I entered the UK median salary. And it said that I was the 58 millionth richest person in the world. That would be very, very odd. The UK has 62 million inhabitants. Even counting only half as having a salary (an obvious underestimate), that's already 16 million richer people in the UK alone. Probably around 80 million in the US. We still have quite a few countries to go and we are way already way over 58 million.

Then, of course, it does not seem to take the difference in purchasing power into account at all.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi

They do not strike me as being in direct competition for raw materials, so basically they're in competition for qualified labour. Which is currently sufficiently abundant as to be a problem.

So the actual choice is whether to provide all of these things (with the possible exception of the TV, which might be in competition for energy resources), or providing only a subset of them. The latter is of course only desirable if your objective is to keep third-world countries miserable, suppress labour bargaining power through unemployment, or both.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.