by Patrick Appel
Alex Tarrabok posts the above graph:
Comparing between countries we see that the poorest 5% of Americans are among the richest people in the world (richer than nearly 70% of other people in the world). The poorest 5% of Americans, for example, are richer than the richest 5% of Indians.
A reader adds:
??The main reason that the US has a higher Gini coefficient is that it is much larger than any of those other countries. The Gini tends to be higher for larger populations. So, for example, the Gini coefficient of income for the US will he higher than that of any individual US state. It's interesting that of this group, that Israel (population: 7 million) and Tunesia (10 million) have higher Ginis than Egypt (34 million) or Pakistan (170 million); nevertheless, comparing Ginis of different-sized groups is very much an apples-to-oranges comparison.