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US takes 'richest nation on earth' crown from Switzerland
- anxrn 7y agoI suspect using the median net assets instead of the average would lead to vastly different results.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hartator 7y agoActually the 20% poorest in the US has it better than the average EU middle class. Ref: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-richer-than-most-nations-of-europe//amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20...
- defertoreptar 7y agoI like how they calculated consumption, rather than income or net wealth. That's a more honest way of comparing poverty in different countries.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoIs consumption defined as spending, though? If an apple costs $1 in the US but 25 cents in Europe, and a poor person in each place is provided a free apple by the government, did the poor person in the US have 4 times the consumption?
- why_only_15 7y agoThe way you adjust for the first effect is to adjust by Purchasing Power Parity, which they did.
- rndgermandude 7y agoWell, you try to adjust by Purchasing Power Parity. That works well for things where you can directly compare, like the price of an apple. However, it doesn't work so well for other goods and services, e.g. single payer health care vs health care costs in the US, because at best you're comparing apples to oranges. On top of that, it does not account for things you may need in one nation but not in another. E.g. cars spring to mind. In the US you need a car in most places even the bigger cities, to get to work for example. In a lot of places in the EU you don't.
- gridlockd 7y agoHaving a car and being able to drive it around is a form of wealth. Cars in the US are also much more affordable. The "I don't need it" argument only goes so far. You can't go shop a lot of groceries. You can't transport bigger items. You can't go on a road trip. You travel according to whatever public transport affords you. I might just as well say "I don't need it" in regards to healthcare. You don't need it until you do, but then you can't afford it.
- Reason077 7y agoI'm not sure it's an entirely fair way to define poverty. In many parts of Europe you can have a relatively high standard of living without consuming (or even owning) all that much. For example, you can have a high standard of living without owning a car (and all the 'consumption' that goes along with that), in cities that have good public transport, and a good infrastructure/environment for walking and cycling. In much of the US, that's difficult or impossible.
- rayiner 7y agoBut if consumption capacity was equal in Europe, that consumption would shift to something else, such as food and entertainment. People in New York City don’t consume less because they don’t own a car—they spend more money eating out, etc. And Europeans are hardly ascetics. It’s fair to assume that in both places, if people had more means to consume they would.
- Infinitesimus 7y ago> It’s fair to assume that in both places, if people had more means to consume they would. Not the parent commenter but why do you think they would if they could? Consumption habits across borders aren't as obvious to me because of advertising, culture, etc.
- rayiner 7y agoConsumption habits don’t vary that much in the developed world. The household savings rate is 5-10% in most countries, with the US being lower than famously frugal Germany, but higher than Italy or Spain: https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/916lqg-household-saving-rates https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/916lqg-house.... (Switzerland and Luxembourg being heavily financialized countries seem to be outliers.)
- Reason077 7y ago> "But if consumption capacity was equal in Europe, that consumption would shift to something else, such as food and entertainment." Yes. But my point is that not all consumption can be considered equal in terms of the wellbeing and quality of life that it provides. For example, if I was spending $5000 per year on car payments and fuel for my commute to work, that's a lot of 'consumption'. But it isn't something that makes me happy or feel fulfilled. On the other hand, suppose I live in a city where I can walk, cycle, or ride a tram to work. My quality of life might be equal or better - yet I'm consuming $5000 less.
- chillacy 7y agoThis doesn't seem to account for debt, does anyone have stats on debt in Europe?
- mc32 7y agoThat’s a good point. I’d like to see that as part of the comparison as well.
- pkaye 7y agoHow about this. Household debt to disposable income. US seems to be in the middle. https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm
- monocasa 7y agoThat's again average, not median.
- why_only_15 7y agoWhat does this mean? They talk about consumption of goods and services and while taking the debt might be included, the paying of the debt won't be.
