The dataset
Everything the machine computes with, published as it ships: 145 country income curves from the World Bank, merged into one population-weighted world distribution, plus the conversion factors that put a salary on it. Free to use with attribution.
Files
| Global income distribution (CSV) | 1001 rows · percentile, daily income | 10 KB |
|---|---|---|
| Country percentile curves (CSV) | 145 rows × 107 columns | 77 KB |
| Full bundle (JSON) | countries, global quantiles, trend, metadata | 119 KB |
What's in it
- Global distribution: 1,001 quantiles of daily income per person, 2021 PPP dollars — the line the machine walks you across. Median $7.73 a day.
- Country curves: 100 percentiles per country (daily income per person, 2021 PPP), the survey year, population, currency, the 2021 consumption-PPP factor (PA.NUS.PRVT.PP) and the CPI growth factor since 2021 used to express today's money in 2021 prices.
- Coverage: 145 countries, 7.9 billion of 8.2 billion people. Countries without a complete PIP distribution or a published consumption-PPP factor are absent rather than estimated.
- Vintage: snapshot fetched September 2026; prices through 2024.
How it was made
Country percentiles come straight from the World Bank's Poverty and Inequality Platform (latest complete survey per country, national level preferred). The global distribution is the population-weighted merge of those curves. Every choice — and what the machine refuses to claim — is on the methodology page; the pipeline is scripts/fetch-data.mjs and scripts/lib.mjs in the site's source.
License & citation
The underlying data is the World Bank's (CC BY 4.0); this derived bundle is released under the same license. Please cite both:
World Bank, Poverty and Inequality Platform (2021 PPP); The Perspective Machine dataset, 2026-09-23 (theperspectivemachine.com/data).