Cost of living does not seem to factor in that argument at all. Someone who makes $5000 a year in Guatemala or Nepal arguably has a higher quality of living than someone barely scraping by on a working class (less than $40K) income in a developed country.
$32K a year in Los Angeles and New York is only going to get you a moldy basement with roommates or a dingbat apartment built back in the 1950s. Whereas you can live like a king in a lot of third world countries at a $100 to $300 a month budget.
You need to take into account the cost of living and compare the revenue after taxes
According to
http://www.globalrichlist.com/ if you make more than $32,000 you are among the richest people in the world.
Also if you have more than 1400 bitcoins you can consider yourself among the wealthiest 1% in the world along with the Rockafellers and Venderbuilts.
This is a clear reminder of how poor most of the world is.
Oh wow that was so well put that I had to quote it and point out for anyone else who may have missed your post. That is such a great example of how bad things really are. I commend you for hitting the nail right on the head.
The world has never been so wealthy, tens to hundreds of millions of persons go out of extreme poverty every year; 1billion persons went out of extreme poverty in asia in a few decades
And the proof is..? Anyone can manipulate statistics to make it look like anything is happening. The only thing which has happened is increasing urbanization and I don't know if I would characterize that as an end to poverty. It's arguably better for people to live in rural villages with their own homes than to crowd people into slums and urban sprawls.
Revenue per day, having a bicycle or not, access to water, death at birth, life expectancy, nimber of children, % of literate are not subjective, it is a revolution that has started a few decades ago and it still going on : people are coming out of poverty thanks to the free market but the big states are slowing down the process with corruption, spending and bad regulations
Learn about the world you live in!
BTW the calculator should also take into account if you are a family of one two three...