Out of the 187 countries represented by spheres, highlighted countries from bottom left to top right include: Pakistan is the pink sphere, Nigeria black, India indigo, Indonesia dark red, China mint green, Brazil blue, Mexico brown, Poland purple, UK yellow, Germany green, and USA red-white-and-blue red.

It’s hard for Westerners to grasp how many people there are in the rest of the world, which is why we often treat frivolously data points that ought to be thought-provoking, such as the Gallup Poll’s finding that 640,000,000 adults want to immigrate. To increase awareness, here’s a graph I’ve created based on the International Monetary Fund estimates for 2015. It shows that almost seven billion people live in countries with lower per capita GDPs than America’s $56,000 (red sphere), most of them much lower.

On the vertical axis is GDP per capita (PPP), while on the horizontal axis is the cumulative world population at that GDP level or lower.

Each country’s population is proportional to the area of its disk.

The IMF doesn’t break out data for Puerto Rico, but it would fall on this graph between Mexico and Germany. One estimate of its per capita GDP is $29,529, while another is $34,938 (due to massive subsidies since the 1950s intended to persuade Puerto Ricans to stay home). In either case, over six billion people live in countries with lower per capita GDP’s than Puerto Rico. Yet, somewhere around 5/8ths to 2/3rds of all Puerto Ricans now live in the Fifty States.

And they’re still coming.

Poland, with a slightly lower GDP than Puerto Rico, represents a non-impoverished country that has been flooding wealthy London with jobseekers who underbid from Brits from the North. With Poland at least there’s some hope that the immigrants might actually return home someday. In contrast, nobody (except Puerto Ricans) seems to think Puerto Ricans will ever go home.

But the take-away lesson is that six billion people live in countries poorer than Poland and Puerto Rico.

By the way, Qatar, host of the 2022 World Cup, is literally off the chart at $144k per capita GDP, by far the highest in the world in the IMF tables. If helping out refugee Arabs is the world’s highest priority, why hasn’t the 2022 World Cup in Qatar been moved (to, say, 2010 host South Africa) and the $200 billion Qatar had budgeted to throw itself a party been freed up to help Qatar’s fellow Arabs and Muslims?

Under the fold is the data for this graph (downloaded from the IMF):