Suspicious of this assertion about wealth

[dangermom]

Today I started reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bright-Sided: how Positive Thinking is Undermining America. It’s an interesting premise; we’ll see how it goes (so far I approve of her evisceration of The Secret). In the introduction she makes an assertion that I also saw mentioned in a different book about 6 months ago, but the book was by John Taylor Gatto who is an admirable person but also a bit of a nutball, so I sort of went :dubious: and read on. Ehrenreich is more reputable, but I’m still going :dubious:. Here’s the quotation:

Worse, some of the measures by which we do lead the world should inspire embarrassment rather than pride: We have the highest percentage of our population incarcerated, and the greatest level of inequality in wealth and income. We are plagued by gun violence and racked by personal debt.

The assertion about “wealth and income” is not footnoted; no source is given. I am wondering where this comes from and how it is supposed to have been measured. Sure, we have plenty of inequality in income, but more than India? Mexico? Certain African nations plagued by corruption and starvation? I find myself skeptical.

And how is this supposed to be measured? Every country is going to have a certain number of people whose income is zero. If this assertion came from some sort of survey, were gov’t benefits included? Does it just boil down to some formulation of “how many wealthy people are in each country?”

Does anyone know where this came from? Should I email Ehrenreich with my question? Is this one of those horribly wrong memes that float around like “Domestic violence always increases on Super Bowl Sunday” (no it doesn’t) or “150,000 women die each year of anorexia” (that’s the approximate # of people who suffer from it in the US, which is quite bad enough)?

[BetsQ]

Here is a list of countries ranked by income inequality. Personally, I like the Gini Coefficient as a measure of inequality, as it’s pretty easy to understand. Here’s the description from Wikipedia:

The Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1, where 0 corresponds with perfect equality (where everyone has the same income) and 1 corresponds with perfect inequality (where one person has all the income, and everyone else has zero income).

On that list, the U.S. is not the country with the most unequal income distribution, but it looks like it’s the most unequal among industrialized nations. I am not certain what is counted as income in these measures, though.

[Quercus]

It’s more or less accurate if you qualify it to ‘among developed countries’. Of course, you can choose your own way to measure it, but compared to, say, EU countries, Japan and Russia, the U.S. generally tops out. List of countries by income equality - Wikipedia

The U.S. has nothing close to the income inequality in Latin America and most of Africa, of course. But we’re working on it; don’t give up hope yet.