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Explore Wealth and Income Inequality in the World Wealth and Income Database
- dpflan 9y agoThis was shared by the New York Times regarding the revelations of the "Paradise Papers." For example, on this site you can explore global inequality - consider how recently the elite have had wealth growth rates nearly double that of the total wealth growth rate.
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y agoWhat does 'Income Equality' look like?
- davidcbc 9y agoI don't think most people are looking for actual income equality, just lower income inequality.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoBingo! But it seems a lot of people are die-hard anti-everything that smells even vaguely of socialism, no doubt due to decades of US political brainwashing.
- danharaj 9y agoAbolition of class. Democratic control over the means of production.
- shaunxcode 9y agoExactly - and speaking of class here is further speculation on semantics of an equitable world system: as late as possible dynamic binding(real time adaptation for all actors), lexical scope (affinity groups), functions that provide utility for the masses rather than fragile hierarchies of turgid dominance(object oriented is the perfect description of our current economic and political structures. Beside how much cooler and arrogant does it sound to describe your political leaning as “functional”).
- thriftwy 9y agoThese days I don't see much production around. It's probably somewhere in the industrial zones on the outskirts of cities, but it's not something many people do. As a software developer I produce code. How would you exert democratic control over means of such production? Will it involve lots of tin foil?
- hnaccount357 9y agoHistorically speaking you accept the governments unilateral offer and terms to produce code or men with guns come and place you in a camp.
- thriftwy 9y agoFrankly speaking, I would prefer a fair amout of income inequality to that.
- danharaj 9y ago> As a software developer I produce code. How would you exert democratic control over means of such production? Open source software is already a model that approximates such democratic production. If us developers didn't have to make a wage to survive, how would we develop software?
- ptaipale 9y agoClass is much more than income (or wealth), and enforcing income equality won't get rid of classes.
- danharaj 9y agoNo, but income equality with a class system would cause the system to destabilize. The long-term behavior of such a system would have to resolve the contradictions of capitalism.
- ericd 9y agoCollective ownership of all MacBook Pros? Or of my efforts with the one I use? I suppose I wouldn't get to choose the terms with which I distribute my software, at the very least?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- alexasmyths 9y ago"Abolition of class. Democratic control over the means of production" Oh wow, these people still exist. We tried that in the last century and it ended up being the most horrific, mass-murdering, totalitarian, controlling era in all of history. About half of my schoolmates growing up in Canada came from places like Cambodia, Vietnam, Ukraine, Russia, Czech, China, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Estonia, Hungary ... see the common thread there? :)
- danharaj 9y ago> Cambodia > Vietnam Buddy. I've got some news for you.
- alexasmyths 9y agoThe Communists were the root problem in that area, obviously they came about due to other forms of ostensible dysfunction, but they were the worst, possibly the worst ever ... and really the core of the problem. And FYI Cambodians were not fleeing bombs dropped near their homes by Americans, they were fleeing Communists who murdered 3 of 8 million, making it one of the worst genocides in history, easily comparable (on the same scale as) the '6 million' who died at the hands of the Nazis. Everyone from there hates the Communists, much like almost everyone fleeing Cuba hates Fidel, it seems their only supporters are those who are not from there , and who have a very academic view of it all.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoThat sounds very much like "we the people have voted to take your factory". That is, it sounds like the "democratic" in "democratic people's republic". Fortunately, we have this Constitution that places limits on the amount of democracy we have, partly to keep it from running amuck in exactly that way...
- conanbatt 9y agoDemocratic control? You mean that 51% can bar the other 49% from having access to the means of production?
- dalbasal 9y agoIn the way the term is used here, income equality is (the inverse of) income inequality. More equal, less equal... it's a measure, not a state. This is like asking what does wealth look like.
- smokeyj 9y agoIf you have two popsicles, and I have one - we could achieve popsicle equality by throwing one of yours away. We have overall less popsicles but greater equality.
- davidcbc 9y agoIf you have billions of popsicles and other people have none you could easily give out millions of popsicles to help the less fortunate and still have vastly more popsicles than you could ever need.
