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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>So Europe did a better job in distributing wealth more equally

False. Europe did a better job at distributing income due to high taxes but not wealth.

Most Europeans are rich due to accumulation of wealth (specifically old business and real estate) inherited across generations.

Due to that, statistically, Europe does worse than the US wealth inequality as wealth has pooled to the people whose families have been here the longest, the newcomers are just burdened with high income taxes and high property prices, that's why skilled immigrants in STEM who have options and can afford to "shop around" usually avoid Europe in favor of North America.

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> Due to that, statistically, Europe does worse than the US wealth inequality […]

Do you have a source for the statistic that show this?

Another comment mentioned Gini. Piketty uses the share of the top percentile (1%) or decile (10%):

* https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequal...

* https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-...

The US isn't the worst in the world, but it is certainly more unequal than Europe as a whole, and most (all?) EU countries.

Both of those citations appear to be looking at income inequality measures rather than wealth inequality measures.

What is wealth but income accumulated over time?

(Or wealth stolen from others. Oops?)

Wealth is the integral of income minus expenses plus net unrealized gains over time. The latter two terms are pretty significant in the overall calculus, if you’ll pardon the (partial?) pun.

Yeah but what pays for rent and food? Income.

There are several chapters on wealth inequality in Piketty's book:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Wealth is harder to measure because it's not as reported in most countries. You get an 'income slip' for tax purposes (e.g., US Form W-2), but there's no official 'wealth slip'.

That's one of the things that Piketty suggests: declaring of credits and debts in an official way, which could then be used for a (net) wealth tax. Starting as little 0.1% if you're just over (e.g.) $US 10M, and having a top rate of (e.g.) 2% for those that are worth more than (say) US$ 1B.

> Due to that, statistically, Europe does worse than the US wealth inequality

I had a quick look at Wikipedia's wealth Gini figures and this isn't the case. Places like the Netherlands and Sweden score atrociously, but the three big European economies (France, Germany, and the UK) all have less wealth inequality than the US (significantly so for the first two), as do a whole host of other European countries.

It doesn’t look to me like Germany has significantly better score than the US. (0.818 Germany vs 0.852 US. 0.867 Sweden and 0.906 for Netherlands [with 0.736 the very year prior, making me suspicious of the stability of those data points as I can’t comprehend that wealth distribution across a country that large could change that much in a single year].)

* - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...

Is the GINI scale linear? In other words, what does a difference of 0.81 vs 0.85 mean?

The Netherlands is quite small (about the size of LA + suburbs). I didn’t look at the data, but there was a major shift in 0-hour contracts in the last year due to COVID-19 which would probably impact those calculations[citation needed].

The figures in the table are 2018 to 2019, so predate CV-19. Even with that, those would seem like that could shift income inequality measures but not wealth inequality measures by such a wide range.

Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...

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