- foota 7y agoWould be interested in looking at two things: * How we do in terms of relative consumption along the percentiles, since that reveals how well we distribute consumption among working people. I believe that by moving savings into consumption we increase aggregate welfare, as spending by the people that receive the cash injection will end up generating more consumption than there would have otherwise been. However, I suspect that the current level of income inequality is also what's preventing massive inflation from occurring so it's something of a wash. * As well as how our even lower percentiles compare to other economically developed countries. 5% of America is something like 15 million people, or ~two Washington State's * Lastly, it might be interesting to look at what people have to do to earn the consumption they get at the 20th percentile. A lot of people in America are out their working 80 hours in minimum wage jobs to do that. As a soap box: imo the biggest issues with American socioeconomics today are more about mobility and safety nets than about how much the poorest can absolutely afford. Like, do we do a good job of enabling people to improve their situation and do we do a good job of helping people stay there once they have made it through e.g., helping with substance abuse problems, mental health, and unexpected debt burdens, among other things.
- soperj 7y agoAnd you still have plenty of homesless and destitute. Pretty sad that you can't look after the most vunerable.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
- skybrian 7y agoI mean, it's not like they were wrong about that. I don't know what to conclude from this other than most of history is terrible and the present often isn't so great either. Until we live in a utopia, there will be no shortage of targets for whataboutism.
- EpicEng 7y agoThe point is that it's nothing but a deflection tactic, and I don't believe the people doing the lynching were typically the same people concerned about human rights abuses in the USSR. It's an oversimplification used to prevent discussion about real problems.
- skissane 7y agoI think there is a valid point to it – there is a certain degree of hypocrisy in criticising other country's human rights problems when you aren't doing enough to resolve your own country's human rights problems. Calling it "Whataboutism" seems to excuse that hypocrisy rather than giving it the condemnation it deserves.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
- thatfrenchguy 7y agoThe second decile in the US had in 2017 a wealth of $4798 (-962 for the first decile), while in France in 2015 the second decile had E12900, E4300 for the first decile. And, you know, access to health care :-)
- dillonmckay 7y agoand affordable highspeed internet.
- rayiner 7y agoFrance has much slower internet on average than the US: https://www.akamai.com/de/de/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf https://www.akamai.com/de/de/multimedia/documents/state-of-t... It’s almost as if it’s part of a pattern, where the top 75% in the US do better than France, while the stronger French safety net is better for the bottom 25%.
- Cyph0n 7y agoHow did you get from "slower internet" to "there is a pattern"? If you scroll two comments up, you'll see the most crucial difference: free healthcare. Healthcare-related expenses can bankrupt an entire family in the US, even with great health insurance... Then there is free education, but let's leave that aside for now.
- tdhoot 7y agoThe lowest income people in the US also qualify for free healthcare through Medicaid. It covers ~20% of the US population (that number also includes those with disabilities).
- negrit 7y agoEveryone qualify for healthcare in France, you don't have to take part of a pissing contest about who is the poorest...
- anigbrowl 7y agoCongratulations, you found a libertarian blog to validate whatever viewpoint you needed support for.
- illuminati1911 7y agoDo you have an argument against the information and details provided by the article or nothing but bitterness as it seem.
- anigbrowl 7y agoI refuse to make the effort to refute bad faith articles any more.
- Nicksil 7y agoI've no opinion on this source, but here's the actual, non-Google/AMP URL: https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-richer-than-most-nations-of-europe/ https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric...
- wavefunction 7y agoTexas has literal shanty towns with 100,000 American citizens living there so I think this is a situation where statistics (or the ones presented) are highly inaccurate or deeply mischaracterized: https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+colonias&sxsrf=ACYBGNTcoIGEBe9UqYRXYylpiE8oq-tdaQ:1568941989699&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiCh-CvnN7kAhWwna0KHdkbCEsQ_AUIEigB&biw=1920&bih=958 https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+colonias&sxsrf=ACYBGNT...
- rayiner 7y agoThe Texas colonias are inhabited by people who crossed into the US from Mexico. There are many Americans citizens there because everyone born in the US is automatically a citizen. But their standard of living says nothing about the accuracy of the statistics addressing the standard of living at the 20th percentile. (That’s 60 million people from the bottom.) That’s not to say we shouldn’t “do something” about their living condition, just that your post is a non-sequitor. When Sweden accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees, the median income of the country almost certainly went down. But that doesn’t mean everyone became poorer.
