Income and Welath Inequality

I was crusing the streets of Da Nang yesterday with my new co-worker Dat. I mentioned I liked the way cars treat scooters/motorbikes out here. They basically honk as they drive saying "get out of my way, I'm coming." This is of course fairly common in many places, but seemed very callous here. Here was our conversation:

Dat: "Money Talks Here"

Me:  "Yeah but it's that way everywhere"

Dat:  "Yes but probably more so here"

Me: "I guess. It's probably pretty similar to Hungary. I spent many summers there as a child, and have travelled to just as many poorer countries as rich countries"

Well of course I can't just make a conjecture like that without Verifying. Turns out that Vietnam is by far the poorest place I've been probably. Here's some research.

Probably the cruedest measure of "wealth" of a nation is GDP/capita:

UK - 35,000

Hungary - 16,000

Vietnam - 1,000

But that's all in dollars and doesn't account for the COST of things locally. Still even if you factor in what's known as Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)  You get:

US - 45,000

UK - 33,000

Hungary - 19,000

China - 5,000

Vietnam - 2,600

India - 2,600

Congo - 180

Ethiopia - 175

So you were right. In that simple sense it's certainly much poorer here. About 8x more income per person in hungary. Still it's about 10X better to live in Vietnam. Now that of course doesn't tell you ANYTHING about how the income is distributed. Mexico for example has the largest number of BILLIONAIRES on the planet but is a very poor country. There are many metrics but the gini coefficient is the most common one and it measure the standard deviation essentially of wealth distribution. Typically this is inversely relate, but it clearly shows that while USA is wealthy, it's still pretty unequal as far as income. That's not to say everyone doesn't have an opportunity, I think it just means nobody believes in handouts, only hard work. Here's some comparison values :

Japan & Sweden 25

Hungary 27

Vietnam 34

USA 41

Mexico 46

China 47

Brazil 57

Bolivia 60

Namibia 75

So you can see that while wealth is high in USA for example the income distribution is still pretty unfair, though once again you can see Africa is a mess.