Americans Are Not Wealthy: This Is the Truth About the US Economy

By Ben Norton – Aug 16, 2026

It is often said that the United States is the richest country on Earth. This is a myth.

It is certainly true that, in the United States, there are some very, very rich people, including the wealthiest billionaires on Earth, and the first ever trillionaire (Elon Musk).

However, when you look at the country as a whole, you see that the US is not a relatively prosperous nation.

This article will analyze a broad set of data, including several different indicators, that show how Americans are not wealthy compared to people in other advanced economies.

Americans are NOT wealthier than Europeans
US media outlets constantly promote a pernicious narrative, claiming that, supposedly, the United Kingdom is poorer than Mississippi, the poorest US state.

This misleading idea is especially common on the US right. Trump’s MAGA supporters often disparagingly refer to Europeans as “Europoors”.

Even some European media outlets have published articles claiming that “American families are so much richer than us”.

This is completely ridiculous — and, frankly, false.

UBS, the major Swiss bank, publishes an annual Global Wealth Report. The document is written primarily for rich investors, but it includes some interesting data that can be relevant to everyday people.

In the 2026 report, UBS calculated the wealth per adult in the 30 richest economies in the world. What was especially useful about this report was that it included both average wealth and median wealth.

It is true that, if you look at average wealth per adult, the United States is in second place, after Switzerland.

This is the data point that most Western media outlets highlighted. The Wall Street Journal pointed to it to conclude that “Europeans get wealthier, but lag behind Americans”.

However, the Wall Street Journal ignored the median wealth per adult, which was also reported in UBS’ Global Wealth Report 2026.

If you look at median wealth, the picture suddenly changes — and dramatically, at that.

The US drops from being in second place in average wealth way down to 28th place in median wealth.

The median wealth per adult in the US is lower than that of Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Israel, Sweden, Finland, Qatar, etc.

The median (middle) American is not wealthy.

If you say Americans are wealthy, you have to say Austrians are wealthy, Portuguese are wealthy, and Slovenians are wealthy, because the median person in those countries has more wealth than the median American.

In reality, the US is such an unequal country, with a small handful of extremely wealthy billionaires, that it makes the average American look wealthy, but that average is extremely skewed by the rich.

Confusing mean (average) and median (middle)
A big reason for this confusion is that many people simply do not understand the difference between the mean (the average) and the median (the middle).

There is a lot of wealth in the US, but that wealth is concentrated in a few hands.

In fact, the US has one of the highest rates of wealth inequality in the world.

The following infographic illustrates the difference between average wealth and median wealth.

Think about it this way: If you have a room with 10 people, and each person has $1000 of wealth, the average wealth is $1000 per person, and the median wealth is $1000. (The median is the middle value.) In this case, and the mean and the median are the same.

However, if you have a room with 10 people, but one of those is a billionaire, and the other nine only have $1000 of wealth, suddenly the average wealth shoots up to more than $100,000,000 ($100 million) per person.

That doesn’t mean that the other nine people are somehow rich. They don’t have $100 million of wealth; only one person has $1 billion of wealth. The other people are still poor; they only have $1000 of wealth.

This is why it is more important to look at median wealth. The median wealth in the second room is still $1000. But that single billionaire massively skews the average.

This is a crucial difference that is not understood by the US propagandists who make fun of the supposed “Europoors”.

To be fair, it’s not just Trump supporters who fall for this. Even major US media outlets keep publishing articles claiming that Europeans are supposedly lagging behind Americans in wealth.

The Wall Street Journal did exactly this in its article on the UBS Global Wealth Report. Its reporter overlooked the median wealth and instead focused on the average.

The UK is NOT poorer than Mississippi
This is why the claim, promoted by US media outlets, that the United Kingdom is poorer than Mississippi is utterly false. It is based on a misunderstanding of the difference between average and median.

It is also based on a misunderstanding on the difference between median wealth and GDP per capita.

GDP is not a measurement of wealth. GDP is a measurement of economic output, of the market value of all of the goods and services produced in a country in one year.

The fact is that, despite the many, many economic problems in Britain, the median wealth per adult in the UK is more than $125,000 USD. Median wealth in the US is roughly half of that, at just $69,000.

