Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 January 25

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January 25

Millionth richest person

How much money (including real estate and clothes) does the millionth richest person in the world have today? Would he (or she) have had more or less money in the past? And is that person's holdings expected to grow in the future? And if that question is unanswerable (which I'm 97% sure it is), when were there a million millionaires?—azuki (talk · contribs · email) 12:58, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Some information at How many millionaires? Depends who’s counting. Alansplodge (talk) 13:01, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

I have no idea if this is reliable, but I thought it could be interesting to discuss it, even if only to confirm it is not reliable: http://www.globalrichlist.com/ --Lgriot (talk)

Independent of who this 10milth wealthiest person is, there is almost certainly some point in the past in which the person with that rank had less wealth than the current title holder. See Economic inequality, Income distribution, distribution of wealth, and Gini coefficient. Generally, the ultra-wealthy are wealthier now, relative to the common worker, than they were in the the early 20th century. While it gets a little more confusing and harder to call for the top 10 richest, once you go down to the millionth rank, you're talking most likely about a CEO or similar, and those tend to be paid better now and are more wealthier than they were a few decades ago in the USA [1]. This question would probably be easier to answer with good sources for a specific country. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:49, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Probably somewhere around $5-6 million, if the numbers from our HNWI, UHNWI and Millionaire articles are realistic. 93.142.116.5 (talk) 00:54, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Eat me, building off SemanticMantis' point, you have to consider inflation, as well as a millionaire in which currency. During the last period of the Zimbabwe dollar, everyone was a millionaire (I remember seeing something noting that a couple of eggs would cost $1,000,000,000), while many millionaires in today's US dollars would not be millionaires 50 years ago if they'd had the same wealth, simply due to inflation in the US dollar. Nyttend (talk) 12:48, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

American car auctions

There are a number of television programmes nowadays to do with buying and selling cars. I have noticed in these that at American car auctions there appear to be auction house employees who point at the bidders and shout at the auctioneer. What are these called, and why are they thought to be necessary? DuncanHill (talk) 22:31, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Auction assistants. --Jayron32 05:58, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, the linked description is what would be called a porter here, but doesn't include the pointing at bidders and shouting at the auctioneer. DuncanHill (talk) 15:45, 26 January 2018 (UTC)