James Fallows reminds me of a site I’d seen before and forgotten about—Global Rich List. What you do is you plug your income in and it tells you where you fall on the international distribution of income.
This is pretty much impossible to do in a really methodologically rigorous way. But the broad message it sends is clear enough. Pretty much everyone in the United States of America is doing pretty damn well by international standards. An income of $50,000 per year, for example, puts you in the top one percent internationally.
Now, again, there are a lot of obvious flaws and limits to this calculation. But I do think it’s one useful way of trying to get people to think a little more globally and a little less myopically about what really matters on the planet. In particular, once I started trying to think more globally on a personal basis it really changed my attitude toward American politics. You start to see that the most important thing isn’t who wins what in the midterms, or how many of the Bush tax cuts we extend. The key issue is how can we push the public and the political system to take a broader view of what matters and whose interests count over the long-term. Right now the interests of foreigners are basically absent from our political debates, even over issues like trade, climate, migration, and war where the relevance is obvious. It’s also obvious why that might be. But few people are prepared to explicitly defend the proposition that foreigners’ interests don’t count. And that gives me hope that better thinking can emerge over time.
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