- smokeyj 9y agoBut the relevant metric here is how many people have nothing. If everyone had nothing you solved the inequality but you're still poor. Inequality is just a bad metric. I'd rather be a poor in America than equal in Venezuela.
- gadders 9y agoSocialism :-(
- token_throwaway 9y agoPigs flying
- jpwagner 9y agoMilton Friedman's three categories for human equality: equality before God, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome - the second is compatible with liberty, and the third is socialism.
- rayiner 9y agoI’m not sure the second is compatible with liberty either, unless you water it down to mean nothing. Do you stop parents from passing on good genes, education, values, and money? If not you’ve got a very impoverished version of equality of opportunity. If so you’re impinging on some very fundamental freedoms.
- ssambros 9y agoIt's equality of opportunity, not equality of ability.
- conanbatt 9y agoEquality of opportunity is one of the hardest things to define. Milton talks about the opportunity to pursue your talents. But your talent could be really expensive, so what does that actually mean? The son of a wealthy man might have the funds to become a rocket engineer, wasn't that an unequal opportunity to develop talents? And is there a point to prevent that rocket engineer from existing?
- dalbasal 9y agoIf we want to get into zinger rhetoric I might reply that the 1st is theocracy and the 2nd is a lie, or also socialism. If not, we might say consider all 3 (excluding the one that doesn't exist) relative. We never have absolute equality of opportunity or outcome, but we can have more or less equality.
- jpwagner 9y agozinger point taken, but consider: 1 - compared to a rock, all humans are equal (note: this is not a political statement and has no relationship to theocracy) 2 - if a unit of food sits on the ground between two people, they are free to behave however they want, either can choose to pick up the food or not - this is liberty 3 - given that a unit of food when found will be split evenly (by some process out of an individual's control) their behavior no longer matters - this is not liberty
- hnaccount357 9y agoRoughly ten thousand dollars a year per person total spend including all government intervention as well as cash compensation. That is assuming everyone still is motivated to create as much under the new system. For the downvoters, current global population is 7.6 billion[0], global GDP(GWP) is 78.28 trillion USD[1]. 78.28 trillion / 7.6 billion = ten thousand three hundred USD. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
- rayiner 9y agoThe opposite of income inequality isn’t income equality. It’s less inequality and more integration. My wife grew up in small town Iowa. There were rich people (doctors and some farmers) and poor people, but everyone’s kids went to the same school (there was only one), went to the same cornfield parties (apparently a real thing), etc. The millionaire farmers still worked for a living—they weren’t making passive income.
- username223 9y agotl;dr: The opposite of New York. I grew up in a town with a high per capita income, but fairly low inequality. There were a few tiny religious and Montessori schools, but pretty much everyone's kids went to the public schools. Home prices probably varied by a factor of 10 or 20; there were both crappy old duplexes and McMansions, but no genuine slums or palaces with car elevators. No one commuted by helicopter. The richest and poorest had shared interests.
- ameister14 9y agoThat's still income inequality, though, when you boil it down to the numbers as we are here. I completely agree that it is what is desirable, and would like people to talk more about wealth inequality rather than income inequality, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoI think this comic illustrates your point. Equality vs Equity. https://scontent.flas1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/23331456_1749255225371234_5299669832795705179_o.jpg?oh=42b021eabfd4ca116996792d5ed3517b&oe=5A994485 https://scontent.flas1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/23331456_17...
- Idontknowmyuser 9y ago"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
- thrillgore 9y agoShared suffering, aka socialism.
- ryandrake 9y agoThe way I see it is income inequality is just the derivative of wealth inequality. Opportunity inequality is the derivative of income inequality. Opportunity equality is the idea of a level playing field. When people complain about income inequality, they're really complaining about opportunity inequality, which I believe drives the bulk of income inequality. All that people are asking for is real opportunity equality. My opportunity to succeed (which drives my potential income, which drives my potential wealth) is not equal to that of a guy whose parents are billionaires, went to private school and an Ivy League college, and has a contact list full of CEOs and high up politicians. My opportunity to succeed is also not equal to that of a guy whose parents are divorced and poor, lives in a gang-ridden neighborhood, and is stuck in the school-to-prison pipeline. The playing field is not level.
