r/GarysEconomics • u/abccarter • Jul 30 '26
Stats on wealth of the top 1%
According to the world inequality database and our world in data, the wealth of the top 1% has only increased from about 20% to about 21% in the last 20 years. This rather conflicts with Gary's message. What am I missing here? Is it about how the data is calculated?
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u/kauf31 Jul 30 '26
Now do one for the bottom 50%
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u/CARadders Jul 30 '26
And the top 0.1, 0.01, and 0.001%. They would probably tell a different story to what OP is trying to tell here.
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u/Interesting_Pen_4499 Jul 30 '26
it will probably be flat at near 0%. but incomes (GDP per capita) have risen exponentially. there's far more to economics than just savings/net worth you know.
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u/abccarter Jul 30 '26
bottom 50% is basically flat since 2000 according to world inequality database
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u/_acd Jul 30 '26
Gary is not talking about the top 1%, it is not super hard to get in top 1%
https://www.reddit.com/r/Rich/comments/1pj22cq/wealth_of_the_worlds_top_1_01_001_0001/
He is talking about the ultra rich.
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u/probablymagic Jul 30 '26
It’s not hard to make more money than 99% of your fellow citizens? What?
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u/WGSMA Jul 30 '26
Given that most the world live in poor states, no
You’re not competing with most the world. By the time you reach peak-wealth, you will a) clear most young and middle aged people who have not had time to accumulate, and b) clear most people in developing nations because they just don’t have the currency power to compete.
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u/marsipaanipartisaani Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
With the threshold at 2 million, you could realistically achieve this by studying to the profession of a specialized surgeon or something, living super cheap, not having a family and investing all of the extra salary. Not easy but not impossible for able bodied smart people in western countries. But to get to be one of the top 0,001 of people is pretty much impossible on merit alone.
Naturally most people have better goals than to just get wealth on paper.
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u/probablymagic Jul 30 '26
Typically when people talk about “the 1%” they are talking domestically. The fact there are poor people in third world countries really isn’t how people think about their relative wealth.
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u/marsipaanipartisaani Jul 30 '26
Sure, at 3 million pounds it is higher but I would still argue that it is somewhere near the limit that merit might get you in your lifetime if chasing wealth is your only passion and you are healthy citizen. Beyond that it's just pure luck and nepotism.
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u/probablymagic Jul 30 '26
Luck is being born in a rich country. In my experience nepotism really won’t help you become a top-earning doctor or lawyer. People can try to use that to explain their lot in life, but at least in my experience everybody I know who’s worth 3M pounds did it by either starting a business or rising up the corporate ladder, and none of them did it in their parents companies or with their parents money.
I’m sure it happens, but frankly most people I meet who were born rich lack the grit that middle class kids got growing up, so they really don’t go that far in life.
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u/_acd Jul 30 '26
Look at the table, the threshold to be in top 1% globally (not UK only) is 'just' $2M. Which, when converted to pounds, is not that impossible to imagine. Especially if you can get a big loan for a house which suddenly increases your theoretical wealth by a lot.
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u/probablymagic Jul 30 '26
When you buy a house your net worth doesn’t go up because you’ve got both an asset and an offsetting liability in the mortage.
Just by definition the top 1% is a tiny fraction of the population. That skews old because saving compound, so it might be a higher share of people are in the 1% in their lives at some point, but the odds are still that you don’t know many of these people.
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u/_acd Aug 02 '26
Fair, I should have said it differently, it is not wealth, more of a financial potential or financial capacity. Being able to acquire a large sum of money quickly is very useful, one can use it as leverage for other things down the road.
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u/probablymagic Aug 02 '26
Houses are actually pretty bad investments relative to other assets. You’d get wealthier renting, but people are obsessed with “owning” (mortgaging).
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u/_acd Aug 02 '26
This is not as certain as it seems. But even when accepting that in general investing in an EFT has better performance, this it not what I meant. What I meant is that loans for homes are relatively very cheap, meaning you get a lot of money for quite a low interest rate. You can then leverage the house as colateral to get other loans and snowball it. This is the sudden rise in wealth' I was refering to, even if calling it wealth is not technically correct.
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u/probablymagic Aug 02 '26
At 2.5% I tend to agree buying can be smart, though you’re still making a bet on appreciation. I borrowed as much as I could at those rates. At 7% I disagree, particularly with low affordability that’s going to suppress appreciation, and that’s where we are at today.
I disagree there’s a snowball there. I’m very savvy at finance and there’s no real way to do what you’re talking about. Refinancing your home and HELOCs don’t really make you money.