Moreover, conservative Americans, especially Trump supporters, love to make fun of Canada. They claim that the country is supposedly the “51st state”, calling to annex their northern neighbor. They often argue that Canadians are supposedly poorer than Americans.

Once again, this is based on an ignorant misunderstanding of the difference between average and median.

The median wealth per adult in Canada is nearly $148,000 USD, more than double the US median wealth of $69,000.

The US is one of the most unequal countries on Earth
The reason the United States appears to be rich, on the surface, is because it is one of the most unequal countries on Earth, and its high-profile elites often flaunt their wealth.

UBS’ Global Wealth Report 2026 also looked at wealth inequality in dozens of major economies.

The Swiss bank measured wealth inequality with the Gini coefficient. The Gini coefficient is a spectrum from zero to one. A Gini coefficient of one is the most extreme, hypothetical, example of inequality, in which all of the wealth in the country is held by one person. A Gini coefficient of zero is the utopian notion of perfect equality, in which all of the wealth is equally held by everyone in the country.

The higher the Gini coefficient is, the closer to one it is, the more inequality; and vice versa: the lower the Gini coefficient is, the closer it is to zero, the lower the inequality.

UBS found that the US is the sixth-most unequal country on the planet, with a Gini coefficient of 0.77.

Wealth inequality in the US is roughly at the same level as that of Saudi Arabia, which is an authoritarian absolute monarchy run by a royal family, which treats the domestic oil industry as its personal piggy bank and controls an estimated $1.4 trillion in wealth.

This is the perfect symbol of how the United States is not actually a democracy, but rather an oligarchy, dominated by a small handful of billionaires (and now the first ever trillionaire).

In fact, the only countries that have higher wealth inequality than the US are:
• Brazil (the fourth-most unequal), a formerly colonized nation in the Global South, which (like the US) has been plagued by systemic racism and extreme inequality between European-descended elites on one hand and Indigenous peoples and Brazilians of African descent on the other;

• South Africa (the third-most unequal), a country that for decades was run by a colonialist, white-supremacist apartheid regime, which systematically denied rights to the Black majority;

• Russia (the second-most unequal), which had capitalist shock therapy imposed upon it by US neoliberal economists in the 1990s, following the overthrow of the Soviet Union, when Washington mandated mass privatizations, which allowed a small handful of oligarchs to buy up formerly nationalized industries and other state assets for pennies on the dollar;

• the United Arab Emirates, or UAE (the most unequal), an absolute monarchy built upon horrendous exploitation of migrant workers, where modern-day slavery is widespread, and where just 13% of the population has citizenship and full rights.

In terms of its distribution of wealth, the United States is similar to these countries.

In fact, the US is more unequal than even some formerly colonized countries in the Global South, such as India and Mexico.

The only European nation that comes close to the level of US wealth inequality is Sweden.

Many European governments have been rightfully criticized for serving the interests of a small handful of wealthy elites.

France’s leader Emmanuel Macron is a multi-millionaire neoliberal banker who has often been referred to as “the president of the rich”. He has implemented many policies to benefit the rich, such as eliminating the wealth tax.

However, despite all of this, wealth inequality in France is nowhere near the level of the US. France is the 43rd-most unequal country.

Despite the many problems with other European governments, which are also frequently led by rich elites, their level of wealth inequality is much lower than that of the US.

The UK is the 40th-most unequal country. Italy is the 49th-most unequal country.

Similarly, Western propaganda often criticizes China for having “harsh inequality”, but the UBS data shows that mainland China (the 36th-most unequal country) has relatively the same level of wealth inequality as most European countries. It is more equal than Portugal (the 33rd-most unequal), and close to the level of the United Kingdom (the 40th-most unequal).

This is not to dispute that people in these countries still struggle with inequality. But the point is that the problem in the United States is exponentially worse.

The French economist Gabriel Zucman has done important research on wealth inequality. He found that the wealth of the 19 richest households in the US (the richest 0.00001% of the country) makes up nearly 14% of national income.

The US has never seen this extreme level of wealth concentration in its history.

US wealth inequality today is significantly worse than it was even during the Gilded Age, in the late 19th century, when the nation was dominated by the infamous “robber barons”, oligarchs like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and JP Morgan.

