About 33% of that GDP is controlled by the richest 1% according to The World Bank [1].
Yes, Chile's HDI is quite high for a Latin American country. The problem is, in the same city (Santiago) you've got communes with HDIs above Norway's (Vitacura, Las Condes, and Providencia got HDIs above 0.953) and then there are communes less than an hour away that got an HDI lower than Panama's (San Ramón HDI is 0.786) [2][3][4].
By OECD's data, Chile is the third country with the highest income inequality amongst OECD members [5].
You're right that the US is a fabulously wealthy country. Still, this might be a misguided comparison: the least developed region of NZ still has a higher HDI than two US states[1][2], without considering territories.
If you decided to wander around West Virginia (as I have), you'd see plenty of people burning coal and/or firewood for heat in winter (and WV winters are much harsher than NZ ones, from what I know about NZ). You'll also see extreme indigence of a sort that's otherwise almost completely invisible in the US.
I assumed you realized we were constraining ourselves to places with a High or Very High HDI.
If nobody has any money at all, would you not say inequality is low? If everyone in Tajikistan has $5 except the president, Emomali Rahmon, is inequality not low?
I suspect you are looking for a pairing of HDI and Gini, which factors in both the development (and hence the standard of living) and the inequality.
Now, Tajikistan has an HDI of 0.66 ("medium"), and Azerbaijan 0.756 ("high").
Kazakhstan might surprise you, the HDI is 0.817 ("very high"). The standard of living there is actually good, in spite of what you may have seen on Borat - incidentally filmed in Romania. Almaty's been on my list of places to visit for a long time :) [1]
The difference in HDI between the US (0.921) and say Denmark (0.948) can be entirely explained by the fact that a large portion of the US population is a formerly enslaved minority, and an even larger portion is recent immigrants from the developing world: https://measureofamerica.org/10yearsandcounting. That has nothing to do with socialism, but historical and geographic factors unusual to the US.
I agree with your comment, particularly with the fact that HDI is a good index for monitoring the "richness" of a country.
However, the parent comment was about Brazil being a 3rd world country, not only "poor" by US standards. There are 113 countries that score lower than Brazil: countries like Ukraine or China. I don't think they are the 3rd world.
Total accumulated success is easily shown to be a false measure with a thought experiment. Consider two thousand-person communities, one full of middle-class professionals, and one with a single multi-billionaire and the rest are all downbeaten impoverished workers. You'd have to be pretty crazy to suggest that the one with widespread crushing poverty is a better society.
GDP per capita isn't the best measure for citizen's wealth when you don't take equality into account.
It's much better to look at median wages, I think.
As for the HDI, I have my reservations about it. It feels like one giant expression of wealth. That's bad because wealth isn't a direct measure of quality of life, it's indirect. One can be rich in a country where you have no freedom of the press or horrible gender relations or restrictions on sexual or ideological preference, for example.
Of course every metric is a function of wealth in some way, but the HDI more than others. For example, it measures education by years of education, not quality of education. The US does fine on years of education, but it hides the fact that test scores compared to the rest of the world are poor, or that the higher educational system leaves students with mountains of debt that have financial and non-financial consequences.
The second metric is income. Again, income an expression of wealth that's not a direct measure of quality of life, and again one that doesn't take into account wage-equality (and thus skews equal or even better towards countries with a very rich minority and a poor majority versus countries with a middle-class majority, while the latter is generally preferred.
And lastly Life expectancy at birth is a pretty decent metric. But even here there are plenty of more granular metrics. For example, a 22nd century medical system can keep alive much more obese and sick people. This showcases the notion that a sophisticated healthcare system can attain high life expectancy yet hide the fact that general health is in poor condition. While in countries where people die of lack of vaccinations reducing the life expectancy by a few years on average, people are otherwise much healthier.
On all these metrics the US skews more positively, I think. Income for one - the US is richer than most, but its middle class isn't. US kids get plenty of years in school, but test worse on virtually all subjects compared to their peers in other developed economies. And the US has good life expectancy, yet its healthcare system doesn't rank in the top 10, is more expensive by a wide margin and less accessible, and insane statistics like 2 out of every 3 people being overweight or obese are well known.
Actually reading further, my suspicion seems valid as they did an inequality-adjusted ranking too, one that looks at the average (median) level of development (i.e. loosely what you'd call middle class standard of living). US is at Nr 28.
But again the HDI is extremely thin in its metrics, it's only used well because it's a global UN effort and it's so easy to get metrics from every country as opposed to comparing more granular metrics for which data may not exist in tens of countries around the world. But if you compare OECD countries on granular metrics (e.g. something specific like a math test score, or teenage pregnancies), you'll find the US also ranks quite poorly.
Your last link ranks the US around nr. 20. That was kind of my point, US not on top, top 5 or even top 10, usually in the 20-30 range, but does very well given its size.
The US is way down the list at 120 for income equality, worse than most of the "developed world". That median hides a lot in a country of over 320 million.
It is probably worse if you would compare wealth distribution globally. Those statistics only represent distibution in USA - 1st world country and currently the biggest economy in the world.
At least in the US the base level of wealth (poor) is higher than half the countries on earth. True that the higher levels (the 120 people that own half of America) are way out of balance.
A few things worth mentioning: in the countries highest on the happiness indices, taxes are also among the highest in the world, and distribution of wealth less skewed.
Leading the world is a big stretch but "The income inequality in the United States, according to the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality where 0 is perfectly equal and 1 is perfectly unequal) is about 0.45, which is awful..."
Believe it or not, the United States has a higher median income PPP adjusted after taxes and transfers than pretty much every European nation; it's ranked #3 in the world:
Also, the US is ranked #11 in the world for food security, ranked higher than Canada, Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, France, Norway, and Australia (to name a handful): https://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/Index
The highest HDI in the world is possessed by dozens of counties in the US. The lowest in the US is on par with... Poland.
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