How rich are you?

Not long ago I was turned onto this fascinating website, called the Global Rich List. It allows you to include your personal income and then tells you where you rank in terms of global wealth.

What was interesting to me was how different standards of wealth in the United States seem when you put them up against the wealth of the rest of the world. For instance, according to U.S. government standards, the poverty threshold for 2006 was $10,400 for a single person (or $21,200 for a family of four). But according to the Global Rich List, living right at the poverty line in the U.S. would still make you the 793,757,388th richest person on earth. Keep in mind that there are well over 6 billion people on earth, so being in the top 800 million is pretty good. Put in simpler terms, it would mean that you are still in the top 13.22% wealthiest people in the world.

It's tougher to figure these numbers in family terms; the Global Rich List is really meant to give the stats on an individual. But even if I take my family income and divide it in half to get a rough idea of my personal earning power in a given year (I live in a family of two), it still puts me in the top 10% of the world's wealthiest people.

Now I can tell you, as a part of a family where one of the bread winners is a full-time graduate student (that's me), I don't feel wealthy at all. For those of you reading this blog from North America or Western Europe, I imagine you probably don't feel wealthy either. But I bet you also rank pretty high in terms of the world's richest people.

How are we to think about these things? Well, for one, I think it says a lot about how we are conditioned to think about money. We are taught to always think in terms of scarcity instead of abundance; this is a theme that government and the consumer culture drive into our brains all the time. When we constantly receive the message that we don't have enough of this or that (money, consumer products, security, etc.), then we are always going to think we're not well off.

And second, I think it calls us to go back to the Scriptures and read again what God has to say about how we use our wealth, both in the Old and the New Testaments. Wealth is both a real and a relative concept. It's real in the sense that one can either have or have not what it takes to get by, and if one lacks for basic necessities, one is certainly not wealthy. But wealth is also relative, in exactly the sense that the Global Rich List points out. Who are we to buy second homes and boats and expensive clothes, when the vast majority of our brothers and sisters around the world lack for so much?