| It's not really a conspiracy. You just need to know the right people intimately. I live in a country with a thoroughly dysfunctional banking system which, by most accounts, fall right in the middle of the global income bracket. Yet I know a ton of people in the upper-middle and lower-upper class and they all have the following characteristics of their wealth, which _do not_ appear in most wealth statistics: * One or multiple bank accounts in offshore tax havens, with the US being the most important * Multiple properties, whose real ownership is hidden by being assigned to family members, friends, and relatives * A lot of overseas trips to buy things that are normally horribly expensive due to to import restrictions. * A deep, thorough understanding not only of tax law, but also personal connections with people who work in tax agencies to understand when to avoid (legally), when to evade (knowing the tax agency won't pursue evasions under a certain currency amount) and when to get into convenient tax amnesty regimes. Again, these aren't phenomenally rich people and they're easily hiding away 50-85% of their net wealth. By most metrics these people's income would, in theory, put them in median American lifestyle. Yet it's obvious that their standard of living _easily_ puts them in the top 2-5% of a developed country, with the addition that labor costs are so cheap that they can afford services even pretty wealthy people in other places cannot. This is a classic in Latin America, and I have no reasons to believe it's any different elsewhere; the instruments are just different. |