By Joyce Hooi

Last month, if Singapore had been a person, it would have stood above the unwashed tableau of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), watching from its penthouse and laughing into its cognac.

But it has spent the year being a little down in the mouth, preoccupied with property prices, taxi fares and faulty trains.

This gloom is hard to explain in the grander scheme of things.

When OWS's gross simplification of the one per cent trampling on the 99 per cent is contemplated, Singapore is practically part of the world's one per cent.

This is a country where, every single day, 25 people bought either a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW for the first 11 months of the year.

In the same period, every four days, someone drove away from the Ferrari showroom with a big smile on his face. (One assumes that, each time, it's a different person.)

When it comes down to it, Singapore can be almost as Wall Street as Wall Street.

Last year, 8.5 per cent of New York City's workforce was on the payroll of the finance and insurance industries.

Singapore had about 6.4 per cent of its resident population on it, while Hong Kong had 6 per cent.

If a demonstrator with anti-banking invective to expend were to imagine the two as corporate entities - which is not hard - he would therefore be more inclined to picket Singapore than Hong Kong.

"One per cent" might be a dirty term these days, but would-be picketers here have to be careful about calling others names that might apply to themselves.

On a per-adult basis, Singapore has the sixth highest net wealth in the world: a mean value of US$284,692, according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2011.

"Net wealth" here is defined by a person's financial and real estate assets minus debt.

The mean value, however, gets short shrift from experts, since it ignores wealth distribution.

"(It is the) mean without information on inequality. A very high personal net wealth with high inequality is likely to imply a skewed prosperity within the country . . . Actually, it is not something we would like to boast about," says Ho Weng Kong, senior lecturer at SIM University.

The median net wealth figure then - which is less vulnerable to being yanked up or down by the obscenely rich or the devastatingly poor - sees Singapore ranked eighth out of 160 countries, at US$101,033.

On this score, the only countries that outrank it are Australia, Japan, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.

Last year, the odds of being born in any one of these countries, including Singapore, was 2 per cent - not quite the fabled one per cent, but close enough.

This is better than the best odds in the Singapore Toto (one in 321), but to properly appreciate the jackpot-like nature of being born in any of these eight countries, the rest of the world needs to be surveyed.

At the best end of the ovarian lottery, more than half the adults in Singapore belong to the wealthiest 8.8 per cent of adults globally.

And while the one per cent of the United States might be under the onslaught of scrutiny there, the global one per cent club is thriving in Singapore; two out of every 25 adults here can claim membership.

On the losing end of the ovarian lottery, however, only 0.3 per cent of the adults here have less than US$1,000 in net assets.

Perhaps it is not so much that Singapore is fabulously wealthy (which it is), but that the rest of the world is poor (very much so).

Suppose you represent Singapore's population with 100 people riding on a bus.

If that bus were to stop at the world's poorest neighbourhood to let residents get off, less than one person would alight.

This shantytown, however, is where more than one-fifth of the world's adults have to live.

This says as much about the rest of the world as it does Singapore.

To be better off than half the adults on this planet, the threshold is heartbreakingly low. All it takes is US$4,200 in net assets.