Four faces of inequality
Wealth and income get treated as one story. Count per person rather than per group and the gap in what people own is wider than the gap in what they earn in every country where both can be worked out, and about six times wider in the middle of them.
wealth
The wealth held by the richest one percent.
income
How unevenly income is shared out.
opportunity · US only
How much your parents' income sets your own, across 741 US commuting zones
health · US only
How much longer the rich live.
link
One face read alongside another
extend
The same face through time and across geography
Wealth
Divide each group's share by the people in it and the gap in what one person owns is wider than the gap in what one person earns, in every one of the 146 countries where both can be worked out. The middle of that set is six times wider. In five more the poorest half owes more than it owns, which is the same pattern past the point where a multiple still works.
One person against one person
The gap in owning set beside the gap in earning, for the same country. In the United States one person in the top 1% owns about 1,800 times what one in the poorest half owns and earns 69 times as much. Most of these wealth figures are modelled from the smaller set of countries with tax records, so read the direction, which is unanimous, before the digits.
What half a country owns, and how many owe
The poorest half of British adults held 13.1% of everything owned there in 1990 and holds 4.6% now. In Sweden the same line crosses zero around 2000: debts there come to 10.9% of all household wealth more than assets do.
That is a share of a national total, which a few deeply indebted households can drag under. Counting the households instead gives a different answer and a different ranking: 4.1% of euro-area households owe more than they own, 10.5% in Finland, and 23.7% of Dutch households headed by someone under 35. The two measures barely line up, at a rank correlation of -0.14 across the 22 countries that carry both.
And then the question all of it is for. Half of euro-area households have nothing left over at the end of the month, two thirds among the poorest fifth by wealth, and four in ten could not raise money from family or friends in an emergency. In Greece it is four in five, and 70% of the households that went looking for credit were refused or given less.
In money, for the one country that publishes a household balance sheet on a run of years: the American family in the middle of the poorest quarter has $3,470 to its name, and in 2010 and 2013 it had nothing at all. The family in the middle of the richest tenth has $3.8m. 8% of that poorest quarter own the home they live in; 95% of the richest tenth do.
What it is made of, and the house
A share says how much, never what of. Two thirds of everything the poorest half of American households own is the house they live in and the car and the furniture in it, against 6% in shares, and they owe 58 cents on every dollar of it. For the richest thousandth it is 7% housing, 54% shares, one cent of debt. Which is why the price of a house is a wealth question: British houses rose 280% after inflation between 1969 and 2017 while the typical household's income rose 223%.
Income
The figure almost every report quotes. It describes a pay slip, and it is not the same as what anybody owns: rank countries by the income share of the top 1% and by their wealth share and you get two different tables. The three readings below turn a share into something a person can picture.
One person against one person
A share belongs to a group, and the top 1% is a fiftieth the size of the bottom half, so the two shares cannot be set against each other as they stand. Divide each by the people in it and they become incomes. In the United States one person at the top takes 69 times one at the bottom, against 25 times in 1974, the closest the two have come.
What the money buys
The income of the person in the middle, priced so the same basket of goods costs the same number of dollars in every country. That is $45 a day in the United Kingdom and $65 in the United States, against $14 and $41 when each country's record opens.
Which part of the country
The richest tenth, the forty per cent under them and the poorer half add to the whole country, so whatever one gains another loses. The American middle held 48.9% of national income in 1945 and holds 40.6% now. Over the same years the top tenth gained 10.3 points and the poorer half lost 2.0, so the middle's loss and the bottom's went the same way.
Health
A face of the cube for the United States only, on purpose. Life expectancy across countries is a national average, which cannot show the gap between rich and poor inside one, and no source publishes that gap in a form that compares across borders. The one place it is measured, by household income, is the United States, so that is what the face shows, labelled the way opportunity is, rather than an average dressed up as an inequality.
Where the gap is visible
In the United States, by income quarter, across 595 commuting zones. A man of forty in the poorest quarter lives 8.7 years less than one in the richest quarter of the same place, 5.6 years for women. No zone has no gap. These are measured from age forty rather than from birth, so they are not the figures quoted for a whole country, which run lower.
What is still held
National life expectancy, life satisfaction, poverty and emissions, all as things to hold inequality up against rather than as inequalities themselves. The correlation is weak across countries and the chart says so. The poverty figure is the $2.15 a day line, which reads under one per cent across nearly every rich country and so says almost nothing about one.
What would take it past the US
Life expectancy by income group, published the same way in more than one country. The WHO has child deaths by wealth quintile for poorer countries and the OECD has life expectancy by education for richer ones. They were built differently and do not join.
