I’ve seen estimates on the distribution of wealth in the US, and one of the statistics was 1/3 of the national wealth is held by 1% of the population. That’s a pretty astounding statistic, and what’s even more amazing is that it could, in reality, be worse.
Perhaps someone else out here has the latest statistics of wealth distribution in the US, and if so, I hope they post it. But I’m also curious as to how the US compares to other countries of the world. For example, what would be the breakdown for the UK? Cuba? Canada, or China?
Is the US, with its capitalistic, truly the worst country with so much wealth being held by so few people, or are other countries just as bad if not worse?
The disparity isn’t quite as extreme in Canada, but the gap has been growing here as well. Here is a summary which includes a chart comparing the Gini coefficient for 17 western countries. The US is indeed the worst of the bunch.
Income is often used as a proxy for wealth. (I think wealth statistics are harder to come by, in part due to ambiguities in the ownership and evaluation of land and capital, especially, intangible forms of capital.) Here is a graphic which depicts income inequality levels for different countries. “Gini” is a robust and general measure of statistical dispersion named after its inventor, Corrado Gini, but today is generally used to denote the Gini measure of income inequality.
I would be careful about using adjectives like “bad” or “worse” to describe high income inequality. Many right-wingers on this board relate inequality to goodness of economic methods, though I’m unclear whether they treat the goodness as a cause or effect of the inequality.
You can Google to find graphs of Gini over time. These graphs will show that U.S.A. Gini has risen steadily since the Reagan Administration. I was startled in the above pictorial to note that the U.S.A. now has higher Gini than Thailand, a country once often cited as an example of income inequality.
This is the important thing to keep in mind. Income distribution is certainly good information, but it’s not what I’m looking for.
For example, in the UK, with all the land that the royal family has in its portfolio of wealth has to be huge. That’s a percentage of national wealth that is in the hands of a very few.
Similarly in the US, the truly rich… the UBER rich, own the vast majority of capital in this country… from land, to stock, to other assets. If it’s true that one third of the country’s wealth is taken by 1% of the population, to have 99% fighting over the other 2/3s can certainly cause great disparity among the haves and have nots, even within this group of 67%.
> For example, in the UK, with all the land that the royal family has in its portfolio
> of wealth has to be huge. That’s a percentage of national wealth that is in the
> hands of a very few.
The idea that some Americans have that there is a lot of wealth (or income) inequality because of the British royal family (or even because of aristocracy) is mistaken. The wealth and income of the royal family isn’t very much compared to any member of the Forbes 400 in the U.S. The wealth and income of the aristocracy isn’t much at all, and many of them have to open their homes to tourists or they would lose them to taxes. The U.K. has less wealth and income disparity than the U.S.:
In fact, the notion that Americans have of the importance of the royal family or the aristocracy to British society in mistaken. From the three years I spent living in the U.K., I don’t think that they are really a major element in British society at all. Most Brits consider them just a cute addition to their culture which sometimes brings in tourist money.
