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I don't think this is true or at least is not reflected by any statistics. Inequality, as measured by GINI has been falling both for the EU as a whole and with

by derriz 1y ago

I don't think this is true or at least is not reflected by any statistics. Inequality, as measured by GINI has been falling both for the EU as a whole and within most European countries for decades now. The last decade in particular has seen declines in nearly all EU countries. Taking the EU on average the last time it increased was in 2014 - which is to be expected as the 2013 expansion allowed a number of relatively poor countries into the union. For individual countries, you can check the statistics here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI A few examples, I looked at Ireland in particular, and inequality has never been lower - the earliest statistics I could find is from the mid-1980s. Inequality peaked around 2000 for the UK and has declined hugely since then. France is more equal than it was in 2000 although the fall is less dramatic than that for the UK. Admittedly Germany has seen a slight rise since 2000 but Germany has also absorbed millions of very poor refugees in that time. The US is an outlier globally - with rising inequality over the last few decades. Slightly off-topic, this untrue claim of rising inequality in Europe is often presented without challenge and then used to justify some radical political solution. To my mind, it's using the same political "mind hack" that the the MAGA/alt-right in the USA have used (in this case concerning race, immigrants, global multilateralism, or social tolerance - "wokism" - in general). For both, the veracity of the claims is apparently unimportant and uninteresting as long as the claim aligns with one's political orientation. The goal of these oft repeated untruths is to provoke indignation or anger - in order to drum up support for some radical political "solution".

nosianu 1y ago
Gini does not give a full picture, it is just one measure. Here is a German podcast on the high quality "Deutschlandfunk". Headline: "Only the top four percent make it to the top in Germany." > Despite political upheavals over the past 150 years, Germany's elites have remained the same. Sociologist Michael Hartmann criticizes the fact that only four percent of the population shapes the country. He calls for a quota of working-class children on executive boards. Same with Germany's schools, my country has one of the worst records when it comes to mixing it up. Those who come from well-educated parents will become well-educated. Society is quite static. Next, Germany puts the majority of the financial burden of financing the country on incomes from work. Income from capital, or much worse, inheritances, are not even considered, whenever the government needs to plug holes it's going to come from working income. Also, the number of bad jobs, especially those where even many engineers don't work for the actual employer, but for companies that lend them out, has only risen decade by decade to absurd heights. Employers may claim that is to work around the strict labor laws, that they cannot just fire somebody they don't want, but that is an incomplete statement at best. The entire economy has gone away from stable long-term, even life jobs, to ever more insecure employment. That is part of why our birth-rate has just dropped to new record lows too, there is just too little security and too much uncertainty in one's live these days. We are also terrible at providing housing, which also depresses the labor market because moving has become risky and costly, there just is no housing no matter where you go, and if you find something it's likely to be much more expensive than what you had.
- nosianu 1y ago
  > Here is a German podcast on the high quality "Deutschlandfunk". I forgot the actual URL! It's German though. And a podcast (19. July 2025, 29 minutes) But it's good and quite thorough and has a lot of details, so if you understand German, it is worth a listen. They say the "elite" is about 4,000 people in Germany, defined as those having significant and real influence in politics, law, media (highly concentrated ownership), business. https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eliten-seit-dem-kaiserreich-an-die-spitze-kommen-nur-die-oberen-vier-prozent-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eliten-seit-dem-kaiserr...
pseudo0 1y ago
The problem with those stats for Ireland is that the Gini coefficient measured by the World Bank just looks at household income, not wealth. Much of the inequality in Ireland in the last few decades has been driven by the explosion in property prices and rents. This has created a great deal of inequality between people who benefited from the rapid increase in price of those assets, and the people stuck paying much higher rents. In roughly a generation (30 years) property prices have increased by roughly 600% after adjusting for inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QIEN628BIS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QIEN628BIS
- derriz 1y ago
  Household wealth inequality has also fallen significantly in Ireland. Longer term statistics are more difficult to find compared to income inequality but see Chart 3 here - https://www.centralbank.ie/statistics/statistical-publications/behind-the-data/the-evolution-of-irish-household-wealth https://www.centralbank.ie/statistics/statistical-publicatio... - provides a 12 year time series which proves this. Irish property prices are and have risen considerably - but "600%", I think, is a somewhat dramatic way to present the increases - on an average yearly basis, it's been about 3.5% per year for the last 2 or 3 decades. To put this into perspective, average household incomes have been rising at a rate closer to 9% (non-inflation adjusted) per year - see https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/ireland/annual-household-income-per-capita https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/ireland/annual-househo...
  - spwa4 1y ago
    True this is bullshit. The government has a direct policy of wealth transfer from the population to itself and banks, who have "foreign" (except of course not really, for the worst example look at the board of the "gift to Ireland" national wealth fund and how the very young board members have no qualifications or experience and DO have family in government ...) ownership. Which, conveniently, isn't counted in the Gini coefficient. But if you count household wealth in houses in Ireland, household wealth in Ireland in 1986 used to be 3 average Irish houses, and now it's 1/3rd. This was, just like anywhere else, deliberate government policy, amongst others to allow banks to invest in housing stock, preferential tax treatment and guarantees for property ownership, government buying of specific (mostly politician owned) housing, non-enforcement of both Irish and non-Irish tax law ... the list goes on. Ireland prides itself on creating prosperity by lying and cheating other EU countries out of their tax income. Surprise! A government that lies on international treaties (they promised to enforce minimum tax since 2008, then ... didn't, then claimed credit for the "unseen in history prosperity boom"). Surprise! A government that does that ALSO lied to it's constituents and instead of delivering prosperity took 2/3rd of every euro you own. "Oops, who could have seen this coming"

