Where to find the ridiculously rich in Latin America

Some outfit called Wealth-X claims to have come up with a guess of how many ridiculously rich people there are in each country in the world. (Ridiculously rich=net worth of more than USD$30 million) They have a special page on Latin America. The key chart is here:

There’s a little problem — Latin American countries range dramatically in population, so raw numbers show little. I did the math, using CIA factbook population figures, to see how these numbers look when turned into per-capita rates. And you see, Brazil isn’t so special after all.

The mean rate turns out to be 2.46 per 100,000, and all but one of the countries stays within one standard deviation from that mean. But one country is 2.6 standard deviations above the mean. And then people wonder why that country has had six months of constant social unrest as regular people demand a bigger piece of the pie.

(Wealth-X report via Climateer)

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this post was (perhaps subconsciously) inspired by this one, which is also interesting for those of us who like charts. Thanks Otto.

8 thoughts on “Where to find the ridiculously rich in Latin America”

  1. Carol

    Excellent that you did not take the chart at face value but applied additional information and came up with a dramatically different chart.

    1. sapitosetty Post author

      Thank you Cause. Interesting. Argentina is a pretty typical Latin American country. I’d be surprised if any countries in South America were substantially different. Venezuela is different on paper, because rich people there have moved all their money abroad to avoid possible expropriation. But the rest are all probably pretty similar. Chile may be more unequal.

  3. ottorock

    Yeah, but your chart is better. Love than Chilean anomaly.

    Dude, my question would be whether Chilean megarich tend to be discreet about their wealth or whether they strut around rubbing it into people’s faces. Got a thought?

  4. sapitosetty Post author

    I’d say it’s pretty British — people rarely zoom down the street in bright yellow Bentleys, throw multi-million-dollar birthday parties or engage in other Miami/Houston/Moscow/Bogota-type douchebaggery. But there are exclusive polo clubs, plenty of $10 million homes, and entire districts of both the capital and the regions where regular Chileans fear to tread — cops & private security forces give them trouble if they are seen walking there without a good reason. I don’t think most of the rich here are aggressively ostentatious. But they do take their weekends at The Cliffs ($3000 per couple), drive little Audi roadsters to work, and celebrate birthdays with $1,000 balloon rides. In other words, I don’t think most rich folks aggressively rub their wealth in others’ faces, but they don’t hide it, either.

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