US income inequality jumps to highest level ever recorded | Hacker News Reader

US income inequality jumps to highest level ever recorded

markets.businessinsider.com

48 pointsyogthos5 comments

Hmmm...other sources have the U.S. Gini coefficient at around 0.39, not the 0.48 that this says: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm

OECD and the Census bureau both seem like reputable sources, so I wonder what the methodology difference is.

A quick google shows the same thing is true in France and China. Those were the first two arbitrary countries that came to mind.

This seems to be a non story explained away by globalization or at least only of interest when discussed in the context of globalization as the trend seems to have little to do with the “US” specifically.

I don’t know much about France, but China has all kinds of issues (egregious human rights, IP theft, dodgy business practices). Just the other day I read about how they’re persecuting a Muslim population of their own people and harvesting their organs.

To compare that country to America and say this is a non story because something also happened there doesn’t make sense.

America’s always been about opportunity. Regardless of how people perceive our government, folks from everywhere on the planet have wanted to come and live work here. If something is now changing that and taking away the opportunity, that’s a problem, and as an American, I absolutely care about it.

Well, at the very least, if something's happening in countries as different in their politics and economic policies as France, the U.S., and China, then you should not be looking at the specifics on a country to find the cause. It seems more likely to be something that is global in scope.

This whole American exceptionalism meme is getting pretty old now. US runs literal concentration camps for children, and you have torture camps on Cuban soil. People in Flint still don't have drinking water, more than half of Americans can't afford an unexpected $500 expense. And don't even get me started on dodgy business practices when you elect Trump as your president. US has one of the largest prison populations in the world, with the number of people imprisoned per capita that's higher than China. And then there's US foreign policy that created literal slave markets in Lybia, killed millions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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