World Income Inequality

[Recursion]

A bit more grist for this running flamewar.

From Marginal Revolution: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01/world-income-inequality.html



EDIT: fixed the chart display

The graph shows that the bottom 5% of Brazilians are among the poorest people in the world but the top 5% are among the richest. Thus the vertical range of the curve tells us about within-country inequality.

Comparing between countries we see that the poorest 5% of Americans are among the richest people in the world (richer than nearly 70% of other people in the world). The poorest 5% of Americans, for example, are richer than the richest 5% of Indians.

[OneGrassRoot]

1. Thank you for this. Also....

Has anyone seen a recent chart showing the disparity between executive/CEO pay in relation to average employee salaries throughout different countries?

I previously found something from 2000, and most countries showed executive pay limited to up to 50 times the median salary of employees of same company while the US exec pay was over 500 times that of the median employee salary. If anyone has this info, I'd appreciate it.

:hi:

[Jim__]

2. There are only 4 countries in the world? Or, is the chart labeled incorrectly? - n/t

[Recursion]

4. What about that chart makes you think that?

It doesn't claim the lines are exhaustive; these are four cases.

[Recursion]

3. I found this via Andrew Sullivan, who also posted this comment from a reader

The main reason that the US has a higher Gini coefficient is that it is much larger than any of those other countries. The Gini tends to be higher for larger populations. So, for example, the Gini coefficient of income for the US will he higher than that of any individual US state. It's interesting that of this group, that Israel (population: 7 million) and Tunisia (10 million) have higher Ginis than Egypt (34 million) or Pakistan (170 million); nevertheless, comparing Ginis of different-sized groups is very much an apples-to-oranges comparison.

This is very much true. Coming from an electrical engineering background I had used Gini coefficients on probability distributions much more than on income distributions (it applies to any piecewise differentiable distribution, and is used a lot in information theory as a complement to Shannon entropy), but the issue of here of population size is important.

Also, while reading up on it I just found out that Gini was a fascist. Go figure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_Gini