In the United States, our Thanksgiving holiday is fast approaching. On this day, we give thanks for the good things in our lives.

For this post, I wanted to quantify how thankful we should be. Ideally, I’d quantify something truly meaningful, like happiness. Unfortunately, most countries are not like Bhutan, which measures the gross national happiness and incorporates those data into its five-year development plans.

Instead, I’ll focus on something that is more concrete and regularly measured around the world: income. By examining income distributions, I’ll show that you have much to be thankful for, and so does most of the world.

Anatomy of the income distribution graphs

To really understand incomes, we must understand the distribution of incomes for whole populations. By assessing entire distributions, we can identify the most common incomes, probabilities for ranges of incomes, income inequality, and how all of these change over time and by location.

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