As expected, a good article, Michael. Next to your information, I’d like to point to the political system in place and how it nudges economic outcomes/distribution as well. First the image for the bottom 10% in nations:
I created this image in 2006 and used nationmaster.com information and CIA World Factbook to review the systems in place.
As is immediately visible, the two systems with winner-take-all (because a president is a winner-taking-all) contain nations that are able to exclude income/consumption from the bottom 10% to a far more extreme level than the other systems (they are: dictatorships, proportional without a president and nations that have a mix of district and proportional voting in-one).
France has a president and France has a mixed system (and since this was 2006, I forgot by now in which column I put it). Yes, it is always handier to have a group do this kind of work, but I was just curious and went ahead by myself. The general outcome is relatively obvious.
As you can see, the US performs below the lowest level in three other categories.
Here’s the 2006 view for the top 10% in nations and how much they can take home:
In this view, the US hovers near the highest levels for the rich in the two categories of proportional without a president and the mixed version.
When we think about it, it is only logical that a system will tinker with outcomes (even though on paper that was never the intention). A nation run by people being good at basketball will end up with special treatment of those that were born to be tall. Yes, systems can contain fascist elements (while communist systems overly ignore the benefits of our not being identical).
The biggest surprise I had myself, Michael, seeing this information was that I had to understand the role a single empowered president has in a nation, and therefore in respect to the income/distribution results.
The explanation as I see it is simple. With a divided field in proportional voting, having a single president on top can make decisions that are harder to counter by a majority. Hence, the president has more power (which in France is used well).
In the US, having a president is therefore also not beneficial, but I’d say all in public office are kings and queens and they can take on the Big king (or future queen) better than a field of six different parties.
One issue that I need to call out is that (this was 2006) data was of a lower quality than it is today. Data was put in a list by nationmaster.com and I used it, but they also declared how not every nation has everything available in the same format. Just to let you know we are looking at a rather clear picture based on somewhat wobbly data.
Yes, this is a fascinating field and so few people have looked into this.
Still reaching out a hand to see if we can cooperate.