- moduspol 9y agoThe government can't give you two married parents that love you in a stable household, the best education money can buy, or social connections with powerful people. It can minimize the value of those things for the people that have them... at least within its borders. I'm not convinced that's in anyone's best interests, though.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> The government can't give you two married parents that love you in a stable household, the best education money can buy, or social connections with powerful people. It can do the second, and it can create opportunities for the third. And it can help (or hinder) the first. (As a purely hypothetical illustration of that, it could implement a systematically racially biased criminal justice system and engage in a pattern of racially-suitable violence against a specific segment of the adult population, decreasing the number of two-parent present families in that segment.)
- moduspol 9y agoHow do we get everyone through Ivy League without lowering the bar? How do you propose the government manage social connections to powerful people? You're right about it affecting the first, though. Also as a purely hypothetical illustration, it might create a multiple generation-spanning dependency on social programs, make single parent households more economically feasible and socially acceptable as a lifestyle, and foster class warfare that downplays the importance of one's own choices by blaming only others for one's own outcomes.
- phaemon 9y agoWell, no-one answered your question directly, so here: https://ibb.co/dVDSDG https://ibb.co/dVDSDG That is cumalative wealth up to 100%. The blue line is if everyone is equal (poorest 20% have 20% of the wealth). The red line is linear increase where the richest 20% have 5 times the wealth of the poorest 20%. The yellow line is the actual wealth. These figures are just for the USA; the world one looks too much like a cliff.
- wjnc 9y agoFor those not into (macro-)economics but willing to dabble some more, a few more sources included at the bottom. Enough to last you a scientific lifetime. If your neural net gives meaningful predictions of how institutions, inequality and other measures predict or explain growth or well-being, contact your local Peter H. Lindert, Geoff Williamson or Daron Acemoglu. Know any (worldwide, historic) datasets on institutional arrangements: please comment! There are a lot of open questions in economic history and many, many more worldwide datasets taking the long view available. Used to be more theory and (econo)metrics than data in growth economics, finally it is starting to come around. Thank the scientists taking the time to create those datasets. Not the easiest route, nor the quickest to tenure so it takes those special ones to take it up. [1] http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/ http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/ - Income History Group at UC Davis [2] http://www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/ http://www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/ - Penn World Table currently at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen [3] https://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators https://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-in... - World Development Indicators at The World Bank [4] http://www.macrohistory.net/data/ http://www.macrohistory.net/data/ - Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database
- fragsworth 9y agoWealth inequality changed drastically between 1900 and now. According to the graph, in 1901, the U.K.'s top 1% controlled 73.8% of the nation's wealth. Today it's about 20%. I wonder what factors caused that change. Wars and emigration maybe have something to do with it?
- codemac 9y agoAre we looking at the same graph? The same tool is showing me they were ~20% in 1920, and doesn't have data for earlier.
- qntty 9y agoYou're looking at income, not wealth
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoI know that during and after WW2, USA enacted significant anti-trust legislation that broke up and prevented the formation of monopolies, while at the same time allowing for the widespread adoption of worker unions. Taxes were also higher at this time. Did similar legislation occur in the UK during that time period?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- apsophus 9y agoMany things, from the Liberal government's new taxes on landed wealth in the 1910s, to the advent of democratic socialism and universal healthcare after the Labour party's victory in the 1945 election, to the 'Long Boom' of economic growth that the whole capitalist world experienced from the end of WW2 up to the 1970s. Data like these are interesting, but you still need the deep historical context to make sense of what it all means. Of course, for the overall big picture, you couldn't do better than Thomas Piketty's _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_.
- pjc50 9y agoThe biggest factor is probably inheritance tax and the slow fade of the aristocracy. There may also be a "hidden wealth" effect as people move it offshore; is someone domiciled in the Cayman Islands who lives in the UK for <6mo a year part of the "UK" graph?