by derriz 1y ago

nosianu 1y ago

Gini does not give a full picture, it is just one measure. Here is a German podcast on the high quality "Deutschlandfunk". Headline: "Only the top four percent make it to the top in Germany." > Despite political upheavals over the past 150 years, Germany's elites have remained the same. Sociologist Michael Hartmann criticizes the fact that only four percent of the population shapes the country. He calls for a quota of working-class children on executive boards. Same with Germany's schools, my country has one of the worst records when it comes to mixing it up. Those who come from well-educated parents will become well-educated. Society is quite static. Next, Germany puts the majority of the financial burden of financing the country on incomes from work. Income from capital, or much worse, inheritances, are not even considered, whenever the government needs to plug holes it's going to come from working income. Also, the number of bad jobs, especially those where even many engineers don't work for the actual employer, but for companies that lend them out, has only risen decade by decade to absurd heights. Employers may claim that is to work around the strict labor laws, that they cannot just fire somebody they don't want, but that is an incomplete statement at best. The entire economy has gone away from stable long-term, even life jobs, to ever more insecure employment. That is part of why our birth-rate has just dropped to new record lows too, there is just too little security and too much uncertainty in one's live these days. We are also terrible at providing housing, which also depresses the labor market because moving has become risky and costly, there just is no housing no matter where you go, and if you find something it's likely to be much more expensive than what you had.

nosianu 1y ago
> Here is a German podcast on the high quality "Deutschlandfunk". I forgot the actual URL! It's German though. And a podcast (19. July 2025, 29 minutes) But it's good and quite thorough and has a lot of details, so if you understand German, it is worth a listen. They say the "elite" is about 4,000 people in Germany, defined as those having significant and real influence in politics, law, media (highly concentrated ownership), business. https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eliten-seit-dem-kaiserreich-an-die-spitze-kommen-nur-die-oberen-vier-prozent-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/eliten-seit-dem-kaiserr...

pseudo0 1y ago

The problem with those stats for Ireland is that the Gini coefficient measured by the World Bank just looks at household income, not wealth. Much of the inequality in Ireland in the last few decades has been driven by the explosion in property prices and rents. This has created a great deal of inequality between people who benefited from the rapid increase in price of those assets, and the people stuck paying much higher rents. In roughly a generation (30 years) property prices have increased by roughly 600% after adjusting for inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QIEN628BIS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QIEN628BIS

derriz 1y ago
Household wealth inequality has also fallen significantly in Ireland. Longer term statistics are more difficult to find compared to income inequality but see Chart 3 here - https://www.centralbank.ie/statistics/statistical-publications/behind-the-data/the-evolution-of-irish-household-wealth https://www.centralbank.ie/statistics/statistical-publicatio... - provides a 12 year time series which proves this. Irish property prices are and have risen considerably - but "600%", I think, is a somewhat dramatic way to present the increases - on an average yearly basis, it's been about 3.5% per year for the last 2 or 3 decades. To put this into perspective, average household incomes have been rising at a rate closer to 9% (non-inflation adjusted) per year - see https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/ireland/annual-household-income-per-capita https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/ireland/annual-househo...
- spwa4 1y ago
  True this is bullshit. The government has a direct policy of wealth transfer from the population to itself and banks, who have "foreign" (except of course not really, for the worst example look at the board of the "gift to Ireland" national wealth fund and how the very young board members have no qualifications or experience and DO have family in government ...) ownership. Which, conveniently, isn't counted in the Gini coefficient. But if you count household wealth in houses in Ireland, household wealth in Ireland in 1986 used to be 3 average Irish houses, and now it's 1/3rd. This was, just like anywhere else, deliberate government policy, amongst others to allow banks to invest in housing stock, preferential tax treatment and guarantees for property ownership, government buying of specific (mostly politician owned) housing, non-enforcement of both Irish and non-Irish tax law ... the list goes on. Ireland prides itself on creating prosperity by lying and cheating other EU countries out of their tax income. Surprise! A government that lies on international treaties (they promised to enforce minimum tax since 2008, then ... didn't, then claimed credit for the "unseen in history prosperity boom"). Surprise! A government that does that ALSO lied to it's constituents and instead of delivering prosperity took 2/3rd of every euro you own. "Oops, who could have seen this coming"