The U.S. outpaces other nations — the income wage gap is huge.
Siripurapu 20 — Anshu Siripurapu, a writer/editor for CFR, holds a BA in political economy from the University of Southern California, 2020 (“The U.S. Inequality Debate,” CFR, April 20th, Available Online at https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-inequality-debate, Accessed 06-26-2023)
The picture is much the same when looking at wealth—that is, total net worth rather than yearly income. In 2021, the top 10 percent of Americans held nearly 70 percent of U.S. wealth, up from about 61 percent at the end of 1989. The share held by the next 40 percent fell correspondingly over that period. The bottom 50 percent (roughly sixty-three million families) owned about 2.5 percent of wealth in 2021.
Moreover, inequality in the United States outpaces that of other rich nations. This is captured by the steady rise in the U.S. Gini coefficient, a measure of a country’s economic inequality that ranges from zero (completely equal) to one hundred (completely unequal). The United States’ Gini coefficient was forty in 2019—the same as Bulgaria’s and Turkey’s, and significantly higher than that of Canada, France, and Germany—according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of advanced economies.