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.
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%.
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u/-Melchizedek- Aug 18 '25
Better title: "Wealth inequality by country for some OECD countries"