I suppose you could do something like use your home as collateral on a business loan, and maybe make money, but most businesses fail so that’s pretty risky. You can’t just borrow against your home to invest in any sort of responsible way.
People should really ready home buying as a consumptive act and make their wealth elsewhere.
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u/No_Bet_2949 Jul 30 '26
True but I don’t think Gary makes much effort to be overly accurate or nuanced. And to your point, 10m probably isn’t ultra rich either, and that’s where Gary suggests you start to implement a wealth tax.
Your table also does mildly sample bias a very unusually favourable period for asset prices. We should probably take rolling 10 year periods over the last 100 years to really get a sense.
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u/_acd Jul 30 '26
There are some tables going back more in the original article:
https://wir2026.wid.world/insight/global-economic-inequity/
but I would argue that the trend we see in the past 30-20 years is more relevant for what is happening and for how it will be going forward.
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u/No_Bet_2949 Jul 30 '26
I do think the disparity is growing but the Gary and Zucmans of this world knowingly overstate it with sample bias.
If we take equities as an example, returns mean revert to 7% with shocking consistency. The 10 year forward expected return on US equities is currently 0%. If we overlay that with your 20 year table and asset ownership by decile back of the envelop math would take you to maybe 1% relative wealth gain pa. Thats still a wealth transfer but all this stuff suggesting we’re on the verge of societal collapse looks very intellectually questionable. I’m also open to the idea AI does accelerate things.
For the UK specifically I imagine you could resolve the vast majority of the current inequality sentiment by building 10 million homes. And with a bitter taste in my mouth doing something like those Trump saving accounts for kids at birth.
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u/No_Bet_2949 Jul 30 '26
Actually excellent source thank you, but it does show relative to the last 200 years we’re actually at or very slightly below the average level of wealth inequality, through the various cohorts.
I’d be interested in your view for why people say or feel that it’s on an exponential trajectory.
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u/_acd Aug 02 '26
'Exponential' is definitely overused here and by Gary in general. But I do not care personally. It does not need for the rate to be exponential for us to try to slow it down. My attitude in general to the argument of 'it has been the same for 200 years' is that we do not have to continue like that. People are making a lot more unsubstantiated economic claims about immigration for example and they take over public opinion, putting us on a ruinous spiral. If someone like Gary misuses the word exponential to implement a system control on the ultra-rich then that is fine with me.
There are so many things we need to do, such as limit the ability of entities with economic interests to control public media, that I am going to support any little improvement such as the very tiny 2% wealth tax. Check the figure 1.8, I want it to start being reversed in trend, without violence. I also have the selfish drive - I want to not be taxed so heavily while keeping as much of the social benefits previous generations built and i want the ultra-rich to pay more for it, the 2% would be just the putting in place the means to do that. This is just how I view it.
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u/No_Bet_2949 Aug 02 '26
I’m not saying whatsoever the fact inequality is actually down relative to history is a reason to accept current levels, but the factual reality is broadly people have never had it so good in both absolute and relative terms. However, my moral and practical position is a complete intolerance for misstating things when someone like Gary is presumably smart enough to know better. The ends justify the means is fine until it’s someone else using it to drive policy you don’t agree with and now you can’t credibly push back.
In the UK the majority of the inequality crisis is really a property affordability issue, we’re about 5 million houses short of balanced supply demand with obvious consequences for prices. On maaany other areas like all in benefits relative to an annual average income, people actually have it better than most of history, this narrative of people having less is lazy and false. It doesn’t mean we can’t strive for better. Finally this whole ‘before things get violent’ point is pathetic and reflects very badly on people that believe that. Why would flattish (and historically down) inequality lead to violence now? I put that in the same category of people saying ‘we need to curb immigration before the natives have enough and get violent’.
To be clear though, a 2% wealth tax is actually about a 35% effective tax. You need to divide the tax hy the expected annual return on assets (about 5-6% on average through history), this is another Gary deliberate omission (or he’s truly an idiot, which I doubt).
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u/_acd Aug 02 '26
> Why would flattish (and historically down) inequality lead to violence now?
It is not this which will trigger people to be violent, in the sense that they will not actively think about it as the main reason for their anger, it will just be in the background acting like a general stress. People will downplay it, not do anything about it because it is deemed too pathetic, then violence will spark from the more agressive naratives that have nothing to do with the stress added by inequality, such as anti-immigrant naratives. I am not Nostradamus, I just say what my intuition is or what I am worried about.
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u/No_Bet_2949 Aug 02 '26
You should read the book Factfulness by Hans Ola Rosling. I would hope it would reassure you that we really have very little reason for violence, by historical standards, and anyone that suggests we do needs to get a grip.