Today’s oligarchs — such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison — are significantly richer. And they have enormous influence over the political and economic system.

US billionaire Big Tech oligarchs sit with Donald Trump’s cabinet members at his inauguration in January 2025

Extreme income inequality in the US
Another reason why the myth that Americans are wealthy is so widespread is because mainstream economists and Western media outlets conflate GDP, income, and wealth. All three are different metrics.

Wealth inequality is the most important form of inequality, given that rich people are rich because they own assets, not because of their income. In fact, many US billionaires claim to have little to no income, in order to avoid paying taxes.

Wealth inequality in the US is especially extreme. But if you look at income inequality, you can see that that it is also very high.

The economist Gabriel Zucman demonstrated that the richest 10% of Americans received about half of all growth in income in the past three decades, whereas the bottom 50% of Americans only earned 15% to 20% of the growth in income.

In fact, the richest 10% of Americans by income bracket make up roughly half of all of the consumer spending in the economy.

If you look at the bottom 60% of Americans, their share of consumption has fallen consistently over time.

This is particularly relevant, because consumption is the most important part of the US economy, which has been deindustrialized. And that consumption is being driven more and more by a small handful of rich elites.

Gdp is NOT a measurement of wealth
One of the biggest problems with the corporate media’s economic discourse is the perception that GDP is a measurement of wealth. It is decidedly not.

The BBC claimed this June that “the US economy keeps defying the odds” and “the American economy continued to outperform so many of its peers”.

The narrative promoted in the Western media is that the US economy is supposedly healthier, because it has higher GDP growth. Therefore, the average American supposedly has rising living standards.

But this is not true. GDP is simply a measurement of economic output. It is the market value of all of the goods and services produced in a country every year.

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GDP per capita is not a measurement of wealth, and it’s not a measurement of well-being.

A country’s GDP per capita can rise even as living standards for the average and/or median person fall, if the benefits of economic growth accrue to a small handful of elites (which is precisely what has happened in the US for decades).

Moreover, US GDP often looks misleadingly higher in relation to other countries because other nations’ GDP figures, which are initially reported in their local currencies, are skewed by being converted into US dollars at market exchange rates.

When you account for purchasing power parity (PPP), it is true that GDP per capita in the US is higher than that of Germany, Canada, France, and the UK. (Although median wealth in the US is lower.)

However, there are also several European countries that have significantly higher GDP per capita than the US, when measured at PPP. These include Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland.

Some Western mainstream economists don’t use PPP, instead preferring to measure GDP at market exchange rates. This makes the US economy look bigger than it actually is in relation to other countries, because the US dollar is so overvalued compared to most major currencies.

Ironically, Donald Trump himself constantly complains about how overvalued the US dollar is. And it is true. It’s because the US economy has deindustrialized, and it is based largely on inflating financial bubbles in the capital markets and real estate market. A stronger dollar encourages foreign investors to pile into US assets, keeping the bubbles inflated.

Trump says he wants a weaker dollar, in order to increase the competitiveness of US exports and encourage reshoring of manufacturing production.

So, in other words, the US is trying to have its cake and eat it too. The US wants an overvalued dollar to continue inflating asset prices, but it also wants a weaker dollar to make manufacturing more competitive.

Trump constantly boasts when stock market indices like the S&P 500 and Dow Jones break new records. But to keep juicing share prices, the US needs an overvalued dollar. If the dollar depreciates significantly against other major currencies, many foreign investors will sell their US holdings, causing a crash in the price of equities.

And with all of that said, there are still more problems with GDP data.

Ireland is a textbook example of why GDP per capita can be very misleading.

In 2014, Ireland’s GDP per capita (PPP) was $57,730 USD. Just one year later, it shot up 25% to $71,900. By 2025, it rocketed to $152,630. That means Ireland’s GDP per capita nearly tripled in a decade.

Throughout the 2000s, the US and Ireland had virtually identical GDP per capita. However, as of 2026, Ireland’s GDP per capita is now 69% higher than than of the US.

Does this mean that Ireland saw a massive economic boom in the past decade, of world-historic character? Did Irish people suddenly became much wealthier? Did living standards rapidly rise?

