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I wouldn't call Canadian (or Fr or Se) wealth inequality 'low'. 'Why I can't afford a house', again is more a problem in Fr/De/Se than in US, see https://en.wik

• arcticbull 6y ago
  Inequality in Canada is substantially lower than in America (and is on par with Australia, and between Fr and Se). This is evidenced in their Gini coefficients. [1] - Gini for SE is 0.25 - Gini for FR is 0.31 - Gini for CA is 0.33 - Gini for US is 0.48 - Gini for ZA is 0.65 I've also included South Africa for comparison, one of the least equal societies on earth. A photo of what a 0.65 Gini country looks like is here (https://blog.prif.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/SA_Drone_Picture_BLOG.jpg https://blog.prif.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/SA_Drone_Pi...) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
  • betaby 6y ago
    From your link, GINI of Canada and Tajikistan is the same or Finland and Azerbaijan. Totalitarian states like Belarus or Kazakhstan have one of the lowest GINIs in the world, now I question gini usefulness even more.
    • arcticbull 6y ago
      I assumed you realized we were constraining ourselves to places with a High or Very High HDI. If nobody has any money at all, would you not say inequality is low? If everyone in Tajikistan has $5 except the president, Emomali Rahmon, is inequality not low? I suspect you are looking for a pairing of HDI and Gini, which factors in both the development (and hence the standard of living) and the inequality. Sweden: (Gini: 0.25, HDI: 0.933), France: (Gini: 0.31, HDI: 0.901), Canada: (Gini: 0.33, HDI: 0.926), USA: (Gini: 0.48, HDI: 0.924), South Africa: (Gini: 0.65, HDI: 0.709). Now, Tajikistan has an HDI of 0.66 ("medium"), and Azerbaijan 0.756 ("high"). Kazakhstan might surprise you, the HDI is 0.817 ("very high"). The standard of living there is actually good, in spite of what you may have seen on Borat - incidentally filmed in Romania. Almaty's been on my list of places to visit for a long time :) [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaty
      • dnautics 6y ago
        > If everyone in Tajikistan has $5 except the president That distribution will yield a very high gini coefficient of very close to 1.
        • tobinfricke 6y ago
          No, it yields a Gini coefficient very close to zero. The Gini coefficient is defined as 1/2 the mean absolute difference considering all pairs of households: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient A group of people where everyone has the same income as a Gini coefficient of exactly zero. Adding a single outlier will increase it a little. A group of 1001 with 1000 people earning $1 and one person earning $100 has a Gini coefficient of 0.09.
        • thomasahle 6y ago
          >> If everyone in Tajikistan has $5 except the president > That distribution will yield a very high gini coefficient of very close to 1. It yields (n-1)|5-p|/(2n(5(n-1)+p)) which is about p/(5n+p). So it depends on whether the president (p) has $10 or $n^2.
          • dnautics 6y ago
            indeed. If everyone in tajikistan has $5 except the president, who has $1, the gini coefficient will be different.
      • passerby1 6y ago
        > Borat - incidentally filmed in Romania Romania: Gini: 0.36, HDI: 0.828 HDI is close to Kazakhstan, actually
    • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Trives of neanderthals were very equal too. Obviously you have to compare apples to apples
      • etothepii 6y ago
        Read "Sapiens" 35 hour working week as a hunter gather is far preferable to the 60 + home chores of the homo softwaricus.
        • sokoloff 6y ago
          I would way rather program 60 hours a week than live as the hunter-gatherers did.
          • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
            I am not sure, in there own world some tribes might have been far happier than 95% of society is today
            • dantheman 6y ago
              That is until they die from a simple infection.
              • geodel 6y ago
                Seems better than perennial back pain from sitting long hours and getting brain fried from implementing same logic of micro-service 1000th time for a 'challenging' project.
                • winston_smith 6y ago
                  Go try it and let us know how it works out
                  • 6y ago
    • throwaway45349 6y ago
      In totalitarian states, everyone is equally poor.
      • webmaven 6y ago
        > In totalitarian states, everyone is equally poor. Not quite. In totalitarian states, typically everyone's income is fairly equal. Wealth, however, is often another matter. In the soviet Union, party apparatchiks often had very nice dachas to live in, fancy cars, exclusive shopping venues with imported goods, vacations abroad, etc. But these things weren't necessarily purchased with disposable income, per-se. At least not officially.
        • mc32 6y ago
          I would quibble with the "fancy cars" part. Only the nomenklatura got government owned fancy cars and other perks --that reverted to the state if they lost the position. So it was a kind of state wealth that you temporarily had custody over.
          • webmaven 6y ago
            To some extent, many of the "fancy cars" and other perks of capitalistic wealth are also things that one has only temporary access to by virtue of one's position. Without the position and the attached income, these can revert to the bank or other creditor.
