income distribution in other countries
Topics: Taxes
21 Oct 2008
From: Ervan Darnell
The Economist has a fascinating chart of income distribution in other
countries:
http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12454152&fsrc=rss
What I see in it is that, yes, the U.S. has the greatest spread. But,
it's not that much different than other countries. The top decile makes
between 1.9 and 2.9 times much as the median across different
countries. While that's significant, it's not huge compared to long
term growth. Here are a few I'm guessing from the chart (choosing
common comparison points):
U.S. - 2.9
Britain - 2.7
Canada - 2.4
The other aspect is that the average income in the U.S. is higher than
all of the others except for Luxembourg. The U.S. bottom decile is
slightly below European countries, but not that far below.
A third observation is that the the least developed countries have less
of a bell curve. The bottom 80-90% are all in the same boat, and the
top 10% are truly rich. The more developed countries really do have a
true middle class.
This echoes my point of a few weeks ago that income distribution is more
difficult to change than total income. Redistributionist schemes help
the poor a little, but they hurt everyone else more. Economic growth is
more important than "fairness". Less clear, but also suggested is that
countries with powerful governments tend to help the poor at the cost of
the middle class, but the politically connected stay rich, hardly what
liberals envision.
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