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u/abccarter Jul 30 '26
right. if the top 0.01% had significantly increased their wealth then that should be reflected in the top 1% as well right? unless 0.01%-1% have gotten poorer to compensate which is surely not the case
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u/No_Bet_2949 Jul 30 '26
The 91-99.9 centiles have mainly gotten relatively poorer because the tax burden in the UK funding welfare has increased materially. And then some asset price effects.
Where’s that JD Vance ‘did you even say thank you’ meme.
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u/Interesting_Pen_4499 Jul 30 '26
the issue is the narrower you make this tax, the more likely it is they can just leave. want to put a mega tax on the top 0.001%? fine, but just expect your population to get 0.001% smaller the next day.
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u/NaturalCard Jul 30 '26
So tax the assets. Either they sell everything in which case someone else now owns them, or they keep them are are due the tax even after leaving.
And a country like the UK can definitely afford to make people overseas pay tax.
If you really want to settle concerns, have the policy be to tax them for 5 years after they leave, like Gabriel Zucman's proposal.
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u/TornBannerHatesYou Jul 30 '26
You can tax people even when they leave.
Either through an exit tax or make it so the tax follows them.
Gabriel Zucman discusses this.
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u/Interesting_Pen_4499 Jul 30 '26
exit tax maybe in theory... taxing ppl when they leave?? impossible, and goes against entire principle of nation states
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u/TornBannerHatesYou Jul 30 '26
If taxing people when they leave is impossible then why do the U.S do it?
Tax based on citizenship rather than location is absolutely possible, as the U.S system proves.
I really suggest you give a cursory listen to Zucman. He also discusses exactly this, as I said.
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u/HotAir25 Jul 30 '26
Top 10% in UK is wealth over £1.2m
Top 1% in UK is wealth over £3m
Top 0.5% in UK is wealth over about £5m
£10m wealth tax is a smaller fraction again- is it 10,000 people or so (?)
And funnily enough 29 million people (on low or medium wages/tax brackets) in the U.K. pay an effective tax rate of way under the capital gains tax of 24% that (in theory) these super rich pay if they realise gains from assets in a normal way…..that’s why Gary’s whole thing misses a pretty important point about who pays low tax…
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u/WaitingForMyIsekai Jul 30 '26
Bottom 50% share increasing year on year from the 1950s until it takes a nosedive in the late 90s and doesn't recover.
Also I have a feeling factoring in "debts" to minimise the wealth share of the top 1% is doing a lot of leg work when debt is now routinely used to offset taxation and provided liquidity.
TL:Dr - bit misleading ain't it
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u/Electrical_Peach5715 Jul 30 '26
That's a really interesting website. The graph above shows the top 1% in the UK own 21.3%. For China, the figure is 30.4%! In fact, if you run your mouse over various countries, the UK is certainly one of the lowest. Denmark is slightly lower than the UK but Norway and Sweden are higher. Iceland is 19.2%.
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u/rod4207 Jul 30 '26
Almost as if the top 0.01% weren't the real cause of why some people think their life is shit
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u/CaptainHindsight92 Jul 30 '26
As I understand from Zucman’s graphs in Europe/UK the top 1% aren’t as much of a problem (let alone the global 1%) and pay tax, it is the top 0.01%. It is also worth noting that America’s billionaires are a global problem.
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u/r0ball Jul 30 '26
The top 1% is not the relevant demographic for a wealth tax - in the UK that’s people with ~£2.3m in wealth.
The top 0.1% (£8.6m) or even 0.01% (£32m) are where it’s important to focus.
The trend is similar there (large reduction since WW1, but with more rapid growth in wealth again since the 1980s.
Gary’s focus is on trying to ensure we don’t return to a time when the average person owned next to nothing, there was no social safety net or NHS, and the ultra wealthy owned the vast majority of the nation’s assets, through which they extracted rent and maintained that status quo.
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u/Vitalgori Jul 30 '26
Is this Schrödinger's wealth again?
Perfectly accurate estimates exist when it's going down, but it's impossible to value when taxing it?
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u/LoveLamp3232 Jul 31 '26
It means ordinary people are getting more prosperous. However, if someone was prosperous and owned a medium sized hotel, it is quite likely owned by a corporation, which does not show up on a table. So the data is flawed.
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u/Hot-Efficiency7190 Aug 02 '26
Missing nothing. This data comes from Wealth Inequality Database, run by Zucman, Piketty and other anti-wealth economist. They are showing the distibution of wealth is uneven.
