4 ms·

The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it was then: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/ https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-

by jl6 1y ago

The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it was then: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/ https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/ What has actually changed? A whole bunch of other economic malaise, but also perceptions, amplified to your personal taste by social media.

JimDabell 1y ago
Look at the graphs as a whole, not just individual points. Compare the 90s to the 10s.
quantumgarbage 1y ago
Switzerland and Afghanistan have an almost equal Gini coefficient. My point is: the Gini coefficient might indicate what your country's income distribution looks like, it however does not tell anything about actual life conditions.
- jolux 1y ago
  Sure but that’s a bit silly. Switzerland’s GDP is something like 50x that of Afghanistan. UK GDP in 2025 is much higher than in 2003, too. Of course not 5000%
  - quantumgarbage 1y ago
    Again, gini coefficients or GDP growth measures are, at best, proxies to understand the conditions the bottom decile of your country lives in. Looking at housing costs, life expectancy, food insecurity or poverty rates do a much better job at capturing this.
    - graemep 1y ago
      Yes, and and increases in the price of essentials (food, housing, utilities) have a greater effect on livings standards of the worse off and are not captured in the numbers.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  The Human Development Index, on the other hand, does. Switzerland is #1 at 0.967, improving at 0.25% per year. Afghanistan is #182 at 0.462 and dropping, the UK is a respectable #15 at 0.940 (between Finland and New Zealand) and also improving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
- jll29 1y ago
  Quality of life encompasses many factors, e.g. Switzerland has 98 days of maternity leave, Afghanistan has 90(+15) days of maternity leave (Wikipedia even puts it at #1 worldwide with two years, but that may be incorrect?). In Switzerland, women have been able to vote since 1971. In Afghanistan, women have been able to vote since 1919 (but interrupted during the *previous* Taliban regime).
darkwater 1y ago
Oh, lies, damned lies and statistics. One could also say that the Gini coefficient rose, reached its peak ~2006 and now is going down...
teamonkey 1y ago
Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but… https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/ https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/ “for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.” “If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP.” Etc.
- chgs 1y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... Very little change in U.K. over 20 years
  - ferbivore 1y ago
    It looks to me like Equality Trust put a fair amount of thought and research into their website, did their best to paint a picture of what's going on in the UK by using multiple reputable sources, and tried to explain why that picture is dire, not just for those with a net worth that rounds to £0 but for the nation at large, with several dozen citations to back that up. Thank God we have this one number from some Credit Suisse marketing material to invalidate all of that.
  - teamonkey 1y ago
    Gini is a very rough tool. It’s trying to describe the shape of a curve with a single number. It describes the average inequality between any two people. The curve can be skewed without the Gini number changing significantly if, say, the bottom 99% became increasingly more equal in income/wealth by becoming poorer overall, transferring income/wealth to the upper 1%.
  - nickdothutton 1y ago
    I the numbers maybe not, but in the public perception? In society?
incangold 1y ago
“About the same” is not “the same”, and there are tipping points. The gini coefficient has still seen a decent bump. But anyway, gini is a coarse measure. Look at the chart below that, showing income percentages going steadily upwards for the top 10 and 1%. Most worryingly, look at the decline of the middle 40%. A healthy middle class keeps countries stable. You need a good chunk of society who feel like the system works for them. And it’s not just perceptions, it’s fundamental stuff. A teacher could afford a house in the 90s; they can’t now. For all the boomers bang on about mobile phones and flat screen TVs, in the end those are luxuries compared to clean, secure accommodation. The days of getting a mortgage on one income, or having access to nice council housing are gone.
graemep 1y ago
The share of the middle 40% has fallen sharply according to the bottom chart on that page. The bottom 50% is unchanged in aggregate , but there will be groups within in that have done a lot worse. I would also guess (I cannot find numbers) that the proportion of income that is spent on essentials has risen.
gnfargbl 1y ago
What has actually changed is that thirty years ago, the ratio between house prices and average earnings was about 4. By twenty years ago it had doubled and, most importantly, it has been at that level ever since with no real sign of dropping [1]. This is a structural change. We now have at least one, and perhaps two, generations of people who can't really alter their economic situation through hard work. That's the classic recipe for populism to thrive. [1] https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-174-years-of-data-tell-us-about-house-price-affordability-in-the-uk/ https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  And as with so many modern issues, the housing problem was largely created by Thatcher - her Right to Buy policy.
  - gnfargbl 1y ago
    I couldn't disagree more! I think the housing cost issue is pure supply and demand, we have a country which doesn't like to permit building and an increasing population due to (legal) immigration. I will bash Maggie all day, for her refusal to effectively manage industrial decline in Britain, for her boneheaded belief that a top-ranking economy could exist solely on services, and, most of all, for her idiotic squandering of our North Sea oil wealth. But, Right to Buy was a rare hit for me. I see it as having been a forward-looking policy which aimed to reward people for work -- play the game, and you too can have a tangible slice of society in the form of your own home to possess and care for as you wish. The problem is that we didn't replace the social housing lost to RtB.
    - calcifer 1y ago
      > The problem is that we didn't replace the social housing lost to RtB. We didn't fail that - Councils wanted to build more social housing with RtB and Thatcher viciously destroyed those programs. She created RtB not because it was a "forward-looking policy aimed to reward people for work" but because she hated the social security apparatus and wanted to destroy it. And she was never covert nor apologetic about it.
acatnamedjoe 1y ago
I think the argument is less that inequality has increased overall, and more that the country is increasingly stratified by geography - with greater concentrations of wealth in the South East relative to the rest of the country. This is especially true in formerly undesirable areas of London (e.g. Hackney, #10 on the 2003 list) and towns within commuting distance of London (e.g. Hythe, #3). Presumably this is due to the gradual shift to a London-centric services economy as well as the increasingly ludicrous price of houses in Central London.
jdietrich 1y ago
>What has actually changed? The value of grants paid from central government to local government have fallen by over 80%. In 2005, the poorest local authorities received most of their funding from central government; today, they're dependent on council tax and business rates for the vast majority of their income. During that time, demand for social care has vastly increased, disproportionately so in the poorest local authorities, eating away at the already shrinking resources of local authorities. The result of those cuts have been drastic for people living in poorer communities, particularly the poorest members of those communities. They quite justifiably feel abandoned by society. Youth clubs and children's centres, social work, homelessness provision, subsidised bus routes, parks and libraries have all been cut to the bone. None of that is captured in the Gini coefficient, but it's felt acutely by the people who rely on those services. The wealthy are largely unaffected by this, because they live in local authorities that were never particularly reliant on central government funding and because they never really relied on council services anyway. For the very poorest, the impact of austerity is often dominated by one big failure of provision - being stuck in unsuitable temporary accommodation for months or years because there's no social housing available, being denied support for a disabled child etc. For the majority, it's just a slow but pervasive erosion of their quality of life - their kids have nowhere to go after school, their street is full of potholes, the bus they take into town has been cut from four an hour to one an hour, their back alley is full of rubbish because the council can't afford to deal with fly-tipping. https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/NEF_Local_Government_Austerity_2019.pdf https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/NEF_Local_Government_... https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp510.pdf https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp51...
scotty79 1y ago
Gini coefficient of what? Income or wealth? Is borrowing money with appreciating assets as collateral treated as income for purposes of thsese calculations?
Earw0rm 1y ago
Wealth has moved from public to private, and consumer spending from high streets to out-of-town shopping centres and Amazon, Deliveroo etc. Leaving a badly depleted public sphere.

