Michael Henderson suggests

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Stat of the Day II

Friday, 11th January 2008

I just adore numbers like the one that James flagged up below.

By 2004, the richest one percent of Americans were earning more than the total national income of France or Italy.

It comes from Robert Frank's "Richistan" and is, as far as I can tell, an entirely valid statistic. It certainly doesn't feel out of place to me. However, I do understand that not everyone is going to be quite as blase about it as I am. The reason for my nonchalance is that we need to take account of the difference in size of population.

The first thing to note though is that these numbers are pre-tax and the benefit system. The major difference in income distribution between Europe and the US is not in the market incomes, but in the disposable ones, the ones left after the rich have been hammered and the poor assuaged. Sweden, for example, has a market income distribution very like that of the US (and the UK is more unequal than either) as you can see here.

The thing that makes the original statistic so jarring then is not the gross inequity of the US income distribution, it's the sheer number of people within the US. 300 odd million people and 150 million (roughly) taxpayers. We should rather be comparing the EU with the US, 450 million people; yes, it's not exactly the same number but we are at least in the correct order of magnitude.

One minor point when you do this is that, given the vastly larger differences in incomes between EU countries as opposed to US States, the EU is vastly more unequal in the distribution of incomes.

But the major one is that when we use the EU as our yardstick I'm absolutely certain that you'll find that the top 1% of our fellow slaves to Brussels will also be earning more than the total national income of France or Italy.