No. Ireland’s enormous GDP growth was largely a product of accounting and tax jurisdictions.

In reality, what happened is that major US corporations like Apple registered their intellectual property in Ireland, to take advantage of its low-tax status.

These US companies simply wanted to avoid taxes, so they changed their accounting practices. They did not suddenly build factories in Ireland that generated local employment and raised living standards.

Forbes reported on the controversy in 2016 and cautioned that, while GDP “is an interesting and useful number, it’s simply not the be all and end all of trying to measure the economy”.

Ireland’s supposed growth miracle came to be known as a case of “leprechaun economics”.

However, many Western economists and media outlets have forgotten this lesson. They are still fixated on GDP.

Another major problem with GDP is that it is an aggregate figure, based on the market value of the goods and services produced in all industries. However, some industries are more important than others.

Geopolitical Economy Report analyzed data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), separating US GDP by industry, to compare how much each sector of the economy adds value.

This clearly illustrates how the US economy has been deindustrialized and financialized in recent decades.

In the 1950s, manufacturing made up roughly 25% of US GDP. Today, manufacturing represents just a bit more than 10%.

At the same time, the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector (known popularly as Wall Street) has massively increased its share of US GDP from just over 10% in 1947 to roughly 21% today.

Wall Street now represents the largest single sector of the US economy.

The second-biggest sector is professional and business services, which consist primarily of lawyers, managers, and consultants — in other words, bureaucratic overhead, not innovation and entrepreneurship.

The growth of these sectors does not contribute to rising living standards for Americans. On the contrary, a larger share of the economy represented by finance and professional services often translates into lower standards of living for the median worker.

This is why US GDP per capita can continue to rise, while living standards fall.

Another clear example of the problem with GDP data is imputed rent. A growing portion of US GDP consists of a fictitious part of the economy, which is called “imputed rents to owner-occupied housing”.

This means that, if you’re an American and you own your house, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis wants to include your home ownership in GDP data, so it does an imputation. It calculates market rates for the rent you would be charged by an imaginary landlord, if you didn’t own your house. But you do own your house, so it’s not real.

For decades, imputed rent represented a rounding error, at less than 1%. However, since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, imputed rent has become an increasingly important part of US GDP data.

In 2022, imputed rental of owner-occupied housing made up 9.2% of US GDP, up from 1.2% in 1970.

This means that nearly a tenth of US GDP is entirely fictitious. It does not exist. It is simply a matter of accounting.

All of these issues demonstrate why GDP is not a good measurement. GDP has a very specific use, to measure the economic output of the entire economy. But GDP per capita does not measure wealth, and it does not measure well-being.

This explains why it is utterly preposterous to look at GDP per capita, measured in dollars at market exchange rates, and to conclude that the UK is supposedly poorer than Mississippi. But the Western media corporate media continues to do so.

Us public-health outcomes are among the worst of the developed world
Thus far, this article has focused on economic indicators. It is also important to analyze public health indicators, to demonstrate why the United States is in fact not a wealthy country, and how Americans have some of the worst living standards of the developed world.

Perhaps the most important indicator of all is life expectancy.

Even though GDP per capita is higher in the US than France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK (although US median wealth is lower), life expectancy is much higher in Europe.

Life expectancy in the US is just 79, compared to 84 in Spain, 83 in France, 82 in the Netherlands, and 81 in the UK.

The infant mortality rates shows a similar story.

In this area, once again, the US is doing much worse than countries at similar levels of development in Europe.

The US infant mortality rate is six per 1000 live births. In France it is half of that, at three. In the UK, it’s four.

An even more revealing indicator is the homicide rate.

The US is an extreme outlier when it comes to violence, with an average of six murders for every 100,000 people. In France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK, the figure is just one.

You see even more striking outliers when you look at healthcare indicators in the US.

The US health system is so bad that it even hurts rich Americans, who benefit most from the US oligarchic system.

This is according to peer-reviewed academic research published in 2025 by scientists at Brown University. The university summarized their findings in a press release (emphasis added):

The results revealed that people with more wealth tend to live longer than those with less wealth, especially in the U.S., where the gap between the rich and poor is much larger than in Europe.