Opportunity beta
One country, one generation of children, and the deepest thing in the atlas. Everywhere else measures inequality between countries or across a whole population. Here you can watch it pass from one person to the next, because the United States is the only place that publishes data fine enough to follow.
Where children climb
The income percentile a child whose parents were in the bottom quarter reaches by their mid thirties, across 741 commuting zones. From the 23rd to the 67th depending on where they grew up.
Who they grow up around
How many of a poor child's friends are better off predicts climbing better than anything else here, at 0.72 across 3018 counties. Two things have to happen first: better-off people have to be around, and people have to actually mix. Those are nearly independent, so a place can fail at either.
What it costs them
Same town, different starts. By their mid thirties the children of the poorest quarter carry a credit score of 650 against 711, and 55% of them have been ninety days behind on a payment against 33%. The richer children score higher in all 741 zones. The mortgage line is the one to sit with: $47,700 against $92,700, which at those sizes is counting who holds a mortgage at all rather than how big one is.
It is marked beta because it is one country and one cohort of children, born in the early 1980s, with no run of years behind it. You can see that children do not climb where nobody mixes. You cannot see whether that is getting worse.
Why
Almost everything written about inequality is about pay. Ownership is a different thing, it is measured far less often and estimated far more, and wherever the two can be set side by side it is the wider gap. This page is what happens when you look at that one instead.
Half your country owns almost nothing
Take the poorest half of a country and add up everything they own, after debts are subtracted. In the United Kingdom that comes to 4.6% of everything owned there. In the United States it is 1.0%. In Italy, 2.5%. In Sweden it is minus 10.9%, because the poorest half of Sweden owes more than it owns.
This is not a British problem or an American one. Of the 213 countries the atlas holds, the poorest half owns less than a tenth of the national wealth in 211 of them. The only exceptions are Canada and Malta. In 5 the poorest half owns less than nothing at all. And in every single country, half the population owns less than the top one per cent does, though there are fifty times as many of them.
The gap in owning dwarfs the gap in earning
Shares belong to groups, and these groups are wildly different sizes, so a share on its own says nothing about a person. Divide each by the people in it and both become something you can picture: what one person at the top has against what one person at the bottom has.
Do that twice, once on wealth and once on income, and the two numbers are not close. In the United States one person in the top 1% owns about 1,800 times what one in the poorest half owns, and earns 69 times as much. In Britain it is 230 times against 33. Of the 146 countries where both can be worked out, the gap in owning is wider than the gap in earning in every one of them, and the middle of that set is 6 times wider. A further 5 are off the chart entirely, because you cannot divide by a half that owes.
The gap in owning against the gap in earning
That is the reason this atlas exists. Pay is the figure governments publish, so pay is the figure that gets quoted, and when a country is called fair or unfair pay is nearly always what is meant. It is the narrower of the two gaps everywhere anyone has measured both.
It has got worse in most places, not all
In Britain the poorest half held 6.2% in 1995 and holds 4.6% now. Italy went from 10.2% to 2.5%, Sweden from 5.8% to below zero. But this is where the honest answer is a majority rather than a rule: across the 54 countries in the richer third the share fell in 33 and rose in 21. Denmark went from below zero to 4%, the Netherlands from 5.4% to 9.8%.
What the count does not do is wobble. It lands between 31 and 34 whether you start in 1990, 1995 or 2000, which is more than most findings about inequality survive. A steady majority, then, and the level above is the stronger claim.
What the bottom half owns
It is not because their wages collapsed
The obvious explanation would be that these people are simply earning less, and in some countries they are. But in Britain and France the poorest half's share of the national income actually went up over the same years that their share of the wealth went down. They were earning slightly better and owning considerably less at the same time.
Each dot below is a country. Right of the middle line means the bottom half took a bigger slice of the income than before. Below the horizontal line means they ended up with a smaller slice of the wealth. Most countries sit below it.
Earning and owning, the bottom half
What they cannot get is a house
For most people who own anything at all, what they own is where they live. So when houses get dearer faster than wages rise, the people who already have one get richer without doing anything, and the people who do not are locked out of the only asset they were ever likely to hold.
In 1995 the average British house cost about £102,000 in today's money. By 2007 it cost about £289,000. Wages did not do anything remotely like that. The United States has the same shape but its version burst in 2008 and partly came back down. Britain's never did.
Houses and pay
The pay number describes your month. The ownership number describes whether you can buy a house, survive losing your job, or leave anything behind. The one that decides your life is the one nobody quotes.
