[quote=AN][quote=spdrun]Japan had a higher percentage of comparatively well-off people than China or India does today. Japan was a much wealthier country on average by the 80s than China or India are today.
(Actually, parts of NJ are heavily Indian — around Edison. But fortunately, that hasn’t helped prices recover very well so far.)[/quote]
We don’t care about average. We care about total number of rich people. Japanese total population is 127M today. 30-40 years ago, their population is much smaller. So, combining China and India, you have almost 3B people. If you’re counting just 0.1%, that’s 30M people. So there are more people in the top 0.5% of China & India than all of Japan. Also, you’re more likely to see 0.1% of the population in China & India leaving for greener pasture than 25% of Japanese leaving Japan. My bet is, 0.1% of Chinese and Indian are A LOT richer than the top 25% of Japanese.[/quote]
I am from India and trust me there are lots of really wealthy folks in India. I would say 0.1% of Indians are really wealthy, with net worth at least 10M+, that would be around 1.2M people. After that there would be another 5-7% (60-84M) of the population, urban upper middle class which probably is worth somewhere between 400K – 2M & a lot of their wealth is tied to owning real estate in places in Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore etc. Also these upper middle class folks are willing to spend on their kids education and even help them with their home purchases etc. I have members of extended family in India who downgraded to a smaller house in Mumbai so that they could send their son to a top grad school in US. All in all India would probably have close 80M people who are quite wealthy of which 3-4M would be very wealthy even by global standards. Yes, that’s a small % of India’s overall population but that’s still a lot of wealthy people.
