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I just looked it up:

In the US, poverty is officially defined as having less then 804$ per month to spend and that's the case for (and that's quite a high number I think) 12.7 % in 2005

Certainly thats still not bad compared to what you have if you're poor in India.

I wanted to express that a country may very well be quite a good place for economy if a lot of people live in the middle of the wealth scale - if you have just slaves and kings you won't win much.

In Norway life is so good (economy wise) because none or at least only very few people exist under the level of let's say an American production engineer.

Certainly the number of Norwegian millionaires is really limited in comparison to the US so the average doesn't say much about that.

So I guess if you're poor in India you're about the poorest guy on this globe and maybe only envied by northern Koreans - but the number of middle-wealthy quite happy people with a good dental care is growing rapidly.

In Western Germany btw the poor people make up for 13.5 % of us so there you go. Your poors are less then ours.

But - you are officially poor here if you earn below 949 $ (current exchange rate) - in the east you still may have less money and still will not be labeled as 'poor' it's comparable to the US.

Still I'd rather be poor with 900 bucks in Montana then in NY city.

So you see that's not an easy field to do statistics on.

I guess Germany and the US are quite comparable. I calculated once if I was better of in the US but I wouldn't be although I'd earn a lot more money as a Ph.D. in chemistry. But college, health care and stuff would eat it all up.

So for me it doesn't make economic sense to emigrate but if you have a certain income - then there's certainly much more in the equation than money.

All of this is true. My Panamanian spanish teacher tells me that many hispanics come to the US on vacation to purchase durable goods because it is almost a 50% savings for them. I know in Kuwait the Brits and Aussies and Poles even shopped at the US exchanges because the cost of goods were much lower for us, except for ciggarettes I bought them from the British. Wealth is such a hard thing to measure, a person earning three thousand US a year in China may have a higher SOL than a guy earning 12,000 a year here.