- dalbasal 9y agoThe interplay between wealth and income is a hard one to navigate, but I think important. Part of the economic story of the last generation (IMO) is embedded in this interplay. Financialization is largely the process of turning future income into current assets. EG, I buy a house, get a house and a mortgage. My wealth is net 0. One house owned. One house-value owed. Part of my future income is now someone else's current asset. They also net to 0 change (mirroring my balance sheet). Yet obviously, something somewhere has changed. Lending and creating money are interlinked, as is inflation. Monetarists tend towards macroeconomic thinking, and default to regarding of inflation as a single thing. In reality, inflation is microeconomic. More real estate lending, higher real estate prices. Also, "inflation" as an actual phenomenon is not simply devaluation. It is all price and market size increases, including increases in "quality and quantity". More real estate lending, more/bigger houses. Another striking example is american universities. More student loans, more expensive tuition, fancier uni experiences, more students. All that is "inflation" in the "consequences of money supply^" sense. Another aspect that I would be interested in seeing approached is "inflation by income level." I suspect that this is increasingly important, especially because of housing cost fluctuations and trends. If 40% of your income is spent on housing, a 25% increase in house prices represents 10% inflation assuming all other prices remain constant. Similar calculation for college and such. Your inflation could be 5% pa, while the average inflation is 0%. This is happening now where I live. People's spending habits are very dependant by social-wealth class, so I think it would be worth trying to generate class specific inflation rates. I expect income inequality growth would look faster this way. ^I'm alluding to Firedman's "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" though I've defined inflation differently to the macroeconomic/monetarist standard which explicitly excluded increases in "quality and quantity." I think it still holds, as long as you swap "always" with "often" which might even be necessary for Milton's.
- dnautics 9y agoWell I think both of you are right. Inflation starts as a monetary phenomenon but it's net effects are not always monetary. Inflation is a policy choice, not a 'feature of the universe'.
- 9y ago
- nashashmi 9y agoOk. So I looked into it and I had my "OHHH!!" moment. It seems income/wealth inequality got magnified because of the number of opportunities went exponentially higher. Those who were able, took advantage of those opportunities if they had education, business acumen, surplus income, liquid wealth, or were fortunate enough to have ownership in an industry that was not valued very highly before and became very valuable later. Everybody else got left behind. The numbers everyone seems to be talking about day in and day out is the top 1%. What we should really be looking at is the bottom 50%. How did the bottom 50% end up from owning 20% of the wealth in 1980 and going to 5% of the wealth today? They never had anything (like a door or opportunity or a donation box) that could collect some of that wealth flowing from A to B. And that has stifled opportunities for the middle class of the population.
- ctdonath 9y agoIf you want less of something, tax it. If you want more of something, subsidize it. Wealth has been increasingly taxed, poverty increasingly subsidized. For the bottom 50%, this matters.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoAre you suggesting that we should tax the poor? Wouldn't that just make it more difficult for them to pay off debts and collect the capital required to escape poverty?
- creaghpatr 9y agoNo he's pointing out that we 'anti-tax' the poor currently via entitlements and maybe we shouldn't as much because it allows them a sustainable way to not escape poverty.
- euyyn 9y agoFollowing that argument, if we taxed them, their ways to not escape poverty would be even less sustainable. Victory! Ridiculous conclusion from a simplistic argument.
- vijayr 9y agohttp://wid.world/world/#shweal_p0p50_z/US/last/eu/k/p/yearly/s/false/-2.189/5/curve/false http://wid.world/world/#shweal_p0p50_z/US/last/eu/k/p/yearly... Does this mean the bottom 50% in the US are in the red?
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoYes. Student loans, car loans, credit cards, payday loans, and mortgages make it incredibly tough to get a positive net worth nowadays. Combine the expectation a better tomorrow(the American Dream) with a declining middle class, and massive amounts of debt is what results.
