Lee Family Menu

This is a fictional story about the Lee family. The Lee family is a rough approximation of the global median family. There are 2.5 adults and 1 child in the Lee family.[1][2] Let's pretend that Elder Lee spends half her time at the Lee house and half her time with her other son, so she's actually a whole person. The Lees live in a 830 square foot house on a 2 acres where they grow half of their own food.[3][4] A few months each year, during the start and end of the crop season, they work 12 hour days (sunrise to sunset) in the fields. The rest of the year they spend a few hours per week in the fields and work odd jobs that generate the bulk of their monetary income.[5] When they harvest more of something than they can eat or store, they sell it at the local street market. They also have a few chickens that provide essential egg protein. The Lees' combined income is $8,750 per year.[6][7][8][9][10]

They don't have a bank account. Whenever they have some extra money they buy a few more bricks and roof panels to finish a room on the house. If something unexpected happens, like too little rain or too much rain, it can be really stressful. They'll keep their house, but they'll need to come up with a lot of money to not go hungry. Someone in the family might have to go to a big city far away for months to look for a job.

The Lee family is a rough approximation of the global median family. That means that half of the people living on the planet, about 4 billion of us, are living with fewer resources than this. Let's take a moment to think about that...

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References

  1. Spreadsheet (Lee Household Size sheet)
    Global average 3.5 people per household     ↩

  2. Demographics of the world
    "People under 18 years of age made up over a quarter of the world population (29.3%)"     ↩

  3. The economic lives of smallholder farmers
    "About two-thirds of the developing world’s 3 billion rural people live in about 475 million smallfarm households, working on land plots smaller than 2 hectares."     ↩

  4. How big is a house? Average house size by country - Used China for the average. ↩

  5. How many hours a day do subsistence farmers work? ↩

  6. Global Economic Inequality
    2013 Global Median Income was $2,010 / year     ↩

  7. What is happening with global inequality?
    Median per capita income $PPP $2,200 / year     ↩

  8. Worldwide, Median Household Income About $10,000
    $2,920 per capita, $9,733 per household     ↩

  9. Nearly half the world lives on less than $5.50 a day: World Bank ↩

  10. Nearly 1 in 2 in the world lives under $5.50 a day ↩

  11. Global inequalities in CO₂ emissions
    3 billion lower-middle income 1.6 tCO2/person/y     ↩

  12. Household carbon dioxide emissions from peasants and herdsmen in northwestern arid-alpine regions, China ↩

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