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by BrainInAJar 2940 days ago
> In terms of poverty, is there a difference between getting more wealth vs everything becoming cheaper?

Yes. The delta between the richest and poorest indicates a lot of things about a society.

1 comments

What does it indicate?

You can go to a place like Mauritius where the delta is enormous, but everyone is pretty happy and the rich and poor mingle freely. Or you can have a place like France where the delta is far smaller, but the rich and poor detest each other and very rarely mingle.

In 2014 The Gini coefficient for Mauritas was 30 and for France it was 40.

The top 1% in France has about 20% of the total income as of 2014.

For Mauritas no suitable data was found for wealth inequality or dispersion of earnings.

The lack of good data for Mauritas makes a comparison between the two questionable.

Plus even after looking at the numbers for these countries I would want to check out money laundering - if I recall, based on the Panama papers, a nontrivial amount of the 1% (probably more like the 0.1%s) wealth is laundered/hidden/dark. I don’t know if the studies here attempt to account for that or not. I would imagine money laundering is prevalent in France (or any major economy for that matter), possibly in Mauritas

https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/inequality-by-...

https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/inequality-by-...

Information on data sources here - https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/about/

As of 2018 the population of Mauritas is 1.26 million (via google search). The 2018 population of France is 65.23 million (via google search). The 2014 population probably was not radically different.

I wonder if the size of the society in question matters here - is comparing a country to one 65 times larger than it useful?

I did not look for data to validate the hypothesis that everyone is pretty happy in Mauritas as opposed to France.

Back in the 90's I saw the same thing when living in Brazil. A friend in his 70's who owned real estate in Rio owned a Rolls recently returned from NYC. He said he was shocked at seeing the hatred in the eyes of people in NYC. He countered how he could stop for a coffee or beer or anything else and just talk to anyone who was there regardless of the socio-economic status. I had to agree. I always wondered why there was not more discontent.