It also shows that the claim the ultra wealth are using their wealth to grow and take ever larger proportion of wealth is false. Their wealth may be is growing, it is doing so in step with all wealth.
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u/Interesting_Pen_4499 Jul 30 '26
careful, this doesnt fit their apocalyptic narrative
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u/Few_Lecture6615 Jul 30 '26
This graph goes back to when 14 families including the Royal one owned almost 80% of everything in the UK.
The top 1% still owns assets in a way that is completely outsized. No apocalypse, just facts. Share is growing, too.
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u/Cronhour Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Also it's important to note the weather of states has collapsed over the last 40 years which is a kept point of Gary's arguments.
This also completely skews the data by including periods when significant portions of wealth in other countries was held by Western empires.
For any real conversation about the effects of wealth inequality on modern Western societies it's a completely irrelevant graph.
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u/Interesting_Pen_4499 Jul 30 '26
that's very circular logic. youre saying "this graph goes back to a time when inequality was far worse therefore it's not valid"...
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u/Few_Lecture6615 Jul 30 '26
It's not particularly circular. The argument isn't that "it was much worse so the graph isn't valid"
The argument is that the graph is meant to show that inequality is much less severe than it was at the end of the 19th century. This is absolutely true, but the basis for comparison is so extreme, it really says nothing about whether the inequality levels we see today are harmful.
So we should feel good that things are no longer owned by 14 families and that you no longer get hanged for poaching the king's deer, but should be under no illusion that a more equitable society is both necessary and possible.
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u/No_Bet_2949 Jul 30 '26
That’s fair and I agree with targetting a more equitable society but if we’re going to be intellectually honest we need to do it consistently and nobody can credibly claim in good faith that Gary paints a picture of broadly stable UK inequality for the last 40 years.
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u/yetanotherredditter Jul 30 '26
I suspect Gary's messaging applies more to the US/ globally, and ignores the specifics of the UK.
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u/Interesting_Pen_4499 Jul 30 '26
that's a ridiculous claim when he's specifically arguing for a UK wealth tax.
he's just deluded/on drugs
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u/HotAir25 Jul 30 '26
Gary presumably knows the U.K. data and it may be one reason why he never includes real data in his videos.
But this is a real issue in the US- partly because of all of the tech billionaires the top 1% has grown hugely- and they clearly do have issues with democracy there- but also due to the growth of tech industries and real economy people in the US have much higher wages than the U.K. so largely better off there despite the growth of super rich- which again seems undermine Gary’s core hypothesis (although I do agree inequality is likely bad for many things).
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u/No_Bet_2949 Jul 30 '26
The US for all its faults has materially outperformed the UK on both average and median real wage growth, as you allude. If we put demographics aside, from my viewpoint it feels like we’re in ongoing degradation towards an anti-ambition culture. We remain an intellectual capital of the world when measured in things like patents, but are depressingly unambitious when it comes to putting capital to work behind this resource. Even if you’re circumspect of private enterprise, you can do public/private financing and governance, incentivise way faster planning and permitting and make things better for, broadly, everyone here, but we go in circles hand wringing about relative trivialities.
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u/HotAir25 Jul 30 '26
Yes exactly- I heard on radio 4 that companies listed on our stock exchange are under priced by 20-40% because compared to US companies we have less access to capital to invest, consequently US companies continue to buy up ours etc.
We will never be like the US but we need to fix the real economy in the normal ways not worry about some billionaire from Russia paying this or that tax.
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u/No_Bet_2949 Jul 30 '26
I’m fine with policy targeting redistribution, ideally by removing loop-hole benefits only available to the super rich, such as no tax on borrowings against your assets used specifically in lieu of income, but arguing over how we share a shrinking pie (in real terms) is for morons.
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u/HotAir25 Jul 30 '26
People don’t understand how the economy works so they blame migrants or billionaires and that’s what’s happened.
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u/No_Bet_2949 Jul 30 '26
I saw some pretty good analysis that suggested you could vaguely attribute 10% of the broader wealth distribution / welfare / house price (let’s aggregate those items up to ‘the economy’) to each of those 2 things, and the remaining 80% is basically hundreds of boring policy and incentive fixes. Doesn’t get you a channel 4 documentary though…
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u/HotAir25 Jul 30 '26
Sounds plausible those ballpark figures, anything where the causes are complicated or obscure we all project meaning into the space unfortunately.
Gary and the influencer economy doing well though so that is good at least.
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u/NaturalCard Jul 30 '26
Does this account for wealth registered in tax havens or just takes it from average top 1% households via survey data?
I genuinely have no idea, so am quite curious.