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February 15, 2008

Strange But True!

Q. Imagine the world’s people going by in single file, starting with the heightless and proceeding gradually to the very tallest. The procession takes a full hour to pass but for the first 20 minutes no one is visible, then at about 30 minutes the first dwarfs appear and not until 48 minutes do we see the first average-heighted people. In the final few minutes the giants loom up, including the tallest whose heads we can’t see. Last come several individuals whose heights are truly breathtaking. What’s being depicted here?

A. This is Dutch economist Jan Pen’s classic symbolic representation of the world’s distribution of money, with people’s heights proportional to their wealth, say Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot in “The Tiger that Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers.” Those invisible parade leaders have either negative wealth (debtors) or no wealth (height) at all. After the dwarfs pass, at around 48 minutes those of average height and wealth appear, with three-fourths of the world’s people having already gone by. The very last individuals — such as mega-billionaires Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, John Paul Getty — stand at least 10 miles tall. Averages here don’t mean much as just one billionaire can shift the average more than thousands of poor people. “They have this effect to the extent that 80 percent of the world’s population has less than average.”


 
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