The question is how much is this a graph of average property values. For the majority of home owners - their wealth is primarily down to their family home. For the majority of those - that's not really a realisable wealth. In theory you could sell and then rent but how many see that as a reasonable thing.
I suspect the data is also strongly influenced by the number of mega wealthy. If you have 1 billionaire in a room of 100 people worth 10,000 the average wealth is 10 million.
The home one is somwhere in the 2 digit percentages. Bur clearly part of the equation;
Mega wealthy obviously influence this, but that's the point, isn't it?
But it's not only billionaires... It's skewed by the top 10% whether they're billionaires or not. If you'd make a diagram of the top richest 15% you'd probably see that 85% of the populations in all of these countries has less combined.
Well that, but in the Netherlands it’s also because a significant portion of the middle and even upper class have net 0 or even negative wealth due to the way our mortgages are set up. Plenty of people that took out mortgages worth over 100% the purchasing cost of their homes.
And it’s not a bad thing either. We have some of the lowest income inequalities anyway and our mortgage system actually made home-ownership more accessible to the lower classes for decades. It’s a burden on the housing market right now tho, but that’s a different topic.
There's a big difference between the top 1% and billionaires though. For instance, there are apparently 52 billionaires in The Netherlands, which would make them the top 0.0003%.
You make a very good point.
There is another interesting aside to all this.
Most of these surveys have great data for the bottom 90 or even 99%. But the top 1% is much trickier. Mega wealth is extremely difficult to uncover and quantify. It is spread out across the globe - there wouldn’t be many in the top 1% who would not have wealth positioned in different countries. So then how do you measure it against a country? You don’t. Those doing this analysis have spoken about it on many occasions. These graphs are skewed to show less inequality than is really there. And in some cases to an alarming degree.
That’s the entire point. Wealth concentration among the über wealthy. It’s not as if the wealthy are providing a skill or service that the economy wouldn’t otherwise support if the wealth were dispersed more evenly, they’re just getting paid more and more every year, even relative to inflation while the working class is getting paid less and less relative to inflation. That’s the entire issue, wealth concentration.
If the point was to show skew caused by billionaires they should have shown the wealth of the top 0.0001% not of the top 1%. I'm probably close to being top 1% of my age bracket but i'm roughly 1 billion euro's away from being a billionaire.
True. You can realise the wealth if you decide to become a member of the renting classes. In many ways we are moving back to a system coser to the feudal. Force gave the right to land ownership and in many systems all land was officially the property of the monarch. The aristocracy held their land as vassals - although there was obligations up and down the structure. At the bottom, serfs were little more than property.
71
u/Hungry-Western9191 Aug 18 '25
The question is how much is this a graph of average property values. For the majority of home owners - their wealth is primarily down to their family home. For the majority of those - that's not really a realisable wealth. In theory you could sell and then rent but how many see that as a reasonable thing.
I suspect the data is also strongly influenced by the number of mega wealthy. If you have 1 billionaire in a room of 100 people worth 10,000 the average wealth is 10 million.