Ethiopia has lesser income inequality than America

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This month, Bloomberg Rankings dove into U.S. census data to measure the level of economic equality in each of 435 congressional districts—a useful endeavor, given all the recent political attention on inequality. The Rankings team did this by calculating the Gini coefficient, a formula that measures the distribution of income across a population. The closer a Gini number is to 1, the greater the level of inequality; the closer to zero, the closer to perfect equality. You can see the Bloomberg rankings here. The big take-away: A strikingly high level of inequality exists throughout the United States.

Economic equality isn’t automatically a wonderful thing—nations such as Bangladesh and Kazakhstan have very little economic inequality, yet are hardly regarded as societies other countries would wish to emulate. Still, most people would agree that having a high level of inequality is undesirable and potentially damaging. So it’s worth examining how the U.S. stacks up against the Western democracies that are generally regarded as having a high quality of life.

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Even the best U.S. district has higher inequality than any number of countries you probably don’t associate with economic egalitarianism: Greece, Niger, Ethiopia, Egypt, Pakistan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Ukraine, Bangladesh. This doesn’t mean that the U.S. would be better off it were more like Ukraine. But the comparison between the U.S. and similar Western democracies is just as unsettling. The U.S. doesn’t come anywhere close to Scandinavia’s .2 – .3 Gini range. The most equal U.S. congressional district can’t compare with the national averages of New Zealand, France, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, and Austria.