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James Touchi-Peters recently claimed in a Vice article that

One out of every 200 people on the planet makes more than a million dollars a year. That’s one half of one percent of the world population.

That unsubstantiated statistic struck me as dubious. A quick Google search revealed that only about 12 million people in the world have an overall net worth of at least $1 million (that's fewer than 2 people out of every thousand). I would imagine that the majority of people making $1 million per year are likely to have a net worth greater than $1 million. For what James Touchi-Peters claims to be true, wouldn't it imply that the majority of high earners are spending/losing the majority of their income each year?

Does one out of every 200 people on the planet make at least $1 million USD per year?

ESultanik
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    In the next sentence, he says that in the US it's 1:50, which is clearly not true based on [2012 IRS records](http://www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats-Individual-Income-Tax-Returns-Publication-1304-(Complete-Report)). It's more like 1:800. Even if you count "number of tax returns" instead of "people", it's still only 1:370. Finding data for the entire world will likely be difficult, but based on the clear exaggeration for the US, I wouldn't believe it. – Is Begot Sep 18 '14 at 13:24
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    "majority of people making $1 million per year are likely to have a net worth greater than $1 million" - that's a very intuitive but quite likely wrong assumption. There are tons of studies that lottery winners end up poor; ditto rich celebrities that don't have much networth and even go bankrupt. – user5341 Sep 18 '14 at 14:01
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    In Norway, the income taxation process is very open and it's easy to verify details. Out of the 100 Norwegians with the highest income in 2012, nearly 40 of them had a net worth *less than* their annual income. Out of the 100 Norwegians with the highest net worth, about 20 had no taxable income at all. The relation between income and net worth is indeed not as obvious as it might seem. – Tor-Einar Jarnbjo Sep 18 '14 at 15:45
  • @DVK: But lottery winners and celebrities are a very small subset of either people making $1 million/year, or having over $1 million in assets. Even if you make much less than a million a year, it's fairly easy to accumulate over a million in assets, if you save and invest for 3-4 decades. – jamesqf Jan 14 '15 at 07:13
  • This seriously lacks notability, I've googled the claim and could not find other serious mentions of this (the claim is made by someone making a now defunct website, it seems like paid content). – Sklivvz Jan 15 '15 at 00:31

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