- wavefunction 7y agoThe post I am replying to claims that the "20% poorest" in the US have it better than middle-class Europeans which is such a ludicrous claim as to require posts like mine to provide the context of reality. To your stuff about Sweden and refugees, income and wealth are related but separate concepts.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wavefunction 7y agoI am replying to the post and you're off somewhere else faltering in your efforts. Even at the 20th percentile ain't no Americans better off than middle class Europeans unless you operate under a perverse and objectively dishonest analysis structured to favor your own views. CanShootGuns+500 AccessToDecentHealthCareThatWon'tBankruptYourFamily+15
- rndgermandude 7y agoThat uses consumption data for 2010, coinciding with the year the EU financial crisis really hit and dominated the news, while the financial crisis in the US was already in downswing.
- AstralStorm 7y agoYes, I've checked data for 2017 and USA does not look too rosy anymore, matching most of western EU.
- rndgermandude 7y agoGiven that the US unemployment rate has been constatnly trending down since 2010, I guess the lack of improvement or even worsening of consumption in the same time frame say something...
- thefounder 7y agoThe source of this claim is highly questionable
- swebs 7y agoHow so?
- username90 7y agoThe world bank says that we shouldn't compare consumption since it is calculated differently in different countries: "Because of the diversity of methods and instruments used by the surveys, comparability across countries is limited." http://datatopics.worldbank.org/consumption/detail http://datatopics.worldbank.org/consumption/detail I wouldn't be surprised if the American value was grossly inflated by things like expensive healthcare and education, while the study in for example Sweden possibly didn't even count free healthcare visits, free college education, free school meals for everyone, free public transit for kids or free kindergarten as household consumption.
- mseidl 7y agoMaybe in pure dollar amount. As a German that lived in the US for a long enough time, I'd rather be poor in the Germany than in the US. As least I have good worker rights, healthcare, and all the other benefits.
- mantoto 7y agoAre we reading the same? "The high consumption of America’s “poor” doesn’t mean they live better than average people in the nations they outpace, like Spain, Denmark, Japan, Greece, and New Zealand. "
- asjw 7y agoSwitzerland is not EU EU has absorbed many eastern countries that where under USSR influence
- asdff 7y agoOnly in the U.S. could you have a $14 minimum wage and 90k in one city alone living on the street because rents are egregious.
- ptah 7y ago> high consumption of America’s “poor” this is actually a huge negative and flips the result on it's head if you look at it from a climate change perspective. EDIT: if they have to consume so much more, surely they are not having it better
- dagw 7y agoThe article you link to literally claims the opposite: "The high consumption of America’s “poor” doesn’t mean they live better than average people in the nations they outpace"
- PunchTornado 7y agoThat's such a bs article: The World Bank’s “preferred” indicator of material well-being is "consumption" of goods and services. This is due to “practical reasons of reliability and because consumption is thought to better capture long-run welfare levels than current income.” So all it says it that the poor from US consume more than middle class in Europe. Of course, being to the US and seeing how they replace things disregarding the environment I'm not surprised by that conclusion. I'm earning six figures in London and I'm consuming a lot less than the poorest in US and try to reduce it as a maximum so my carbon footprint is small. When I went to France I saw so many people bringing their own containers to the supermarket which was great because it reduces consumption.
- sanxiyn 7y agoYou don't need to suspect. Unlike this news, Global Wealth Report itself is a serious undertaking so it computes both median and average ranking. USA is #1 in average and #13 in median. Switzerland is #2 in average and #1 in median.
- pooya13 7y agoIs that in PPP?
- chillacy 7y agoIncome inequality has only been increasing over time in the US, and GDP climbs while deaths of despair (drug overdoses, suicides) go up and life expectancy goes down.
- glup 7y agoFYI median per capita wealth figures are listed on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe..., but the amounts are somewhat different (I posted a separate question about why)
- microcolonel 7y agoGod only knows what we Americans (and Canadians, for that matter) are doing with our disposable income, but the median Schweizer, Norwegian, American, Australian, or Canadian is doing pretty great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c... P.S: Be wary of comparisons of household anything, especially over time. Household size has changed dramatically over the recent decades.
- vannevar 7y agoYou would be correct, the US lags far, far behind in median wealth, behind countries like Korea and Spain. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-23/australia-tops-median-wealth-per-adult-list/10518082 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-23/australia-tops-median...
- adventured 7y agoAnd the US ranks ahead of both Germany and Sweden in median household net wealth. Those two are almost universally held up as extreme achievers on quality of life and both have notoriously good economies.