And it gets handed down
Everything above compares whole countries. It cannot show how any of this reaches a particular person, because that needs data on individuals, and only the United States publishes it deep enough to follow.
There we can track children born in the early 1980s into their thirties. Two of them growing up in the same town, whose parents earned different amounts, end up like this:
| parents poorer | parents richer | |
|---|---|---|
| credit score | 650 | 711 |
| behind on payments | 55% of the time | 33% |
| mortgage carried | $47,700 | $92,700 |
| student debt | $8,700 | $11,600 |
The mortgage line is the one to sit with. It is not that the children of poorer parents borrowed less to buy a house. It is mostly that they never bought one.
Whether they climb at all turns out to depend most on who they grew up around. How many of a poor child's friends are better off predicts where they end up better than anything else in this atlas: 0.72 across three thousand counties, against 0.50 for the county's own income gap, which runs the other way because a wider gap goes with a shorter climb. Two things have to happen before that friendship exists. Better-off people have to be there, and once they are, people have to actually mix. Those two barely move together, so a place can fail at either, and a single number cannot tell you which.
One more thing, which is the whole argument again
The United States is the only country that measures all four of these at the same fine geography. That makes it the only place we can ask whether they agree with each other. Held against each other across three thousand counties, mostly they do not.
Do the faces agree, inside one country?
The bottom row is the one to read. The gap between how long rich and poor people live is tied to none of the rest of it. A county can share out its income evenly, have children who climb, and still bury its poor a decade early. That is this page's argument arriving a second time, at a scale a thousand times finer: these are different inequalities, they do not move together, and which one you happen to measure decides what you conclude.
All of that is one country and one generation of children, and it is marked beta throughout. It is also the only place here where you can watch inequality passing from one person to the next rather than being measured across a population, which is why it is worth the space.
Where this leaves policy
If the gap in what people own is wider than the gap in what they earn, then income tax, minimum wages and benefits are all working on the narrower one. None of them reach what somebody already holds.
Two countries, same pay gap
In 2017 the richest 1% took 10.8% of Swiss income and 10.9% of Greek income. They owned 31.5% of Switzerland and 23.3% of Greece. Judging those two places on pay alone would call them the same.
What is still missing
Houses are two countries here, not sixty, because the international series sits behind sources we cannot reach yet. Health is closed for the same reason: no one publishes the rich-poor gap in a way that compares across borders.
The database
The wealth series is five source families in one long panel: WID, the ECB household survey (HFCS), the Luxembourg Wealth Study, the US Survey of Consumer Finances, and the Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts. The release files carry 10,783 rows with a non-null Gini on ISO3 keys, 1800 to 2025. What this page ships is the slice it can draw: 7,455 rows, 213 countries, 1990 to 2024. Around it sit WID income shares for 154 countries, World Bank survey measures for 165, real house prices for two, and the United States at commuting zone and county resolution for mobility, debt, life expectancy by income and social capital. Every build script in the repo names its source and what it drops.
Comparability flags
Every row carries comparability_tier (A for harmonized
surveys, B for mixed methodology) and top_tail_flag (survey
only, or enhanced with administrative data).
Filtering to like-for-like rows is one line of pandas.
What the ask tab reads
The WID wealth series, 1990 to 2024, per adult with a couple's holdings split equally. The Gini zeroes negative net wealth; the top 1% and bottom 50% shares do not, which is how a share reaches minus 10.9% in Sweden. Then the latest shares by country, WID income shares, the World Bank survey measures, and the US county and commuting-zone files. It does not read the US long-run series: that path was removed because it put the United States on the Fed's distributional accounts while everywhere else was on WID, and the two differ by five points on the same idea in the same year.
Method
Sources are merged with explicit priority, documented in the methods note. The pipeline is Python and rebuilds the release files from raw inputs.
Latest year by country
| Country | Year | Gini | Top 1% | Top 10% | Bottom 50% |
|---|
Latest available year per country, WID basis. Click a column to sort. The full panel is in the release files below.
Releases
Conway (2026). Open Inequality Atlas: Wealth, v0.4.0.
Harmonized panel of household net wealth inequality.
https://github.com/conway1521/wealth_ineq
Harmonized panel of household net wealth inequality.
https://github.com/conway1521/wealth_ineq
The moments panel adds top-1%, top-10%, and bottom-50% shares plus mean and median wealth for 53 countries. A Zenodo DOI comes with v1.0; until then, cite the GitHub URL and version tag.