Comparison data also showed that at every wealth level in the U.S., mortality rates were higher than those in the parts of Europe the researchers studied. The nation’s wealthiest Americans have shorter lifespans on average than the wealthiest Europeans; in some cases, the wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western parts of Europe such as Germany, France and the Netherlands.

In other words, the average American (not the median American) may have more wealth than most Europeans — because of the extreme wealth inequality in the US — but even many rich Americans live shorter lives than poor Europeans.

Why is that? Because the US healthcare system is so awful.

This is reflected in the data published by the OECD, in its annual report called Health at a Glance. The 2025 report is extremely revealing.

OECD data is useful, because it compares apples to apples, looking at advanced economies at similar levels of development (not apples to oranges, which would be comparing imperialist countries that developed through colonialism to underdeveloped, formerly colonized nations in the Global South).

The OECD found that the US is an outlier when it comes to health expenditure as a share of GDP. No other advanced economy comes close to the level of health spending of the US.

US healthcare spending is 17.2% of GDP. That is nearly double the OECD average of 9.3%.

This is another reason why US GDP looks higher, because the costs of its privatized health system are so exorbitant and inflated by the corporate sector.

Nevertheless, while the US spends nearly double the OECD average on healthcare, it has some of the worst public-health outcomes.

The data on health expenditure per capita is even more shocking.

Every year in the US, the health industry spends nearly $15,000 per person. And the share of out-of-pocket expenses in the US is higher than almost every other OECD country.

The average OECD health expenditure per capita is just under $6000 USD. (It should be noted that this is measured at purchasing power parity, PPP.)

This means the US spends nearly three times the OECD average per person on healthcare, with some of the worst results.

OECD researchers also studied the relationship between health spending and health outcomes.

Once again, they found that the US is an outlier.

The same trend is evident in the data analyzing the correlation between health spending and access to quality healthcare.

The data makes it clear: the US is a plutocracy. If you are rich, you can get good healthcare; if you are poor, you do not get good healthcare.

One of the reasons for this is simply because the US is, once again, a major outlier when it comes to population coverage for health care.

If you look at the dozens of countries in the OECD, you can see that the vast majority have 99% or 100% healthcare coverage for their population, and almost all of them have 99% or 100% public coverage.

There are only three countries in the OECD where the majority of the population gets healthcare from private companies: Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the US.

The average of the 38 economies in the OECD is that 98% of the population has health coverage.

In the US, it’s just 92% — one of the worst levels in the OECD. The US has a lower level of health coverage than Costa Rica, Estonia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary, Chile, and Poland.

The only countries in the OECD that have a lower rate of health coverage than the US are Romania and Mexico.

But unlike the US, Mexico is solving this problem. In fact, Mexico’s left-wing government announced this year that it is creating a system of free universal healthcare. (This is one of the reasons why progressive President Claudia Sheinbaum is one of the most popular leaders on Earth, with a consistent approval rating of between 70% and 80%.)

Us oligarchs are very wealthy, but the median American is not
All of these indicators, together, demonstrate that the US is not truly a wealthy country. Rather, it is a country that has a small handful of wealthy people.

When you exclude the oligarchs who skew the data, you can see that Americans actually have quite a low standard of living, compared to people in other advanced economies.

Nevertheless, the Western corporate media — which even in Europe is overwhelmingly owned by pro-US, Atlanticist billionaire oligarchs — bombards people with propaganda claiming that the US neoliberal capitalist model is responsible for widespread prosperity, and that this is supposedly why Britain is poorer than Mississippi.

These people are utterly out of touch with reality. They ignore how many Americans are living in brutal conditions, are homeless, are impoverished, are struggling with extreme levels of debt, and are living paycheck to paycheck, with horrible health outcomes and a low life expectancy.

The propaganda claiming otherwise is spread by the same oligarchs who benefit from this extremely unequal US system, which is based on financial bubbles, rampant scams, and exploitation of working people, many of whom are barely making ends meet and are on the verge of being homeless.

That is the reality for the median American. For them, the American Dream is a myth. That’s why, as George Carlin said, “you have to be asleep to believe it”.

 

(Geopolitical Economy)