The Distribution of Wealth II

I Have a Dream

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring,
when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet,
from every state and every city,
we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children,
black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics,
will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

We can not be free until, we all have an equal share.

For the 162 countries reported in Wikipedia using Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Databook for 2021, the total number of adults reported are 5.05 billion and the total wealth is $416 trillion USD.  The mean global wealth is $82,306.  If this wealth followed a statistical normal distribution, the mean should be equal to the median.  However the product of the median wealth in each county multiplied by the adults in that country summed over all countries would require a global wealth of $786 trillion, so clearly the mean is not equal  to the median and wealth is not normally distributed  The country where the mean comes closest to the median is Iceland where the mean wealth is $337,787 and the median wealth is $231,462.  Iceland also has the second lowest reported Gini Index at 50.9 ( the lowest is Slovakia at 50.3).  The Gini Index is a statistical measure of inequality, where a score of 100 indicates that most of the measurement is due to one individual in the population.  The United States was reported to have a total wealth of $126 trillion, a mean wealth per adult of $505,421, a median wealth per adult of $79,274, and a Gini Index of 85.0. This is the 25^th highest Gini Index, the highest being Brunei with a Gini Index of 96.2.

Wealth is not reported lower than $0 ( technically negative “wealth” is debt, and would not be  counted as wealth.)  A normal distribution would require the allowance of negative values.  Wealth might follow another distribution for example an exponential  distribution.  In an exponential distribution the mean can not equal the median, but that distribution is closest to a normal distribution if the mean is 1.44 times the median.  The ratio of the mean to the median in the United States is the third highest at 6.38, the highest again being Brunei with a ratio of 7.63. Wealth in the United States is thus neither normally distributed, or distributed at an exponential minimum.

Wikipedia also reports countries by region.  It’s Northern American region includes only the United States and Canada.  (Mexico is assigned to its Central American region.)  Northern America is the region with the most wealth, and the highest mean wealth at $486,909, but the United States is responsible for 93% of that wealth. Canada has a mean wealth of $332,323 and a median wealth of $125,688. A region with a comparable mean wealth is Australia combined with New Zealand, which has a mean wealth of $465,680. However, the ratio of mean to median wealth in Australia and New Zealand is respectively 2.05 and 2.03.  Three regions comprising Europe (excluding Eastern Europe) have a wealth of $94 trillion, and the ratios of mean to median wealth per adult range from a high of 3.74 in Sweden to a low of 1.04 in Iceland.

The United States thus appears to have a less equitable distribution of wealth per adult: within its region, with a region of comparable mean wealth, or with regions of comparable total wealth.