by jl6 1y ago

JimDabell 1y ago

Look at the graphs as a whole, not just individual points. Compare the 90s to the 10s.

quantumgarbage 1y ago

Switzerland and Afghanistan have an almost equal Gini coefficient. My point is: the Gini coefficient might indicate what your country's income distribution looks like, it however does not tell anything about actual life conditions.

jolux 1y ago
Sure but that’s a bit silly. Switzerland’s GDP is something like 50x that of Afghanistan. UK GDP in 2025 is much higher than in 2003, too. Of course not 5000%
- quantumgarbage 1y ago
  Again, gini coefficients or GDP growth measures are, at best, proxies to understand the conditions the bottom decile of your country lives in. Looking at housing costs, life expectancy, food insecurity or poverty rates do a much better job at capturing this.
  - graemep 1y ago
    Yes, and and increases in the price of essentials (food, housing, utilities) have a greater effect on livings standards of the worse off and are not captured in the numbers.
decimalenough 1y ago
The Human Development Index, on the other hand, does. Switzerland is #1 at 0.967, improving at 0.25% per year. Afghanistan is #182 at 0.462 and dropping, the UK is a respectable #15 at 0.940 (between Finland and New Zealand) and also improving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
jll29 1y ago
Quality of life encompasses many factors, e.g. Switzerland has 98 days of maternity leave, Afghanistan has 90(+15) days of maternity leave (Wikipedia even puts it at #1 worldwide with two years, but that may be incorrect?). In Switzerland, women have been able to vote since 1971. In Afghanistan, women have been able to vote since 1919 (but interrupted during the *previous* Taliban regime).

darkwater 1y ago

Oh, lies, damned lies and statistics. One could also say that the Gini coefficient rose, reached its peak ~2006 and now is going down...

teamonkey 1y ago

Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but… https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/ https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/ “for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.” “If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP.” Etc.

chgs 1y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... Very little change in U.K. over 20 years
- ferbivore 1y ago
  It looks to me like Equality Trust put a fair amount of thought and research into their website, did their best to paint a picture of what's going on in the UK by using multiple reputable sources, and tried to explain why that picture is dire, not just for those with a net worth that rounds to £0 but for the nation at large, with several dozen citations to back that up. Thank God we have this one number from some Credit Suisse marketing material to invalidate all of that.
- teamonkey 1y ago
  Gini is a very rough tool. It’s trying to describe the shape of a curve with a single number. It describes the average inequality between any two people. The curve can be skewed without the Gini number changing significantly if, say, the bottom 99% became increasingly more equal in income/wealth by becoming poorer overall, transferring income/wealth to the upper 1%.
- nickdothutton 1y ago
  I the numbers maybe not, but in the public perception? In society?

