The tail of the (green) 2000 curve seems slightly off to me: ~10 million individuals with >$100k annual income? (~ $400k per annum for a family of four; but there are many more than 10 million "one percenters" in the US/Europe/Japan/China/etc.)
Via Roger Chen.
The original source of the graph http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-prosperity/inequality-between-world-citizens/
ReplyDeletePlausible modelling of the process. 'Short Message correspondence' could be the analog of the goods/services/money transactions between humans. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2973857/
Interacting human activities underlie the patterns of many social,
technological, and economic phenomena. Here we present clear empirical
evidence from Short Message correspondence that observed human actions
are the result of the interplay of three basic ingredients: Poisson
initiation of tasks and decision making for task execution in individual
humans as well as interaction among individuals.
...
Bimodal distributions are not limited to human communications, but are
also typical in other interacting social systems, such as trading (22). With suitable modification, our model could be applied to understand the bimodal interevent distribution of these systems.
Forgot the punch line. So money is speech.
ReplyDeleteWhat the graph actually shows is the rise and fall of solid empirical data. 1820 is mostly guesswork, and 2000 more so than 1970.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, all three of the lines on that graph look a bit goofy. But not as goofy as this monstrosity promulgated by rich guy Peter Diamandis. It's amazing how credulous people can be about this sort of thing, perhaps because people are trained to read graphs as rough stories, not as portrayals of quantitative information.
ReplyDelete