- vannevar 7y agoTrue. It's interesting to note that the ratio of the median to the mean for Germany is similar to the US, where France and other high-medians have smaller ratios. Why is wealth more naturally distributed in France, but less so in Germany and the US?
- dagw 7y agoI don't know about Germany, but Sweden has one of the highest private debt levels in the 'western' world. That seriously drags down the net wealth numbers. Also the whole point of the "Swedish model" argument is that a high net wealth shouldn't be a requirement for a high quality of life.
- nicky19890202 7y agoThis is the truth
- persephonee 7y agoThe distribution of wealth is as unequal, as for a hundred years. A new guilded age has arrived. Average distribution of 'placewealthorincomemeasurehere' is irrelevant.
- baron816 7y agoCouldn’t find any content here. Just a full page of ads.
- irrational 7y agoTIL Switzerland is the richest nation on earth. If I was going to guess, I probably would've guessed Saudi Arabia or Luxembourg.
- maneesh 7y agoDid you mean the US is?
- ummonk 7y agoDepends whether you use median or mean. Switzerland is #1 by median, which is likewise not something I would have guessed.
- irrational 7y agoNot once the recession hits full bore.
- m0zg 7y agoVisit Zurich. Prices are ~2x what they are in my (fairly pricy already) area in the US. That's the direct consequence of high median income: businesses charge what the market will bear.
- sanxiyn 7y agoNote that the article is about wealth, not income.
- paganel 7y agoThe high price of the CHF also has something to do with it. I visited the French-speaking part of Switzerland a couple of summers ago (Geneva and Lausanne) and at some point during that visit I realized that those two cities (and the rest of the Swiss cities, of course) were among a very short list of European cities not directly affected by war in the last 200 years or so. Under these circumstances of course that everyone will be busy giving the Swiss their money and valuables for "safe keeping", which among other things translates into said high price for the CHF.
- ic4l 7y agoAre they including the billionaires in their statistics, and dividing the total sum by the population!?
- sanxiyn 7y agoYes.
- refurb 7y agoAs much as I hate the anti-US tone on HN, this article is kind of crap. Fact is, getting good wealth data is really hard. Income is much easier as the govt collects that data.
- sanxiyn 7y agoIt's really hard, but Global Wealth Report does really try. This news is crap, the report referenced is not. If you are interested do read the report.
- causality0 7y agoI do agree with you, but I must point out that hiding income from the government is a very common practice. Probably a quarter of the people I know have significant under-the-counter income sources they feel no need to include in their taxes.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- glup 7y agoHow does this reconcile with the data listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... ? That shows $530,244 for Switzerland and $403,974 for US. Difference in sampling or does the wiki one not reflect net wealth?
- catach 7y agoWikipedia source is from 2018.
- sanxiyn 7y agoWikipedia uses Credit Suisse and this news uses Allianz.
- AstralStorm 7y agoThat's much less important than the date, which is 8 years apart.
- m0zg 7y agoThank you, Donald J Trump. :-)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tempsy 7y agoOne of the more baffling statistics I’ve seen lately is that consumer debt continues to increase and credit card interest rates are at multi year highs despite the fed funds rate being at historical lows. Things don’t add up.
- sanxiyn 7y agoDebt increasing when interest rate is low sounds completely normal to me, although credit card interest rate being high is interesting.
- dnadler 7y agoMaybe creditors are having trouble finding attractive returns, so they are lending to riskier individuals. Similar to the 'reach for yield' phenomenon in the bond market.
- arbuge 7y agoMortgage and auto loan debt are probably significantly larger components of consumer debt than credit card debt.
- DuskStar 7y agoSounds like the credit card companies are expecting a vanishing fraction of the people for whom credit card interest is relevant to actually pay them back... (At least among my family, common knowledge is to treat credit cards like debit cards or charge cards - make the full payment, every time, and if you can't make the full payment you shouldn't have made the purchase)
- ferdek 7y agoSame here - I'm using credit card only for extra protection (chargeback and so on) always making the full payment at the end of the period.
