Unquestionably, one of the richest countries on earth is the United States. According to Credit Suisse’s 2021 Global Wealth Databook, the U.S. is responsible for 30% of global wealth, or $126.3 trillion. China, the second-largest repository, is in charge of 19%, or $74.9 trillion. In terms of total wealth, this places the United States as the richest nation on Earth.
According to the 2020 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, the United States has the most millionaires in the world with 21.2 million adults or 40% of the total global population.
2-Unsurprisingly, China, with 5.3 million people, is the nation with the second-highest number. More than a million individuals immigrate to the United States annually, which is not unexpected given the country’s allegedly endless potential for economic wealth.
3-However, not every region of the country has access to the same level of riches. There is a lot of income inequality in the United States. According to a 2021 research report by the Urban Institute, 13.7% of Americans lived in poverty despite the country having more than $126 trillion in total wealth.
4-Future poverty rates will almost definitely be higher while the pandemic is ongoing.
5-Another indicator of inequality: In the United States, the median adult household wealth in 2021 was $79,274. Switzerland, which came in the first place, had a rate of $146,733.
What Median Income Tells Us About Wealth
A particularly useful metric for comparing people’s well-being between countries and US states is median income. This is why.
There are various methods for evaluating wealth in a certain place. The gross domestic product (GDP) of a state provides a window into its general economic health, but it does not always reflect how well people and households are faring. The most important numerical measure for comparisons is mean income, which is calculated by dividing the total of all values in a dataset by the number of values in the dataset (also known as the average). However, the final outcome in terms of disclosing how much people actually make can be skewed if there are a lot of either high-earning one-percenters or low-income persons in a location.
How Income Is Affected by Race and Gender
Numerous Americans and their families are negatively affected by structural racism and sexism. Here, we concentrate on individual worker performance by examining individual income.
The discrepancy in income by race is a significant cause of income inequality in America. The distinctions are obvious. According to a 2021 study by Payscale.com, when other factors are taken into account, there is a $1,100 wage gap for Black men and a $2,000 pay gap for Black women.
Furthermore, families of color and Latinx people were more than twice as likely to have a negative net worth. In 2017, Black families had a 42 percent ownership rate compared to a 72 percent ownership rate for White families (the last year for which full data is available).
Men and women in the United States experience a significant income disparity. Women make about 82 cents of every dollar earned by men, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
What’s causing these differences: Men make up roughly one-third of minimum-wage employees, but only 8% of Fortune 500 CEOs are female. Race and gender interact. Black women and Latinas make an average of $775 and $706 per week, respectively, while White and Asian women make an average of $1,091 and $912 per week, respectively.
In 2019, all women were more likely to be poor than White males, but women of color were more likely to be poor than White women.
