Mouth-dropping data on U.S. income inequality ranking

by David Safier

Let's start with the assumption that the CIA doesn't have an ax to grind against the U.S. So I'll assume the CIA World Factbook isn't going out of its way to make this country look bad.

But income inequality in the U.S. looks pretty damn bad on the Factbook's Distribution of Family Income page. True, 41 countries are worse than us, but 92 are better.

Let's start with a list of countries with greater inequality than ours. None of them can be considered anywhere near first world except maybe Hong Kong. A sampling, from worst to just a little worse than us: Namibia, Haiti, Panama, Chile, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Nepal, Phillipines, Jamaica and, one worse than us, Uruguay.

Almost all the countries with the lowest income inequality (highest equality) are in Europe or Eastern Europe, though there are many non-European countries among the 92 that best the U.S. Here's a partial list of the countries, starting with those closest to us on the list: Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, Russia, Turkey, Indonesia, Yemen, Vietnam, Egypt, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Kazakhstan, Germany, and, the three most equal, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden.

NOTE: I understand some of the countries have less income inequality than us because they're so poor. But the majority of the most income-equal countries are doing just fine.

CORRECTION NOTE: The fourth paragraph, about the countries with the lowest inequality, was originally sloppily written. I've corrected it to make it more accurate.