- Harvey-Specter 9y agoMortgages are offset in net worth calculations by the value of the home, so they shouldn't have much of an effect on net worth unless the house has lost significant value or you overpaid for it. Similar situation with car loans, although cars lost a lot of value immediately, so they could have some effect.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoRight, but home values _can_ change drastically, and did at the time that the US lower class experienced a negative net worth, during the '08 financial crisis.
- thaumaturgy 9y agoLoans aren't free. Including interest, the cost of a loan can easily exceed the value of the thing being purchased with it (in fact, it initially almost always does). Stagnant housing markets and new vehicles will both add to a person's overall debt, even when accounting for the market value of the asset.
- known 9y agohttps://qz.com/843902/1-of-indians-now-hold-nearly-60-of-the-countrys-wealth/ https://qz.com/843902/1-of-indians-now-hold-nearly-60-of-the...
- twoodfin 9y agoI think median statistics would enhance the insight available through this tool. Averages are not particularly useful when confounded by the very shifting distributional patterns this is attempting to illuminate. I'm the median Chinese worker. Per-adult national wealth has been exploding since 1987. The bottom 50% share of wealth and income has been plummeting, so inequality has been growing, too. But I'm a lot better off than my counterpart 30 years ago, aren't I?
- boomboomsubban 9y agoDo you feel the growing inequality was necessary for the growth to occur? If that growth slows down or stops, will you continue to be better than your counterpart thirty years ago?
- twoodfin 9y agoI don't know. I'm certainly in favor of median income growth even if it's concurrent with growing inequality!
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- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dmix 9y agoChanging the graph from "Share %" to "Average Income or Wealth" shows a much more optimistic looking chart, with every country ramping upwards, almost at an exponentially positive rate. The world as a whole is moving away from poverty and quality of life is improving which IMO is the most important metric here. Far more important to the average person than the relative wealth ratios at the top vs the bottom, which yes I know will skew the bottom end upwards in these averages, but regardless is still on an upward trajectory overall. This should be the primary metric which success is measured by. And I hope in the effort to balance the wealth ratios this progress isn't crippled in the name of some abstract concept of equality.
- david-gpu 9y agoThe world would be moving away from poverty a lot faster if there was less inequality.
- splintercell 9y agoOr the argument can be made that the world is moving away from poverty at the back of 1%ers. The point being that 1% is getting richer than the average person of their own country, by lifting the poorest person of a poor country upwards. The only loser here is the middle class of rich countries, not middle or poor class of poor countries.
- collyw 9y agoCorrelation doesn't imply causation, or ave you got any supporting evidence of that?
- sokoloff 9y agoThe middle class in America today is wildly, wildly better off than 100, 50, 25, or 10 years ago, IMO. 100 years ago, they didn't have phase-change refrigeration, instead relying on ice. (That's why your grandmother might still call it an "ice box".) 50 years ago, they didn't have air conditioning. 25 years ago, they didn't have cars that would reliably run for 250K miles with airbags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, and which required very regular servicing to keep running. 10 years ago they probably didn't have a smart phone with the world's information in their back pocket. All of those things are now readily affordable and very commonplace in the middle class.
- bhollan 9y agoWhy does the Per Adult National Wealth line for France stop in 2010?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kevmo 9y agoThe World Bank also has this site on worldwide trade and competitiveness data: https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/ https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/
- tuna-piano 9y ago1. When everyone was a farmer, the difference between the best possible farmer and the worst farmer just wasn't that great. Maybe you're 2x faster at picking corn, or 3x better at hunting deer. But a few guys literally built a communication tool (WhatsApp) to be used by billions of people. So maybe in the old world you could pick 2x as much corn, but in today's world you can build 1 billion times the communication tools as someone else. 2. The whole idea of inequality, while potentially useful, kind of assumes a fixed pie. The question is phrased as, "What percent of the total income pie did the 1% take" and not "How much pie did the top 1% of people produce to make the overall pie bigger?". I don't think either mentality is totally correct, but both are vitally important to understand (and the second belief is non-obvious to many). Did Steve Jobs producing the iPhone (and becoming a billionaire) take any of the poor people's money, or did it increase the overall output of the country? Steve jobs making the iPhone certainly made the country more unequal, but it also made the economy bigger and the country better off. 3. Does anyone care about equality, or do people care about poverty? Would a world where 1% of people had 100 yachts but 99% of people each had 1 yacht bother you? Would you rather live in a poor equal country or a rich unequal country?
