Europe has lower income inequality but greater wealth inequality.
When only a handful of people can afford to buy and are forced to rent that does not show lower inequality.
If you have 100 people when 50% of them can’t afford to buy a house you have lower inequality than if 99% can’t afford to buy one.
Europe overall has far greater divide between the rich and the poor and the wealthy classes are far more dominated by old money.
You have countries where the richest families haven’t changed in 400 years.
And this is despite the biggest wealth redistribution event that happened in history - WW2.
I’m not saying that Europe is a bad place to live, I live there well in the UK but there are major issues here.
I earn for more than £90K however buying anything outside of a 2-3 bed 800-900 square foot flat in London is out of the question. As houses in middle and upper middle class areas are easily £2M these days and these aren’t mansions either, these are 1000-1500 square foot Victorian houses.
Sadly that isn’t how we measure inequality because it doesn’t makes sense. By your method a feudal society is perfectly equal since only a fraction of the population has any wealth whilst the rest slave away in the fields…
Who is "we"? The gini coeffient does measure income inequality similar to that. And yes, a feudal society would be more equal...
For example, a feudal society of, say, 50,000 peasant and a single lord, where each peasant makes 80 units of money, and the lord's tax cut is 10% (a common tax at the time, called a "tithe"), will have a gini coefficient of 0,09 (where 0 = full equality, and 1 = total inequality).
When only a handful of people can afford to buy and are forced to rent that does not show lower inequality.
If you have 100 people when 50% of them can’t afford to buy a house you have lower inequality than if 99% can’t afford to buy one.
Europe overall has far greater divide between the rich and the poor and the wealthy classes are far more dominated by old money.
You have countries where the richest families haven’t changed in 400 years.
And this is despite the biggest wealth redistribution event that happened in history - WW2.
I’m not saying that Europe is a bad place to live, I live there well in the UK but there are major issues here.
I earn for more than £90K however buying anything outside of a 2-3 bed 800-900 square foot flat in London is out of the question. As houses in middle and upper middle class areas are easily £2M these days and these aren’t mansions either, these are 1000-1500 square foot Victorian houses.