Median is not the same as Average
Data is for latest available years. What politicians and the media usually cite are the first column of numbers (‘average’ wealth per adult), by which measure the US rates as the third ‘richest’ country. But when you look at median wealth instead of billionaire-inflated ‘average’, and then adjust for what that wealth can actually buy in that country (purchasing power parity), a very different picture emerges (last column). Sources:
Average and median data: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/08/15/americans-not-wealthy-us-economy-data-inequality/
PPP adjustment factor data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_price_level
As inequality soars in most countries, the disparity between the ultra-rich and everyone else has become a chasm, especially in the west. Of course the Epstein Class that controls governments and media don’t want you to notice that, so they continue to use false measures of economic ‘prosperity’, like GDP and ‘average’ income and wealth.
As Ben Norton explains in detail, and as the chart above shows, looking at median wealth*, rather than averages that are wildly distorted by the ultra-rich, and then adjusting further for the cost of living in each country, demonstrates that the US is increasingly a poor, struggling nation, its citizens ruled and oppressed by an obscenely rich and unrepresentative tiny minority.
So when American voters, despite all the propaganda they’re drowned in, say that they’re living in financial precarity, paycheque to paycheque, it’s not their imagination.
And this precarity isn’t limited to the US. While Canadians’ median net worth, at $163k, is more than twice Americans’, it is still extremely precarious. The average Canadian home, for example, has dropped over $170k in value since 2022 (to $650,000), putting many once-middle-class Canadians underwater with their leveraged mortgages, and making them at least ‘paper paupers’. The average home cost in Toronto and Vancouver is twice the Canadian average (and for houses three times that — a price only about 8% of residents can afford despite the recent drop). For many Canadian home-owners, their entire net worth is tied up in the wildly-fluctuating speculator-inflated ‘value’ of their homes.
What does it mean when a majority of people (those ‘below the median’) in most western countries are living from paycheque to paycheque, cannot afford to buy their own home, are at risk of having their life’s savings wiped out by a small market downturn even if they do own their own home, and could quickly drop into dire poverty or even homelessness if they lost their jobs or had to deal with one major medical or other crisis?
Economically it means that these countries face the potential of imminent collapse — their housing and stock markets are extremely vulnerable to risks and threats they largely have no control over — such as the actions of incompetent and demented ‘leaders’ and the consequences of exorbitantly expensive and pointless wars. And their governments and citizens know it. The consequence of that economic collapse would be to plunge most of those countries’ citizens into economic precarity, and those already living in precarity into severe poverty.
And our governments, thanks to decades of buying the neocon and neoliberal lies of neo-classical economics, have removed all the guardrails that could prevent or mitigate such a crisis.
And they have created, as Barry Ferns has brilliantly explained, an entire working class whose desperate struggle to stay above water has rendered them physically exhausted and psychologically incapacitated. All largely due to the prevailing and debunked myth that no one will work unless they ‘have’ to, and that guardrails like a Universal Basic Income could therefore never work.
Add economic precarity to the psychological toll it takes on the majority of citizens (making the expression ‘working poor’ increasingly redundant), and you have a recipe for disaster. Something’s got to give, and citizen outrage and fear will inevitably lead to more ‘kinetic’ forms of unrest.
If you’re wondering why western governments are increasingly passing draconian laws to prevent and arrest citizen dissent and disobedience, cranking up their propaganda machines, and accelerating mass surveillance programs, that might be why. They know this can’t continue.
*A note about wealth vs income measures of economic prosperity: Data on incomes is always suspect, because it depends on what you call income: earned versus passive, gross versus disposable etc. As a very rough rule of thumb, median incomes tend to be about half of median net wealth at median levels. But they’re less than a third of net wealth at higher levels of net wealth. And for those ‘below the median’, net wealth is increasingly less than zero: Debts exceed the value of what they own. A single health crisis or job loss or uninsured calamity can easily wipe out someone’s net wealth in less than a year. That’s what they mean by ‘precarity’.
