Usually when you read a story about future EU members, like Slovenia or the other eastern European countries, you’ll come across the adjectives “poor” or “mostly poor” or “predominantly poor” or just plain “poorer.” Like in this article from the Economist, for example.

“They are still poor,” it says, “but the EU’s future members from central and eastern Europe are becoming givers of aid.” The article also has a nice graph about the future members, entitled “Poor, but on the way.” (As opposed to “Poor, but lost in a Roman wilderness of pain.”¹)

To be fair, the Economist makes an important qualifier: It says the East is very poor “by EU standards.” And that’s true. Very true. GDP per capita in Luxembourg is something like quadruple that of Poland.

But the constant stories about the “rich” EU expanding into the “very poor” East, which is “poor”, and doesn’t have money like the “rich” west, which is “awesomely rich,” and much, much, much, much richer than the “poor” East, which is “predominantly poor” — all that stuff starts to skewer your sense of perception.

The average Slovene makes about 13.260 Euros/year, or roughly $17.223.²

The average Luxembourger, of course, laughs at such an amount. “Ha, ha!” they say. For them, that’s what one spends on two scoops of ice cream in downtown Luxembourg city.³

But taken globally, it’s an enormous sum. In fact, the average Slovene is in the top 11% worldwide. To put it another way: the average Slovene is wealthier than 90% of the world, or about 5.297.736.093 people. That’s a lot of people.

So, all this stuff about “wealthy” and “poor” needs to be taken into perspective. The average Luxembourger is, in fact, wealthier than the average Slovene, but so is the guy who drives a Lamborghini Gallardo compared to the poor guy driving an Audi A4.

If you would like to see where you stand globally, go check out The Global Rich List. Just type in your annual salary and hit go.

————————————————-
1) Doors, the. Track 11, “The End,” 1967.

2) I used government statistics found here, which puts the average monthly earnings in Slovenia at about 270.294 SIT/month. Using the exchange rate 1 Euro=238 SIT, I came to the number you see. To convert to dollars, I used the trusty Bank Of Canada site. But are you actually reading this? Good Lord! What’s the matter with you?

3) No, not really.