Just Call Me Keith Silver

No real reason for this, but Nate Silver recently posted a story about which countries you could obliterate to maintain 95% of the worldwide GDP. I grabbed the same data and played around with it a little to satisfy some curiosities.

Anyway, Silver mentions the fact that you could completely discount about 2,865,623,000 people in order to make this reduction, or about 43% of the world's population. This made me wonder exactly how many you could take from the top end; that is, do the opposite. So I pulled the data, sorted it, and found the countries with the highest per capita GDPs:

Luxembourg, Norway, Qatar, Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and two-thirds of the Netherlands constitutes 5% of the world's GDP. And yes, I'm aware that taking a fraction of a country is kind of a tricky thing; in this case, it means roughly the middle 67%; imagine you could take away both the richest 16.5% and the poorest 16.5% from the Netherlands. The United States just misses the cut, falling after the "rest" of the Netherlands and the UK.

Adding up the populations of all these countries and partial countries comes to roughly 52,144,145 people, according to the most recent census data available for all. That's a teensy 0.78% of the world's population. So yes, in a country-by-country basis (it'd be a worse comparison in a person by person one), the top 0.78% of the population is as wealthy as the bottom 43%.