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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia's (UBS') US figure ($69k) is probably wrong? US median household wealth is ~$193k[1]. I don't think there's a way to square claimed median individual wealth of $69k with that? Even taking into account children (22% population) and assuming 2 adults/household (more favorable to the math than the real 1.2-1.4 figure). I can't find anything on UBS' methodology, just the short 1.5 page paper.

[1]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

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I don't have an explanation for this but I did note that the 2023 UBS report had US Median Wealth per adult at $107K[1].

I wonder if there is a per adult vs per person vs per working person difference in the measurement or something like that?

Edit: I've dug into this more, and the closest thing I can come up with for an explanation is that UBS changed its model for 2026 to "normalize household debt" in order to make it more comparable across countries. There doesn't seem to be sufficient information to explain how that change caused such a radical change.

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20230815103944/https://www.ubs.c...

$107k is getting closer to being reconcilable with household $193k, yeah. The gap between $69k and $107k cannot be entirely explained by children (only 22% of population).

> US median household wealth is ~$193k

Emphasis mine. US median household is 2.53 persons [1]. 193/2.53 = 76k, which is within spitting distance of the 69k per person listed. The wikipedia is median wealth per capita

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HCN010222*

I think this analysis is conflating two different kinds of household -- a 2.53 (average) figure must include non-financially interdependent roommates, which aren't included in the $193k household figure.

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