        • ant6n 6y ago
          After the wall came down and the GDR collapsed, East Germans were surprised how simple the life of the highest government functionaries was. They had a small gated community, with a level of luxury (except perhaps for extra labor) which is comparable to North American middle class: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldsiedlung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldsiedlung
  • majormajor 6y ago
    Are those wealth or income coefficients? My impression has been that wealth inequality in many places in Europe is much higher than income inequality, as a factor of it being an older society. The places in Europe I'd want to move to are really no cheaper to buy a house than the places I'd want to live in the US.
    • arcticbull 6y ago
      I grabbed these from FRED and it looks like they use the income version, not the wealth version. [1] [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINICAN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINICAN
      • majormajor 6y ago
        Gotcha, thanks. I pulled some city-level numbers and it seems like at least in some areas, European SWE are missing out compared to coastal US ones: London 2018: 0.7 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/compendium/economicreview/february2020/analysingregionaleconomicandwellbeingtrends https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco... SF 2012: 0.523 https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Income-inequality-on-par-with-developing-nations-5486434.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Income-inequality-on-... (probably this has gone up!) Paris 2015: ~0.492 https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/blog/data-inequalities-france-doing-better-most-oecd-countries https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/blog/data-inequalities-... (they just say "similar to brazil", which is 0.492 Its unfortunately harder to find a bunch of city-level data, I wasn't able to find any German cities on quick googling, so I'm definitely fulfilling stereotypes of "Americans who think of Europe as just a couple famous cities", but those capture at least a couple of major population centers that aren't so appealing if you're a dev compared to the US hotspots: they're still unequal, but suddenly you're not nearly as high on the totem pole.
  • gustavpaul 6y ago
    That picture likely contrasts lower middle class and lower class - middle class and upper middle class houses in south africa would not be across the road from an informal settlement due to unbelievable levels of theft and violent crime in such areas.
  • qwytw 6y ago
    However you look at wealth inequality Sweden is actually the most unequal country in that list: SE is 0.867 FR is 0.687 CA is 0.726 US is 0.852 ZA is 0.806
• hogFeast 6y ago
  I don't know about the other countries you have mentioned but German residential real estate has very high levels of institutional investment and the legacy of rent control (famously, Berlin...although that changed a few years ago). So you have very high wealth inequality, average German net financial wealth is equal to Greece and Germany has a significant number of billionaires, but you also have a system that fundamentally cannot be compared with the US. It just optimises for different things. That being said, whilst recognising those differences, lower wealth inequality is not the result of most of these systems. Income inequality is generally lower but the cost of this is usually: low competition, high structural unemployment, weak unions, low levels of business creation...it isn't free. It is readly apparent from the EU that whilst the US has high inequality, it also has a far more dynamic economy that results in more people actually becoming wealthy (to take Germany as an example, most billionaires come from families that got rich in the 30s and inherited...the level of downward mobility is very high in the US) and higher levels of innovation.
  • coliveira 6y ago
    > more dynamic economy that results in more people actually becoming wealthy This is exactly the other side of inequality: if there is a big gap, someone must be taking advantage of this gap. The problem is that most people are losers in this competition.
  • oblio 6y ago
    Most statistics contradict you, despite the popular impression. The US has lower social mobility than most European countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
  • collyw 6y ago
    What happened with rent control in Berlin? Rent control sounds like a good idea in theory but in practice it seems the opposite, creating two tiers of renters.
    • llampx 6y ago
• adrianN 6y ago
  Home ownership is strongly influenced by culture. Germans are just happier to rent. Buying often doesn't make a lot of sense financially either. It's not much cheaper to buy than to rent and you lose a lot of flexibility. I could afford to buy a house, but I don't want to. That would just tie up a large fraction of my wealth into one fairly risky investment and make it much harder to move when my life changes.
  • throwaway894345 6y ago
    What’s risky about the investment? I’m of the impression that real estate is one of the more stable investments, subprime mortgage scandals notwithstanding.
    • fulafel 6y ago
      What isn't? Volatile market value, risks of breakdowns and fires and previously undiscovered structural flaws, fires, natural distasters, etc. It's putting a lot of your eggs in one basket, which in investment terms is same as foregoing diversification, ie taking on a lot of risk for no corresponding increase in returns. Depending on jurisdiction, risk of unfair treatment in a divorce. High transaction costs when changing housing due to changing life circumstances. And to top it off you are binding the important service of having a roof over your head to the fate of this investment.
      • throwaway894345 6y ago
        Home process in the US are historically very stable. I would think this is also true in Europe? As for diversification, your house shouldn’t be your only investment. As for fires and natural disasters, this is why insurance exists. Owning a home isn’t for everyone, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly risky about it as far as investments go.
        • fulafel 6y ago
          Are you looking at home prices as aggregate? It will naturally seem a lot more stable then since you are then looking at what you'd have if you had diversification! As for individual cases of housing, I think we've recently seen enough discussion of CA volatility to conclude that at least big cities have a lot of volatility in individual housing units. (Of course this all depends on the alternative too: renting regulations vary widely over the world in how strong the position of the occupants is wrt rent increases and landlord initiated termination)