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Do You Make $34,000 A Year? You’re Part Of The One Percent

Matt Lillywhite
Publishous
Published in
4 min readMay 16, 2023
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I’ll begin this article with an uncomfortable truth…

Middle-class Americans are extremely wealthy by international standards. For context, 99% of the world’s population makes less than $34,000 per year. So, if you earn more than that amount, you are, by definition, part of the global one percent.

Billions Of People Earn Less Than $6 A Day

“Almost half the world’s population — 3.4 billion people — live on less than $5.50 a day,” per CBS News. “That’s about the cost of a Starbucks Venti Caffe Latte in New York City.”

That statistic is crazy. However, it’s not surprising to anyone who’s visited poorer countries. After all, 2 billion people around the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, per NPR.

My jaw dropped to the floor when I visited Thailand for the first time. I explored different neighborhoods around Bangkok. And, almost every day, people living in poverty recognized me as a “wealthy westerner” & asked if I had any spare cash.

I was living paycheck to paycheck back then. I only had a few hundred dollars in my bank account & needed every cent to get back…

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Matt Lillywhite
Matt Lillywhite

Written by Matt Lillywhite

Storyteller and part-time procrastinator. Writing to inspire, entertain, and avoid doing laundry. Substack: https://mattlillywhite.substack.com/subscribe

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