Shakes Report This Comment
Date: July 22, 2023 05:31PM

Huh, the United States has the least percentage of poor people in the world. All the communist and socialist countries have the most poor people. Capitalism is such the great evil.

spaznut mcgraw Report This Comment
Date: July 23, 2023 09:50AM

Yes, that's precisely what this graph says, good work.

I'm happy you're clearly joking

Anon Report This Comment
Date: July 27, 2023 11:23AM

This should be called wealth distribution, as that's what it actually is.

Now add dominant religion, including protestant or catholic, education levels, levels of foreign investment (that means dividends leaving the country) and is there a culture of saving/investing?

Then there are other factors:

+ In Australia we have a population in two halves, one lives large and grabs all the headlines. The other saves and invests. Now, after four generations, half our population are the beneficiaries of private companies and family trusts. The sums are sometimes small, but it affects the graph above and is a society of two halves moving in different directions.
+ 'Four generations' is the time frame since yanks infiltrated politics in our countries and preached tax cuts, as these eventually benefit the wealthiest the most. They later called this 'Trickle Down Economics', where wealth is trickled down from the many in number to the few in number, then 'Quantitative Easing' has exacerbated this.
+ 'Four generations' is also the time frame of Australia's greatest gift to the world: The Living Wages Case, that gives freedom, and residual wealth, to individuals, not corporations. Those are two incompatible definitions of freedom, and why Australia has been so resilient to economic shocks.
+ How do the central banks work? Do they manufacture the money? Do they lend it at interest? Do they invest it to create sovereign wealth funds? Do they fund infrastructure projects? Time is money, so regions with poor roads have less economic viability than those that have good ones. That's why the political party just ousted in Australia walked away from The National Roads Agreement: anywhere over 200kms from the capital cities the roads are collapsing, economic viability will follow. That's why the Party did it: it concentrates wealth.
+ Then there's how proactive governments are: do they protect their industries with tariffs and/or import quotas? Does government, often the single biggest employer and customer, make a point of buying goods manufactured within the nation, rather than imports? Does it joint invest with private industry to found new industries or expand existing ones?
+ What's the size of the public service compared to the population? Bureaucracy is a burden on a population, necessary to have, but the size isn't.
+ What's the comparative size of political donations to fund political parties? A party that charges a quarter of an ounce of gold a year for membership has no need of corporate donations and listens to its members. A party that charges one percent of that, well, an English proverb is: "He who pays the piper calls the tune."
+ How concentrated is the media? If a few companies control journalist's careers, they present/write what they are told. I've heard the threat Murdoch used in the 1990's: "You can have a praise a day or a bucket of [sewer] a day". Apparently he now just asks "What's in it for me?" So he doesn't need to make political donations.
+ What's the promoted use of money? Where I come from I was asked "What would you do with [equals four thousand ounces of gold]? I would buy a house on a quarter of that and invest most of the rest, so as to live on less than my income and invest the rest, so it always grows. It's a concept in one of Jane Austen's books (she moved in what we would now call professorial circles, compare with the language Charles Dickens used and the concepts he adds - their life spans overlapped). Is the promoted use of money to just spend it?
+ What happens to political dissidents?
+ Does a religion crush non members/dissidents?

Really, that graph needs a lot more to go with it. If you want to achieve anything constructive.