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Comment by timwaagh | Hacker News Reader

In the Netherlands we already have wealth tax (capital gains tax, but doesn't care whether you gained or not). It's nothing particularly disruptive. We still have the most wealth inequality in all the world. It might be a bit pointless to tax wealth in addition to capital gains though. You could just raise the former instead.

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I think you need to revisit your assumption about wealth inequality in The Netherlands. It’s on par with that of most of Europe, significantly lower than in the US [1].

[1] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rank...

You linked an income inequality graph, which is distinct from wealth. If you look at the list on Wikipedia [1] and sort by Wealth Gini (2019) you will find that the Netherlands are #1.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq...

Any explanation for the jump from 2018 to 2019?

Based on the Global Wealth Book 2018 and 2019 from Credit Suisse, comparing Table 3-1 in both books, it appears that the number of adults in "under 10.000" range increased significantly in 2019. This is likely not a real change, but rather a change of methodology or data sources. As far as I can tell however, this is not detailed in the text. I have directed an email to Credit Suisse on this, as it's a rather interesting piece of data.

Quite interesting, curious what they have to say. I'd be glad if you can put me in cc (e-mail in profile).

Ah you’re right. I misread the parent comment. Thanks.

In that case, perhaps the issue is not the existence of a wealth tax per se, but how large that tax is. I'm also dubious about the Netherlands having "the most wealth inequality in all the world." Do you have a source for that?

The Netherlands really has most? I honestly don’t believe that without any supporting evidence.

A bit surprising, huh? According to this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq... The Netherland, indeed, is the worst. It's close to having a minority own everything while everybody else has 0 (a 1.0 coefficient).

I’m really surprised. It went up a lot from 2018 and 2019 so I don’t fully trust the result but that might be bias talking.

Our friendly Australian economics man made a concise video about it a couple of months ago[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot4qdCs54ZE

TL;DW Very liberal mortgage policy that encourages very low or negative wealth on the low end, and very old money that remains concentrated despite recent income equality.

The video doesn't quite explain the jump though. The amount of old money didn't jump between 2018 and 2019 and it is getting harder and rarer to be underwater on your mortgage.

Yeah, jumping from #65 to #1 in a single year is... surprising.

A quick look at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...) shows that the Netherlands does not have the most wealth inequality in the world. What an odd assertion.

What's odd is that you've chosen to look up income inequality as opposed to the clearly stated wealth inequality as though they mean the same thing.

You looked a bit too quickly, you linked to "Income equality" there. Look here at Wealth Equality and sort by 2019 Gini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq...

> We still have the most wealth inequality in all the world.

No you don't, not even close. Where did you get that idea?

Statistics, most likely. (And yes, they do.)

see page 199 in this dataset[0] which is the dataset used for this list of countries on Wikipedia[1]. If you sort on Wealth Gini (2019), then Netherlands is ranked first.

0: https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq...

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