🌅 Inequality Isn’t Inevitable

Sunrise Stat
May 08, 2025

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Economies in 49 countries are highly unequal based on the Gini index, suggesting 22% of the world’s population, or one in five people, live in a highly unequal society. The Gini index is a measure of inequality based on income using a scale of 0 (where everyone has the same income and thus no inequality) and 100 (where a single person has all income and therefore creates the most unequal society). For perspective, the five Nordic countries all score below 30 on the index.

Most of the world’s highly unequal economies—scoring 40 and above on the index—are located in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, including G20 economies like Argentina (40.7), Mexico (43.5), Brazil (52.0), and South Africa (63.0). The U.S. (41.3) also ranks among the world’s highly unequal economies, while countries like Canada (31.7), France (31.7), and the U.K. (32.4) are considered moderately unequal.

Researchers with the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) project examined 50,000 family homes across 10,000 years of human history, analyzing the homes alongside trends in Gini index values over time. Comparing the trends to changes in governmental structures within economies, the team found that while inequality is indeed widespread throughout history, it doesn’t occur naturally and it isn’t the inevitable end product of governmental choices. Rather, the decisions societies make about how to distribute wealth among people directly impact social disparity across economies.

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