Quote Originally Posted by JBMcB View Post
I love looking at data. It's also part of my job. The first thing I do when I look at a chart is to see where the primary axis starts. If it doesn't start at zero then where and why. Then you look at where it ends. Here we have a range of 0.2 to 0.6. Why was this range selected? Don't know, not in the article.
The range starts 0.2 because 0 is perfect equality, meaning no difference in income between the lowest 10% and the highest 10%; since that doesn't exist, it starts at 0.2, the most equal society.

The opposite end of the range is 1, which means perfect inequality in which all national income is made by 1 person.

Likewise that does not exist, so the max is 0.6

Further explanation is provided here:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gini-index.asp

The complete set of equations is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_c...nt#Calculation

Anywhoo, we see that, after taxes, the difference between the US and the next country down is 0.01. The difference between the US and the UK is 0.03. The difference between the US and Iceland is 0.14.

So, what does that mean?
Roughly, and I do mean roughly, the the U.S. is 10% more unequal than the U.K. Unequal meaning the disparity between those at the top, and those at the bottom is greater in the United States by about 10%

I guess you could argue that taxing the heck out of people will increase the standard of living, ala Iceland, however the next few entries are Slovenia and the Czech Republic, countries not exactly known for their fantastic standards of living. Turkey has a higher GINI index than the US, but it's standard of living is decent for the part of the world it's in.
So....
The Gini Coefficient doesn't measure standard of living, its not a measure of the wealth or income of a country; at least in this context.

Its a measure of how whatever wealth there is in a country is divided among its citizens.

You can have more inequality and greater wealth or the opposite.

What changes is where the proportion of the benefit is located.

In the aggregate, wealthier nations tend to have lower gini coefficients; and this often correlates with a higher standard of living.

But that isn't universally true and can't be looked at in isolation.