I’ve been delinquent in writing up the half a dozen stories on global inequality which I’ve been meaning to blog about, so here they all are in one go:
- “the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.”
- That’s looking at wealth, rather than income, but Michael Turton sent me a link to this great dynamic chart which tracks global income inequality as well as a host of other demographic factors, such as life expectancy and concentration of populations in urban areas.
- Michael also has this post about income inequality in Taiwan.
- The importance of wealth, as opposed to income, can be seen in this great editorial piece about inequality in Korea: “Forty percent of Korean households and half of Seoul’s citizens don’t own their own home. The more housing costs rise, the more they help to define people’s class status.” (Thanks Kotaji!)
- The NY Times has two great stories about educational inequality at the college leve. One from the US: “more leading public universities are striving for national status and drawing increasingly impressive and increasingly affluent students… In the process, critics say, many are losing force as engines of social mobility, shortchanging low-income and minority students, who are seriously underrepresented on their campuses.”
- And one from India: “The job market for Indian college graduates is split sharply in two. With a robust handshake, a placeless accent and a confident walk, you can get a $300-a-month job with Citibank or Microsoft. With a limp handshake and a thick accent, you might peddle credit cards door to door for $2 a day.”
- UPDATE: I should also add these three posts where Brad DeLong and Mark Thoma jump on Alan Reynolds who attempts, in the Wall Street Journal, to deny that inequality has risen: here, here, and here.
{inequality, wealth}
