The ratio of spending is a poor metric to measure equality. All it really shows is that the “poor” are getting milked for everything they earn and own. Energy costs, fuel, water, basics like bread and butter, insurance, even doing something nice - all at sky-high prices driven by nothing else but greed. Oh, and farewell to the middle class…
Yeah, that struck me too. Measuring wealth by spending disguises inequality because higher earners have less reason to spend more, and the difference in freedom to choose not to spend more is a large part of the inequality.
There are interesting aspects to the data, but they overstate what the numbers they present tell us about inequality.
It also ignores a similar phenomenon among the poor. Decreased self-supply.
In a rich country this might mean paying for childcare so you can work. Your expenditure has gone up, but you are only better off by the increased post tax income less the cost of childcare. Even worse is paid childcare has substituted for family provided (e.g. grandparents) childcare.
In a poor country it might mean buying food instead of growing it. An industrial worker will buy their food, a subsistence farmer will grow their own. There is a huge increase in expenditure, but they might well end up with a worse diet.
This is not new. The initial workforce for the industrialisation of Britain (the first country to industrialise) was available because of the enclosure of common land forced people to seek work in cities.
> All it really shows is that the “poor” are getting milked for everything they earn and own
How are you concluding that? The only way I can see that could be true is if the bottom 50% has shifted their meagre savings to spending in an effort to stay afloat.
I find this to be dubious because the bottom 50% was never saving much at all in the first place. For context, the median income across planet earth is $850 USD _per year._ There's not a lot of room at the bottom for savings.
I think the world you're talking about would be the intra country comparison which bears out what your saying.
What the article is talking about is intercountry comparisons where, for instance, India as a nation now spends a lot more than it used to, and seeing as how they used to have nothing it means they probably have something now.
The thing is that buying a hamburger while knowing you can afford to buy a billion more of them is not the same as buying a hamburger knowing you can't afford another one.
This is as disingenuous as saying that both the rich and the poor consume the same amounts of calories, nutrients, oxygen and water, and hence they are not that different.
The key issue is that money often translates to such things as power and leisure. Prosperity is not consumption - it is the command over power, resources and time.
The poor have to sell their time in order to afford the basic necessities of life; the rich don't have to. So the rich have a lot more free time than the poor and the resources to use it well. The rich simply are freer than the poor, who are not unlike prisoners with no claim over their time.
The rich also get to influence policies to a far greater extent than the poor. In a way, wealth is just stored influence. This in turn helps them perpetuate their privilege. For instance, they can fund narratives that normalize inequality and lobby for lower taxes.
The lives of the rich are also far more secure than the lives of the poor. Many poor people are one major life crisis away from penury. This significantly affects the quality of their lives. Access to more wealth would mitigate this.
One could also flip your argument as follows: wealth is a scarce resource. If the rich already have everything they need to live a happy life at low amounts of wealth, then letting them horde more wealth than necessary is unjustified. Instead, that should be distributed to those in need. This would make no difference to the well-being of the wealthy, but it would help others who need resources more.
if you think someone with 1B is the same as someone with every month a minus number on their account then you are deluded.
A good measure of prosperity is quality of life, which sadly in our wonderful civilization one needs to buy with money.
And a little note. Billionaires do not eat the same food, do not take the same healthcare, and do not buy similar consumer goods for the most part. Maybe they will get the iPhone, but if you think a poor person can afford an iPhone maybe you also don't really understand what it is to be poor.
Poor people fighting hungerpains working their shit jobs. Poor people suffer from mental ailments induced by the stresses of being poor.
You can very probably obtain a much different result and most likely more accurate by doing this:
Looking at a few metrics should be enough for you to understand that this article from The Economist is some kind of "everything is going well"-centrist-propaganda.
All of the above are criticizable indices, by themselves. However, if you take the time to superpose those statistical markers, you'll get a much better picture than whatever The Economist is trying to say in this article
Background: I live in a working class duplex neighborhood, adjacent to newer lakeside mansions. Few neighbors have any college education; the majority don't pay taxes (if any, net). My community is mostly pleasant, but I definitely wouldn't raise a family here (mostly single moms and blue collar workers).
Yesterday among the poorest of neighbors said to me "I'm just trying to live a simple middle class life" — and I chuckled (rudely)... then responded "I'm among the wealthier people living on this street, and I'm not even middle class anymore — and we both still rent."
We're two tenants literally scrubbing out a former smoker tenant's filth, for rent credit, so that the next working class tenant can pay this distant slumlord more Rent. Yeah, we're rich... /s
…in the 21st century the world economy has kept getting more equal.
…Spending inequality within countries can tell a different story. Some rich countries became more unequal in the late 20th century even as global inequality fell. In the past decade the richest 10% have pulled away from the poorest 50% in Japan, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden.
> The Chinese did rather well in the age of globalization. In 1990, 943 million people there lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars – 83% of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero. Unfortunately, the United States was not as successful. More than 4 million Americans – 1.25% of the population – must make ends meet with less than $3 a day, more than three times as many as 35 years ago.
> Income and wealth inequalities have been on the rise nearly everywhere since the 1980s, following a series of deregulation and liberalization programs which took different forms in different countries. The rise has not been uniform: certain countries have experienced spectacular increases in inequality (including the US, Russia and India) while others (European countries and China) have experienced relatively smaller rises.
This article is deceitful. I dont understand why you get downvotes.