- fanerel56 7y agoThe fact that people are comparing countries like Austria and Switzerland, tiny tiny German places, to a country that loves to readd the same piece of wood 20 times to it's GDP speaks for itself. Any statistic pushed out by the US government is as irrelevant as Kim Jong Uns personal yachts interior design material. Anyone taking official US statistics serious should get a purple star on their chest reading "Mental defect"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eutectic 7y agoIt seems like if you are slightly more business-friendly than competing countries then you have a big advantage (not to mention network effects), but if everyone tried to be more like America then the world would be worse-off. Just like a classic coordination game.
- archeantus 7y agoGoing to that link I was punched in the face by about 20 ads and saw one sentence of content that basically just restated what was in the title... did I miss something?
- brownbat 7y ago> But debts in the Alpine country are far higher than in the US... Debts make this comparison difficult to make meaningful. A few cases: - Minimum wage earner barely scrapes by but does not seek any credit. - Someone in a high cost of living area takes out a mortgage. - A young neurosurgeon with fresh educational debt takes on a very high paying job. - A billionaire borrows to finance a major real estate project The net worth of these cases goes from highest to lowest. The "means" run in the opposite direction. Sometimes indebtedness is poverty. Sometimes it's consumption smoothing. Sometimes it's a reasonable investment in a home or earning potential. Sometimes it's a dangerous source of leverage on a foolish bet. I don't know how we disentangle all those when trying to measure or compare human welfare. > the strength of the US dollar [also contributed] If high Swiss property values and a strong US dollar conspire to to flip the #1 and #2 countries on this specific metric, I'm worried we're drifting into Spaceballs territory. What's all this mean? Possibly... absolutely nothing.
- ineedasername 7y ago> I don't know how we disentangle all those when trying to measure or compare human welfare. I think they just aren't very good metrics for measuring or comparing human welfare. There might not be any single or small groups of metrics that do any better either. It's a nebulous and complex thing that doesn't have easy answers. Of course in the hierarchy of human needs basic financial security to secure food, shelter, etc is pretty important and a precursor for positive welfare, but not really a sufficient condition.
- on_and_off 7y ago>I don't know how we disentangle all those when trying to measure or compare human welfare. One number I like to use is the IHDI : https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_HDI https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_countries_by_inequality-... There can be an endless debate on the methodology of course and I don't think this number should be taken as an absolute truth. It does give a more holistic picture though and takes many more factors into account.
- jcheng 7y agoWhen you take out a loan, it doesn't decrease your net worth, right? If I'm worth $X, then I take out a $1MM loan, at that moment I'm still worth approximately $X (because the $1MM the bank gave me and $1MM I owe the bank cancel each other out). So I'd rank them as: - Billionaire - Home owner - Minimum wage earner - Neurosurgeon
- drtz 7y agoToo bad money can't buy happiness [0] [0] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/worlds-happiest-countries-united-nations-2019/index.html https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/worlds-happiest-countries...
- collyw 7y agoToo little money does cause misery though.
- ineedasername 7y agoI'd be curious to see the proportional gap between the top 10% and bottom 10% compared. My guess is a much larger gap in the US, but I wonder by how much.
- sanxiyn 7y agoThe report linked in fact does such gap analysis.
- ineedasername 7y agoI guess I should have dug further than the introduction, thanks for point me further in.
- titanomachy 7y agoIf I have a billion dollars, and start a country that consists of me in my palace and 2000 other people living in abject poverty, we are now the "richest nation on earth" by this definition. Big whoop.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- racino84 7y agoExcept your country would be very poor, because you'd have either another country's currency, or you would have a $1bn trade deficit and little actual wealth - thats after you somehow get yourself some UN recognized sovereign territory
- baroffoos 7y agoJust have $1b worth of gold
- vondur 7y agoThat may be true, but what about the chocolate deficit compared to Switzerland?
- miramardesign 7y agoThey don't know how to win, I will show them. --the god emperor Trump
- kwhitefoot 7y agoMean wealth is not very meaningful. What is the median in the two countries? Better still what does the distribution look like and how does it compare to other countries?
- dr_dshiv 7y agoHmm, US does not look or feel like the richest nation on earth. Is that just me?
- theandrewbailey 7y agoIt's nowhere near evenly distributed.
- collyw 7y agoProbably because the income inequality is higher. If you think of some famous super rich people I am sure most of the names you think of will be from the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:2014_Gini_Index_World_Map,_income_inequality_distribution_by_country_per_World_Bank.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:2...
