Forbes magazine has just published its annual list of all the billionaires on the planet, reminding us once again how much easier it is to count the extremely rich than the extremely poor. This year's list includes 587 billionaires — up by 111 from last year. Their total wealth comes to more than $1.9 trillion. Meanwhile, of course, the net worth of the 587 poorest people on earth is, to a certainty, $0. It would be worth sitting down with a calculator on a long rainy afternoon and figuring out how many of the world's poorest people it would take to equal the wealth of these 587 billionaires.

A list like this is packed with trivia — if only trivia didn't seem like such an undersized word when talking about billionaires. On its Web site, Forbes makes it possible to search the list by industry, residence, marital status, etc. But there are so many other ways to analyze a list like this. It would be useful to be able to search by charitable giving, value of art collection, criminal record and something that might be called the privacy quotient — a category that would surely be won by the reclusive Albrecht brothers, who own an enormous chain of German supermarkets. It would be interesting to be able to analyze the list by political giving, political leanings and tax payments. No point analyzing for serendipity, of course, since wealth on this scale implies plenty of that, whatever else it may imply.

The most surprising name on the list is that of J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. The tale of her economic life since the 1997 publication of the first book in the series simply out-Potters Potter. True, she comes in near the end of the list, at $1 billion. But it's a proud day for writers everywhere nonetheless. At least that's the tone in which these billionaires are presented by Forbes, as if they were graduates of a rather striking high school class. Our hopes and dreams go with them, or so the list seems to suggest.