> … the main household survey used to estimate consumption in the UK has a low sample size, and there appears to be a growing problem of undercoverage of expenditure … the fact that undercoverage has grown over time means that it is not clear whether the relatively modest recorded changes in consumption inequality since 1991 are genuine, or just due to an increased inability to pick up the expenditure of high-spending households.
Readit News
There are interesting aspects to the data, but they overstate what the numbers they present tell us about inequality.
In a rich country this might mean paying for childcare so you can work. Your expenditure has gone up, but you are only better off by the increased post tax income less the cost of childcare. Even worse is paid childcare has substituted for family provided (e.g. grandparents) childcare.
In a poor country it might mean buying food instead of growing it. An industrial worker will buy their food, a subsistence farmer will grow their own. There is a huge increase in expenditure, but they might well end up with a worse diet.
This is not new. The initial workforce for the industrialisation of Britain (the first country to industrialise) was available because of the enclosure of common land forced people to seek work in cities.
How are you concluding that? The only way I can see that could be true is if the bottom 50% has shifted their meagre savings to spending in an effort to stay afloat.
I find this to be dubious because the bottom 50% was never saving much at all in the first place. For context, the median income across planet earth is $850 USD _per year._ There's not a lot of room at the bottom for savings.
Deleted Comment
What the article is talking about is intercountry comparisons where, for instance, India as a nation now spends a lot more than it used to, and seeing as how they used to have nothing it means they probably have something now.
No-one's interested in a detailed report: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wid.world
If a billionaire has similar health care, eats similar food and buys similar phones, then in reality they are actually quite similar to the poor.
The key issue is that money often translates to such things as power and leisure. Prosperity is not consumption - it is the command over power, resources and time.
The poor have to sell their time in order to afford the basic necessities of life; the rich don't have to. So the rich have a lot more free time than the poor and the resources to use it well. The rich simply are freer than the poor, who are not unlike prisoners with no claim over their time.
The rich also get to influence policies to a far greater extent than the poor. In a way, wealth is just stored influence. This in turn helps them perpetuate their privilege. For instance, they can fund narratives that normalize inequality and lobby for lower taxes.
The lives of the rich are also far more secure than the lives of the poor. Many poor people are one major life crisis away from penury. This significantly affects the quality of their lives. Access to more wealth would mitigate this.
One could also flip your argument as follows: wealth is a scarce resource. If the rich already have everything they need to live a happy life at low amounts of wealth, then letting them horde more wealth than necessary is unjustified. Instead, that should be distributed to those in need. This would make no difference to the well-being of the wealthy, but it would help others who need resources more.
A good measure of prosperity is quality of life, which sadly in our wonderful civilization one needs to buy with money.
And a little note. Billionaires do not eat the same food, do not take the same healthcare, and do not buy similar consumer goods for the most part. Maybe they will get the iPhone, but if you think a poor person can afford an iPhone maybe you also don't really understand what it is to be poor.
Poor people fighting hungerpains working their shit jobs. Poor people suffer from mental ailments induced by the stresses of being poor.
There is no parallel.
https://infographics.economist.com/2026/20260131_WOC222/2026...
https://infographics.economist.com/2026/20260131_WOC222/2026...
https://infographics.economist.com/2026/20260131_WOC222/2026...
https://infographics.economist.com/2026/20260131_WOC222/
Looking at a few metrics should be enough for you to understand that this article from The Economist is some kind of "everything is going well"-centrist-propaganda.
Suggested metrics:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_in...
Based on the Gini Coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
Based on the HDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
3.
And finally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
---
All of the above are criticizable indices, by themselves. However, if you take the time to superpose those statistical markers, you'll get a much better picture than whatever The Economist is trying to say in this article
Deleted Comment
https://www.pew.org/en/trust/archive/fall-2024/the-state-of-...
Yesterday among the poorest of neighbors said to me "I'm just trying to live a simple middle class life" — and I chuckled (rudely)... then responded "I'm among the wealthier people living on this street, and I'm not even middle class anymore — and we both still rent."
We're two tenants literally scrubbing out a former smoker tenant's filth, for rent credit, so that the next working class tenant can pay this distant slumlord more Rent. Yeah, we're rich... /s
…Spending inequality within countries can tell a different story. Some rich countries became more unequal in the late 20th century even as global inequality fell. In the past decade the richest 10% have pulled away from the poorest 50% in Japan, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden.
Real economists would consider separating statistical outliers like china.
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03057...
> Without China and India, global interpersonal income inequality in 143 countries was higher in 2015 than in 1988.
> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/23/china-us-pov...
> The Chinese did rather well in the age of globalization. In 1990, 943 million people there lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars – 83% of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero. Unfortunately, the United States was not as successful. More than 4 million Americans – 1.25% of the population – must make ends meet with less than $3 a day, more than three times as many as 35 years ago.
> https://wir2022.wid.world/executive-summary/
> Income and wealth inequalities have been on the rise nearly everywhere since the 1980s, following a series of deregulation and liberalization programs which took different forms in different countries. The rise has not been uniform: certain countries have experienced spectacular increases in inequality (including the US, Russia and India) while others (European countries and China) have experienced relatively smaller rises.
This article is deceitful. I dont understand why you get downvotes.
Doesn't help when the source data is not available to better understand what the claims made here are actually based on.
From: https://academic.oup.com/ooec/article/3/Supplement_1/i103/74...