I tweeted yesterday that there are more Guardian readers in the top 1% of the global rich than there are billionaires. This is because net wealth of $798,000 (£528,000) gets you into the top 1% (p99 of this pdf). This means that many people who have enjoyed 20 years of London house price inflation are in the global rich, whereas there are only 1645 billionaires.

If you want a picture of the global 1%, a bien-pensant 50-something in a house in north London might be more accurate than a billionaire hedge fund manager.

My point here, though, wasn't intended to be a cheap snark. This factoid illustrates four things.

1. The world is poorer than we think. Branko Milanovic has estimated that over half the world's population has an income of less than $5.70 a day (£1380pa). Simon's right to say that the world has made great progress away from poverty - but there's still a hell of a way to go. As Jason Isbell sings:

You should know compared
To people on a global scale
Our kind has had it relatively easy

2. People under-rate their privilege. It's the grit in the shoe that gets noticed. James Blunt gave us a nice example of this yesterday when he whined that "Every step of the way, my background has been AGAINST me succeeding in the music business." In a global context, this is of course highly concentrated horse shit; tell it to Malian musicians who are being crushed by Islamists.

This neglect of our own good fortune matters in two senses. First, it generates a sense of entitlement among people (often rich white men) who convince themselves that they are victims. Secondly, it leads to passing the buck; we convince ourselves that the rich and powerful are other people, not us.

3. Inequality is not a neoliberal conspiracy by a tiny minority. Suzanne Moore writes today that "Inequality is not inevitable, it's engineered." (See too some of Adam Curtis's wilder imaginings). This gives elites too much credit. Many of the processes that have driven up London house prices - a global hunt for "safe assets", falling crime, financialization, low interest rates because of secular stagnation and so on - haven't been consciously engineered. Inequality is an emergent process, which has benefited not just plutocrats but also people like Suzanne. As the man said:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

Suzanne's right to say there's nothing inevitable about inequality. We can do something about it. But doing so - especially on a global scale - might mean reducing our own privilege, not others'.

4. Luck matters. I am one of the 1%. This is not I'm hard-working or talented. It's simply because I was lucky enough to have been born in a rich country at a time when my modest abilities have been in demand. Almost all my income and wealth is due to luck. The idea that rich westerners deserve their wealth owes more to a mental disorder than it does to political philosophy.