The socio-legal conditions that permit the building of wealth, like strong property rights and free markets, are necessary but not sufficient; so you wouldn't e

The socio-legal conditions that permit the building of wealth, like strong property rights and free markets, are necessary but not sufficient; so you wouldn't expect to see a correlation between them. There are only a few countries that have a low Gini coefficient (more income equality) along with a high per capita GDP (more overall wealth) in north or western Europe such as Finland, Norway, or Belgium, which are very much the exceptions; for the most part, they all have a strong cultural background of being industrious, and in the case of Norway have a lot of oil. According to the Wikipedia page on the Gini coefficient, the top 20 lowest Gini (highest income equality) countries are: Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Iceland, Norway, Belgium, Finland, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Kyrgyzstan, the Netherlands, Denmark, East Timor, Sweden, Kosova, Malta, and Iraq. You'll notice that besides the northwestern European exceptions, they largely fall more on the "everyone is equally poor" side of the spectrum. The US is in the bottom half of income equality, yet has one of the highest GDP per capita and the highest median household disposable income, which many agree is a very good way of measuring how wealthy ordinary people are. To summarize, obviously having high income inequality does not cause a wealthy nation; but instead (going back to my original thesis) the factors that permit the building of a wealthy nation can cause high income inequality, which isn't a problem as long as the rising tide is lifting all boats. The few countries that are both wealthy and have low income inequality are virtually exclusively monoethnic societies that have a strong cultural emphasis on both the factors that are conducive to wealth-creation (like education and delayed gratification) as well as factors that forbid egregious displays of income inequality (like the Scandinavian Law of Jante). I may go one step further and theorize that the same global factors that led to the rapid increase in wealth around the world in the past half-century or so did much to hide the failings of more egalitarian, "socialist" economic policies, much like the period of very low real interest rates of the last twenty years hid the failings of unprofitable VC-backed startups; and now that it looks like we are entering a more turbulent period with geopolitical instability and energy shortages, we may very well end up seeing a sharp reduction in the standard of living in countries like France or Spain as the ever-increasing redistribution of wealth in response to one crisis after another make it harder and harder to actually produce wealth.