we have nowhere to go but down. The middle class in India who live less well than our poor, are also the engineers who will work for less than ours do.
