A great article posted on Too Much. 

Some people, at year’s end, like to spread holiday cheer. The world might do better, suggests a landmark new report from the United Nations University in Helsinki, to start spreading wealth.

The new study — the first ever to tally, for the entire world, all the major elements of household wealth, everything from financial assets and debts to land, homes, and other tangible property — finds some $125.3 trillion worth of wealth about in the world, as of the year 2000.

If that wealth were divided in perfectly equal shares among all the world’s 3.7 billion adults, every adult on Earth would hold a net worth of just under $34,000 in U.S. dollars.

In real life, says the new study from the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, half the world’s adults hold under one-tenth that modest sum, less than $2,161. The vast bulk of the world’s wealth, the study observes, sits “highly concentrated” in the pockets of a relative few.

How concentrated? The richest 1 percent of the world’s adults — minimum wealth, $514,512 — hold 39.9 percent of the world’s wealth, 13,000 times more than the entire bottom 10 percent.

The new UN University study, The World Distribution of Household Wealth, at one point translates our global distribution of wealth into a technical measure called a Gini coefficient, with “0” representing a situation where wealth is divided in total equality and “1” the opposite, a situation where one person owns everything. The higher the fraction in between, the more severe the inequality.

The UN University study computes the year 2000 global wealth Gini at 0.892, a level higher than the inequality rate within any individual country.

What does this abstract number mean in actual people terms? If you reduced the world’s population to 10 people, the study points out, this 0.892 Gini would correspond to a situation where the richest of the 10 people held $1,000 in wealth and the remaining nine a single $1 each.