This document records, for every figure on the site, what was included, what was excluded, where averages mask distribution, and which numbers we judged not honest enough to publish.
We use 8.2 billion — the UN World Population Prospects 2024 mid-year estimate. Source: WPP 2024 Summary of Results (PDF).
This is rounded to the nearest 100 million. Mid-2024 estimate is 8.16B; mid-2025 projection is ~8.23B. We chose 8.2B as the working divisor and note the rounding introduces <1% error in any per-capita figure.
- Numerator:
2,950 kcal / person / day— the global average dietary energy supply, per FAOSTAT food balance sheets (2021 latest revision, via Our World in Data). This number is the dietary energy available for human consumption after accounting for animal feed, seed, industrial use, and post-harvest loss. - Denominator (need):
2,100 kcal / person / day— the conventional FAO/WHO/UNU reference for an average adult (Human Energy Requirements, 2001). Actual requirements vary by age, sex, body mass, and activity. We use it because it is the most commonly cited reference floor in food-security literature. - What this ratio misses: calories aren't nutrition. A population can be calorically adequate and micronutrient-deficient. The site does not address protein, vitamin, or mineral sufficiency.
- Numerator:
43,000 km³ / yearof renewable freshwater, per FAO AQUASTAT. - Denominator (need):
50 L / person / day— the WHO "intermediate access" level for drinking, cooking, and basic hygiene (WHO 2003 guideline). Survival minimum is 7.5 L/day; full health protection is ~100 L/day. - What this ratio misses: the biggest limitation on this page. Renewable freshwater is geographically locked. The Amazon basin discharges more water than the Sahara, Sahel, and Arabian Peninsula combined. Per-capita global averages tell you the global total is abundant; they do not tell you the water is where the people are. Transport, desalination, and storage are real costs that the ratio ignores. The "287×" figure is honest about aggregate supply and dishonest if read as "local supply."
- Numerator:
30,856 TWh / year— IEA Electricity 2024 reported 2023 generation of 29,471 TWh; the IEA's Global Energy Review 2025 reports 2024 generation grew by ~1,200 TWh (4%). We use the sum as a 2024 estimate. If the IEA's final 2024 figure when published differs by more than 1%, the number on the page should be updated. - Denominator (need): two thresholds, because the IEA's "Tier 1" definition (100 kWh/person/year) is widely considered too low to enable economic development. The Modern Energy Minimum (1,000 kWh/person/year) includes productive uses such as small machines, refrigeration, and commercial lighting.
- What this ratio misses: electricity is not all energy. The world used ~635 EJ of primary energy in 2024; only a fraction reaches end users as electricity. The site focuses on electricity because the access framework exists there and because electrification of heat and transport is the forward trajectory.
- Numerator:
$110.06 trillion— IMF World Economic Outlook, April 2026 vintage. Nominal, current prices. PPP-adjusted world GDP is roughly $185T; we use nominal because the comparison to the World Bank poverty line is also in current USD. - Denominator (need):
$3.00 / day × 365 = $1,095 / year— the World Bank's updated International Poverty Line (June 2025 update), which replaced the prior $2.15/day (2017 PPP) line. - What this ratio misses: GDP is not income. It includes capital consumption, government spending, and net exports. A claim that "GDP per capita is 12× the poverty line" is not a claim that everyone's income is 12× the line — only that the world's output, if it flowed directly to households, would average that much per person.
- Numerator missing on purpose. There is no clean global number for "housing units built per year." We considered using rooms-per-person from UN Demographic Yearbooks and rejected it as too noisy.
- Distribution evidence (instead): 318M homeless and 2.8B in inadequate housing globally, per UN-Habitat and UN DESA. In wealthy countries, vacant units consistently exceed homeless counts by an order of magnitude or more. Sources cited inline on the page.
Universal $3/day floor for every human alive:
$3.00 × 8,200,000,000 people × 365 days = $8,979,000,000,000
≈ $8.98 trillion / year
≈ 8.2% of world GDP ($110.06T)
Closing the poverty gap (paying only the difference between current income and $3/day, for the 847M people below the line) costs much less, because most poor people are not at zero income. The World Bank's poverty-gap statistic indicates the average shortfall is roughly $1/day per affected person, putting the closure cost well under $1 trillion / year — comparable to a single year's increase in global military spending.
We did not put the gap number on the page because we could not find a single 2024-vintage published gap figure we trust enough. If we find one, we will add it with citation.
- "What if we abolished money." This is a political and philosophical question, not an arithmetic one. The page restricts itself to arithmetic.
- GDP critiques. GDP is a flawed measure — it counts oil spills and divorce lawyers as growth. But it is the measure the IMF publishes. Using it does not endorse it.
- Wealth confiscation. The site notes that $213.8T is held by 58M people to make a factual point about distribution. It does not claim that wealth should be — or could be — directly redistributed, which is a separate question with separate technical answers.
- National-level data. Per-country breakdowns are important but out of scope for v1. They exist in every cited source if you want to drill in.
If a number on the site disagrees with this document, or either disagrees with its cited source, the source wins. Open an issue or PR on the GitHub repo and the page will be corrected.