Eight billion people. One income distribution. The half of humanity at the bottom shares $1.18 of every ten dollars the world earns — while the top tenth takes nearly five. This is not an abstraction. It is measured, surveyed, and mapped — and below, you can find yourself inside it.
The Atlas
South Africa
Run your number in South Africa →
The Divide
Line every human being up by income, poorest to richest, and walk the line. Each bar below is one percent of humanity — 79,411,029 people. Heights are drawn on a log scale; on a linear one, the first ninety bars would be invisible. Keep scrolling. The line does not rise. It detonates.
PPP dollars are adjusted for what money actually buys in each country — a dollar here is a dollar of the same groceries everywhere. The data pools household surveys from 172 countries, covering 97.5% of the world's population.
The Stigma
Inequality survives on a story: that the line you just walked is a ranking of effort. The story is comfortable, repeated, and measurably false. Below — the four most common versions of it, set against what the data actually says.
The most reliable predictor of your income is not effort, education, or ideas. It is the lottery of where you were born — a ticket no one chooses.
Case File: China
No country has created wealth faster. And few datasets show more plainly how unevenly a miracle can land. China runs household surveys separately for its cities and its countryside — and under the hukou registration system, which of the two you belong to is largely assigned at birth and decides your schools, hospitals and pensions. The World Bank publishes both lines. They have never touched.
Growth was real. So was the sorting: the city keeps the surplus, the village keeps the work — and a registration stamp decides which side of the line you live on.
The Ledger
Country averages hide the mechanism. Inequality is not weather — it is bookkeeping: wages set against buybacks, pay committees against pension funds. Four entries from the ledger, each with its source attached.
None of these numbers describe scarcity. They describe allocation — decisions, made by people, that could be made differently.
Your Number
You have walked the line of humanity. Now stand in it. Enter what your household — or just you — earns in a month, and the same survey machinery that built the atlas will place you among your country's percentiles, and among the world's. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
Method & Sources
Sources
Decile income/consumption shares, Gini, means and medians from national household surveys; the spine of the atlas, the percentile walk, and the evaluator. 2021 PPP dollars.
Pre-tax top 1% and top 10% national income shares, combining surveys with tax records to correct the top tail.
PPP conversion factors (private consumption), official exchange rates, population, GDP per capita, US CPI.
Ledger entries on executive pay and wealth concentration, as labelled on each row.
Honest limits
- Survey welfare is household income or consumption per capita — not gross salary. Countries differ in which they measure; each case file is labelled.
- Surveys under-capture the very rich. Every top-end figure here is therefore a floor, not a ceiling.
- PPP conversion uses the latest national factor, deflated to 2021 international dollars via US CPI; your local inflation since the survey year is not individually modelled.
- Quantile functions are monotone-cubic interpolations of eleven exact Lorenz points per country; reconstruction error at the median is under ~1% for major economies.
- Sub-national detail exists only where statistical offices publish it (e.g. China's urban/rural series). Most countries are mapped at national level.
- Coverage: 172 countries, 97.5% of world population (7.94 billion people). The missing 2.5% skews toward states too fragile to survey — which likely makes the world look more equal here than it is.