Unless we get economic progress more equally spread this will get worse and worse.
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
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".
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.
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-kaiserr...
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-househo...
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"
For example, Ireland's redistribution of income from rich to poor does more to reduce inequality than any other country in the OECD. The numbers are here: https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality-before-and-afte... or look at Figure 1 on page 10 here: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
And in figure 3, page 11 of the above report, Ireland has seen the 3rd highest growth in income redistribution in the OECD with redistribution from wealthy to poor growing by 40% in the space of a decade
So as far as I can see the facts indicate that Irish government policy is the exact opposite of what you claim.
I don't know why the rich in Ireland are somehow not on that graph, but when you walk around in Dublin for 10 minutes you see that this just isn't the real situation. It absolutely isn't the case that there aren't very rich people in Ireland and obviously they're not getting their wealth redistributed ...
Looking at the CEIC data you linked, which is not inflation-adjusted, it shows household income increasing from just under $20k in 2003 to around $40k in 2023. Plugging that into the CAGR formula you get a 3.5% nominal annual return.
So house prices have increased at over 6.5% annually after inflation, while household incomes have increased at 3.5% before inflation.
And your other link makes it clear that the change in wealth distribution is really just a side effect of the housing bubble:
> The Gini coefficient fell from 0.78 in Q2 2013 to 0.70 as of Q4 2020, before declining sharply since 2021 (Chart 3). This steeper decline in 2021 is driven by increasing net wealth for the Bottom 50%, accounted for by a combination of a decline in this groups mortgage liabilities and, to a lesser extent, an upward appreciation in the value of housing assets. As a consequence, by Q1 2022 the Gini coefficient for Ireland stood at 0.68.
Your graph comes from BIS data - picking 1995 as starting point is a little unfair as that's exactly when house prices started to rise - if I measure from 1990, the rise (using BIS nominal nominal to make comparison easier) is 5.1% per annum.
But yes house prices have risen faster than household incomes. Like pretty much everywhere else in the world.
> And your other link makes it clear that the change in wealth distribution is really just a side effect of the housing bubble
The claim I was contesting was that wealth inequality had increased in the last few decades. It has not - it has decreased significantly.
The con artists they vote for are plainly not going to help their interests (and often work against them), yet they reject understanding this and instead buy into simplistic emotional propaganda that validates their frustrations and absolves their responsibility. Then after some years go by when the mess has set in and Democrats have the nominal power, the Republican media machine goes to work highlighting everything they've broken and pinning it on the current administration. Rinse and repeat.
(context: I'm a libertarian and I have many criticisms of the Democrats as well, but at least they haven't been directly sabotaging the country for the past several decades, culminating in this)
There are no good outcomes until people stop voting for these grifters and con men.
Hell, it already has gotten worse in both France and Germany compared to the US. Imho Macron is more or less the same kind of politician as Trump (rich, and in it to make the rich richer), just a very different person (for one thing he's easily got 10x Trump's IQ, 10x Trump's looks, and doesn't look like an ancient golden retriever that got demummified for a presidential term). Obviously this guy failed to improve France's economic prospects, and every election cycle the actual Nazis, led by Le Pen, gain 5% extra of the vote. Germany differs a lot in the details, but something similar is happening.
The situation in (some parts of) Europe is like if you're hoping for 3rd Trump term, because Steve Bannon became a presidential candidate that polls over 50%. When Trump has just made immigration policy stricter in desperation, because even Trump realizes what a disaster that would be.
The feel good explanations are just that - feel good euphemisms. Acting on them failed in the past repeatedly. Politicians who tried to improve situation of these people were punished, repeatedly. Meanwhile, politicians acting in offensive and harmful way were rewarding even when they made lifes of their voters worst.
We really should stop projecting these good faith falsehoods when the are and were clearly false.
All I know is that the 1990s until now have been a bonanza for some people but increasingly difficult for many others. I blame this on the financialization of our economy, with housing policy in America’s coastal metro areas definitely not helping (municipalities restrict supply through zoning and other mechanisms, and the financialization of our economy only exacerbated matters by pouring gasoline on the demand side). This is a failure of our leadership class; I’m not just talking about politicians, but I’m talking about our wealthy, our corporate executives, and even ourselves when we have positions of influence. Collectively the leadership of our country has chosen maximizing their own material benefit at the expense of maintaining a livable society. The result is anger due to Americans increasly having a harder time just getting by while our “leadership” keeps adding to their power and wealth.
Due to anger over establishment politicians, the Republican Party has been completely captured by MAGA, and the Democratic Party has a very vocal left wing that came close to winning the 2016 primary and was a serious contender in 2020.
Unfortunately Trump on a good day is far more destructive than Clinton, both Bushes, Obama, and Biden on their worst days. Trump’s neo-mercantilist economic policies won’t bring prosperity, but unfortunately his stance on “culture war” matters have resonated with large swaths of the American electorate; we’ve long had problems with racism, xenophobia, religious bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and other related issues since the colonial era.
Moreover, despite Trump’s promises in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” Trump is backed by many prominent billionaires and other influential and powerful people. Trump is not a one-man operation; he would have no power without an entire apparatus of GOP politicians and a stacked Supreme Court.
The only thing keeping Trump’s popularity afloat is his relentless attacks on “enemies” of MAGA, such as immigrants, scientists, universities, unflattering media outlets, Democratic politicians, etc. But eventually the fallout of his reckless policies will trickle down to Trump voters in the form of higher prices for goods and services, and either when Trump runs out of enemies or when the MAGA base gets crushed by the weight of high prices and are looking for answers, what are Trump and MAGA politicians going to do?
Unfortunately I don’t see any easy solutions. A return to the pre-2017 status quo ante is only going to lead to the same leadership that led to such anger in the first place. However, staying the course is definitely going to lead to a crash. The solution is going to need to come from the people, but it’s hard for average people in America to compete against systems that entrench the power of our two-party system and that require massive amounts of money to effectively compete. There are no easy ways out of this mess.
If they believed Trump, they deserve everything they get. Sadly those who didn't believe didn't vote enough.
Is it a matter of "belief," or could it possibly be an optimal strategy to secure potentially two more Supreme Court nominations?
Unfortunately, consequences wont go only to people who voted for Trump, they will harm quite a lot of innocent people.
If I come here and tell you that I'm going to reduce expenses and debt while reducing taxes and also investing massive amounts of money to improve the military, healthcare, etc, something should go off in your head because it doesn't add up.
Voting for someone promising unrealistic things is no different from going into a dark alley in what you know is a rough neighborhood. A victim is still a victim, but grown ups must own up to their actions... and there's no other way of saying this: what you did was fucking dumb. It's even dumber if you do the same dumb thing twice.
Trump should have been a much simpler problem. Those who want to be stupid badly can't be helped.