- Chinjut 9y agoLike Steve Jobs made the iPhone with his own hands... He played a role in the creation of the iPhone, but the level and proportion of reward he received for that role is a choice we made as a society, not an intrinsic physical fact. I guarantee you, even in a world where telling other people to make iPhones doesn't make you a billionaire, there are still people who would line up at the chance to do it.
- tuna-piano 9y ago" the level and proportion of reward he received for that role is a choice we made as a society" I don't believe this statement to be at all accurate. We did not make that decision as a society. Millions of individual people made the decision to buy or not buy the phone based on its price and value. Millions of workers decided to work (or not work) for Apple/Foxconn based on their wages and the work. One of those workers was Steve Jobs, and the owners of Apple decided to pay him a certain amount for his work (and of course some of his wealth was derived from his ownership of Apple). A free market is a special economic system in that it's made up of completely voluntary agreements. There was no coercion involved to make Jobs wealthy.
- lumberjack 9y agoMichael Sandel explains why economic inequality matters. https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_why_we_shouldn_t_trust_markets_with_our_civic_life https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_why_we_shouldn_t_tr...
- AcerbicZero 9y agoHis philosophy class on justice is also worth checking out. http://justiceharvard.org/ http://justiceharvard.org/
- ulkram 9y agoTop 1% isn't the right metric for finding the problems we want to identify. In certain US states like new mexico, the top %1 is 230k, which any physician could reasonably make. Are we trying to discourage physicians? The problem with income inequality is people abusing their capital (via compounding interest or political influence) to make more capital. I suspect that applies to the top .01%.
- rcdwealth 9y agoWealth is created by people providing products and services to other people and it is not a static quantity "distributed" equally or not equally. For something as dynamic as wealth is impossible to give any representation of its "distribution". Neither it is useful to even speak if "inequality". The idea of "distributing wealth" is the idea based on communism to steal property from those who have it and give it to those who do not have it. It is partially implemented in income tax systems all over the world. That fact does not justify its criminal origins. And it is so often propagated to smart online boys to make them more "fit" for the society in which they are to yell on those who have it, in order to spread it to those who do not have it. Instead of asking other people's property to become your property without giving them exchange (which is basic of crime) how about doing something helpful? Maybe those people who belong to the group of not having it "equal" need better environment? Better education? Better chances for survival? You cannot get better chance for survival by robbing other people's hard earned wealth. It is not fair. You have a car, I do not have a car, so let me rob you. That is criminal. But you can get better chances for survival with education, knowledge and training to become better producer and service provider. Each of us is both the producer and service provider. We are producing products and services for other people, so we help people, and we are creating wealth. But those writing this kind of nonsense reports wish to sit behind their TV without creating anything for other people and get the money from "social funds" to support their parasitic lives. That is what those people want who are yelling at you "look at the world, it is not equal".
- blobbers 9y agoDo I read this correctly in seeing that Wealth Inequality section in the United States shows the top 10% have 73% of wealth, the next 40% of people have 27% of the wealth and the bottom 50% are effectively living pay cheque to pay cheque and have 0 (or slightly negative wealth)? As in the average of the lower 50% debt equals savings?
- Dowwie 9y agoThe total wealth of world’s billionaires grew another 17% in 2016: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/financial-services/publications/billionaires-insights.html# https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/financial-services/publ...
- collinmanderson 9y agoThis seems like a misleading graph. The map compares income share to _area_? Wouldn't comparing to density or capita be more helpful? I happen to know China has more population so seeing it lighter says something to me, but having a better way to compare to the number of people would be helpful.
- gbajson 9y agoIn order to understand this data I'd like to see similar charts for the last 5000 years. Has anyone of you seen similar stats for the middle- and ancient ages?