- RichardHeart 7y agoMisleading stat is misleading. Page 47 of the source (https://www.allianz.com/content/dam/onemarketing/azcom/Allianz_com/economic-research/publications/specials/en/2019/AGWR_2019.pdf https://www.allianz.com/content/dam/onemarketing/azcom/Allia...) : "By average net financial assets, the USA are the richest country in the world, not least thanks to the strong dollar. But if we drew up our rankings of the world’s richest countries based on median values, they would look different. The US would slide by a whopping 12 ranks from the top spot to 13th place. Also Singapore (from third to sixth place), Sweden (from seventh to 12th place), Denmark (from tenth to 22nd place) and UK (from 12th to 16th place) would drop significantly. In all these countries the difference between median and average values tend to be bigger than in most other countries. For all countries analyzed, the (unweighted) average for the median value expressed as percentage of the average value is 44%. In the US, in contrast, this number is just 15%; in the UK and Sweden it comes to around 30%"
- Hitton 7y agoJust for convenience: Ranked by average: 1. USA 2. Switzerland 3. Singapore 4. Taiwan 5. Netherlands 6. Japan 7. Sweden 8. Belgium 9. New Zealand 10. Denmark 11. Canada 12. UK 13. Israel 14. Australia 15. France 16. Austria 17. Italy 18. Germany 19. Ireland 20. South Korea
- Hitton 7y agoI haven't checked the data, it really shows the difference between countries who have wealthy elite and countries which have wealthy citizens. By median: 1. Switzerland 2. Japan 3. Netherlands 4. Belgium 5. Taiwan 6. Singapore 7. New Zealand 8. Australia 9. Canada 10. Italy 11. Israel 12. Sweden 13. USA 14. France 15. Ireland 16. UK 17. Austria 18. South Korea 19. Spain 20. Germany
- nabla9 7y agoUS has high average net wealth per capita but is not close to top in median net wealth. Switzerland is close to top in both measures. Median tells how rich the typical person is. United States ranks #22 in median wealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult#List_of_countries_by_median_and_mean_wealth_per_adult_(USD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
- trymas 7y ago> United States ranks #22 in median wealth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult#List_of_countries_by_median_and_mean_wealth_per_adult_(USD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... It's off-topic, but could someone explain how is Ukraine last on that list? 40$ for median wealth and ~1.5k$ for mean wealth sounds incredibly low. I knew Ukraine is in not great economic shape, but completely last sounds insane.
- nabla9 7y agoUkraine was dirt poor even before the war and their corruption index was higher than Russia's. Today Ukraine is in war and the most industrialized part of the country (eastern Ukraine) is partially occupied.
- gridlockd 7y agoThis measures "wealth", not income. You can be in the top 1% of earners, but if you save nothing, you can still have a net worth of $0. Apparently, the median Ukrainian has only $40 to their name, by whatever means they measure wealth. However, Ukraine has compulsory socialized retirement funds. Minimum wage is $160/month. The median US-American supposedly has 60,000$ to their name, which must be mostly due to IRAs.
- trymas 7y agoYes, I understand that wealth is not income, but in Ukraine there are plenty of oligarchs worth multi-billion sums. Dividing that wealth over whole Ukraine population is definitely more than 40$ per person. Though probably that's where rampant corruptions comes in and I will just guess that rich oligarchs "on paper" have little to no official wealth in Ukraine (have no clue how wealth is calculated country-wise if it's international)?
- amelius 7y agoCan we talk about medians, not averages, please? This page provides some nice insights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... For example: The US has a median/mean ratio of 15%, which is very low (ranked with the bottom 10 of countries), where Egypt, Kazakhstan and Ukraine are at the bottom.
- coldtea 7y agoWhen you get to compare the average lifestyle though, this is a joke...
- agoodthrowaway 7y agoI am as American as they come but wealth as reported by this article is a false metric. The Swiss have an amazingly high quality of life and standard of living. For most Americans, I don’t think our quality of life is anywhere near what it is in Switzerland.
- unicornmama 7y agoWhat is the point of this article other than to make the internet more dumb? Say Bill Gates moves into a town of 10,000 people. Congrats! The average wealth of that town per person is now over 10 million. Everyone is a multi millionaire.