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Comment by somewhereoutth | Hacker News Reader

I spent a couple of years in the States before returning to Europe. I really had no idea what happened to people - what they became - if they weren't fed and watered properly. I had always assumed that the way people were was just how people are. Scary how much we take for granted.

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This is true when you look at raw numbers but you'll still get some pushback on this fact since the pace of USA's drop in median wealth has been so sudden. As in my home country of Australia now has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita compared to the USA. This never used to be the case at all. Australia still has a lower average wealth but this is just telling of the extreme inequality. The median and averages aren't meant to be this far apart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

Sort by median and compare to average wealth to see the issue the USA has right now. The USA's median wealth in 2007 was $173,151 in inflation adjusted teams for some reference, it dropped in 2008 and never really recovered. It's now well below many other Western nations.

Do you have data showing a drop in per capita median wealth?

I found this nice visualisation: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

But it’s totals, and not inflation adjusted.

https://dqydj.com/net-worth-by-year/ See "Median Net Worth by Year".

It's inflation adjusted to 2022 though, not 2025 (hopefully at least that's still in ballpark though). There was a slight spike upwards for median wealth during the pandemic fwiw. This seems to have entirely corrected though.

I think your historic trend data is out of date. The inflation-adjusted median wealth crossed the 2007 bar sometime between 2019 and 2022.

See the "CPI-Adjusted to 2022" column https://dqydj.com/net-worth-by-year/

I'm not sure why that 2022 number is so much higher than the previous years listed.

I guess the stimulus checks and stock market movements during the pandemic brought the median and average closer together for a year? Regardless it didn't hold, it's back below 2007's level again today by any measure.

Isn't this an artifact of using the median when the majority of families in both countries own a home, and housing prices in Australia are somehow even crazier than they are in the US?

When housing prices are high, anyone who can't afford a down payment is completely screwed, because they're paying the high rents which inhibits saving, but the high rents they're paying aren't turning into principal. So the savings of most of the people who can't afford a home end up being ~0 or negative (in debt). But this will be worse, i.e. more inequality, in the country with the higher housing costs.

It just doesn't show up in the median when the median is a homeowner and then the higher housing costs increase their number.

But the "extra" wealth is mostly on paper because you have the house but you also need somewhere to live. If you sold it to get the money you'd have to pay the crazy rents, so all the value really does is give you the capacity to borrow against it, which is only useful if you wanted to borrow more than a smaller amount of equity would have allowed you to, which most people wouldn't. And if they did they wouldn't have that "wealth" anymore because they'd have borrowed and spent it, and would then be paying interest on the debt.

Nomadland the book documents this for a lot of Americans surviving in the brink in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, turning to living in vans and RVs, a less glamorous version of van life, barely scraping by and eventually bad luck or circumstance of some kind of another just crushes individuals. Even in Silicon Valley just a few streets from Google HQ in Mountain View on Longhorn and other streets there are several blocks filled with RVs of folks I assume like the ones in Nomadland. https://maps.app.goo.gl/KQY2AWL2sNfGem44A

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