Gini Coefficient

The Gini coefficient measures how unequally a quantity (income, wealth, land, anything) is distributed. The score runs from 0 (everyone has the same amount) to 1 (one person has everything). Most modern economies sit between 0.25 and 0.55.

US income Gini is around 0.42; US wealth Gini is around 0.85 — the latter much higher because wealth compounds across generations while income earned in a single year does not. Wealth Gini is the more politically interesting number for a publication tracking concentrated power, but it is also harder to measure than income because it depends on disclosure rules that vary by country and on asset valuations that move with markets.

Gini collapses a full distribution into a single number, which is its strength (comparable across time and place) and its weakness (the same Gini can describe very different distributions). For granular questions Thin Gold uses share-of-top-1% or share-of-bottom-50% instead.