incangold 1y ago

“About the same” is not “the same”, and there are tipping points. The gini coefficient has still seen a decent bump. But anyway, gini is a coarse measure. Look at the chart below that, showing income percentages going steadily upwards for the top 10 and 1%. Most worryingly, look at the decline of the middle 40%. A healthy middle class keeps countries stable. You need a good chunk of society who feel like the system works for them. And it’s not just perceptions, it’s fundamental stuff. A teacher could afford a house in the 90s; they can’t now. For all the boomers bang on about mobile phones and flat screen TVs, in the end those are luxuries compared to clean, secure accommodation. The days of getting a mortgage on one income, or having access to nice council housing are gone.

graemep 1y ago

The share of the middle 40% has fallen sharply according to the bottom chart on that page. The bottom 50% is unchanged in aggregate , but there will be groups within in that have done a lot worse. I would also guess (I cannot find numbers) that the proportion of income that is spent on essentials has risen.

gnfargbl 1y ago

What has actually changed is that thirty years ago, the ratio between house prices and average earnings was about 4. By twenty years ago it had doubled and, most importantly, it has been at that level ever since with no real sign of dropping [1]. This is a structural change. We now have at least one, and perhaps two, generations of people who can't really alter their economic situation through hard work. That's the classic recipe for populism to thrive. [1] https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-174-years-of-data-tell-us-about-house-price-affordability-in-the-uk/ https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
And as with so many modern issues, the housing problem was largely created by Thatcher - her Right to Buy policy.
- gnfargbl 1y ago
  I couldn't disagree more! I think the housing cost issue is pure supply and demand, we have a country which doesn't like to permit building and an increasing population due to (legal) immigration. I will bash Maggie all day, for her refusal to effectively manage industrial decline in Britain, for her boneheaded belief that a top-ranking economy could exist solely on services, and, most of all, for her idiotic squandering of our North Sea oil wealth. But, Right to Buy was a rare hit for me. I see it as having been a forward-looking policy which aimed to reward people for work -- play the game, and you too can have a tangible slice of society in the form of your own home to possess and care for as you wish. The problem is that we didn't replace the social housing lost to RtB.
  - calcifer 1y ago
    > The problem is that we didn't replace the social housing lost to RtB. We didn't fail that - Councils wanted to build more social housing with RtB and Thatcher viciously destroyed those programs. She created RtB not because it was a "forward-looking policy aimed to reward people for work" but because she hated the social security apparatus and wanted to destroy it. And she was never covert nor apologetic about it.

acatnamedjoe 1y ago

I think the argument is less that inequality has increased overall, and more that the country is increasingly stratified by geography - with greater concentrations of wealth in the South East relative to the rest of the country. This is especially true in formerly undesirable areas of London (e.g. Hackney, #10 on the 2003 list) and towns within commuting distance of London (e.g. Hythe, #3). Presumably this is due to the gradual shift to a London-centric services economy as well as the increasingly ludicrous price of houses in Central London.

jdietrich 1y ago

>What has actually changed? The value of grants paid from central government to local government have fallen by over 80%. In 2005, the poorest local authorities received most of their funding from central government; today, they're dependent on council tax and business rates for the vast majority of their income. During that time, demand for social care has vastly increased, disproportionately so in the poorest local authorities, eating away at the already shrinking resources of local authorities. The result of those cuts have been drastic for people living in poorer communities, particularly the poorest members of those communities. They quite justifiably feel abandoned by society. Youth clubs and children's centres, social work, homelessness provision, subsidised bus routes, parks and libraries have all been cut to the bone. None of that is captured in the Gini coefficient, but it's felt acutely by the people who rely on those services. The wealthy are largely unaffected by this, because they live in local authorities that were never particularly reliant on central government funding and because they never really relied on council services anyway. For the very poorest, the impact of austerity is often dominated by one big failure of provision - being stuck in unsuitable temporary accommodation for months or years because there's no social housing available, being denied support for a disabled child etc. For the majority, it's just a slow but pervasive erosion of their quality of life - their kids have nowhere to go after school, their street is full of potholes, the bus they take into town has been cut from four an hour to one an hour, their back alley is full of rubbish because the council can't afford to deal with fly-tipping. https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/NEF_Local_Government_Austerity_2019.pdf https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/NEF_Local_Government_... https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp510.pdf https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp51...

scotty79 1y ago

Gini coefficient of what? Income or wealth? Is borrowing money with appreciating assets as collateral treated as income for purposes of thsese calculations?

Earw0rm 1y ago

Wealth has moved from public to private, and consumer spending from high streets to out-of-town shopping centres and Amazon, Deliveroo etc. Leaving a badly depleted public sphere.