Yeah, I think the point about US, Russian or Chinese news is crucial. I will leave US aside for a while - a situation there is very dynamic, they used to be a bit more like the EU in this regard. But in Russia and China, clearly, there is no independent media. They have propaganda instead of public debate. Thus, you hear about positive things happening there, as this is the goal of propaganda. In the EU, there is a vital and highly critical public debate, which focuses on shortcomings. This is a strength, since the issues cannot be just ignored - but the feedback of negative information from the citizens reaches also outsiders. In US, one thing seems to go well - bussiness. And while they sure do get a lot of money, there is also one more kind of propaganda, that might influence the view: marketing. Unfortunately, in a world where in many sectors more capital comes from investors than customers, you can get far with just marketing…
In brief, I think there is an issue of reporting here. Things seem bad in the EU, because bad things are reported in the EU. This reminds me another anecdote: You will read in many places that Nordic countries have low income inequality, but high wealth inequality compared to other countries. Indeed, if you look at the tables, this seems to be the case. You will find many complex mechanistic explanations of this phenomenon on the internet. But if you read into the original Credit Suisse report (https://web.archive.org/web/20250401062226/https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/research/publications/global-wealth-databook-2022.pdf), you can find this paragraph:
The distributional data have certain fairly standard features. The unit of analysis is usually a household or family, but is in a few cases the (adult) individual. Household sample surveys are employed in almost all countries. The exceptions are the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden), which use data from tax and other registers covering the entire population. For all other countries, except the United States, the wealth shares of the top groups are expected to be understated because wealthy households are less likely to respond, and because the financial assets that are of greater importance to the wealthy – e.g. equities and bonds – are especially likely to be under-reported.
Yeah, I think the point about US, Russian or Chinese news is crucial. I will leave US aside for a while - a situation there is very dynamic, they used to be a bit more like the EU in this regard. But in Russia and China, clearly, there is no independent media. They have propaganda instead of public debate. Thus, you hear about positive things happening there, as this is the goal of propaganda. In the EU, there is a vital and highly critical public debate, which focuses on shortcomings. This is a strength, since the issues cannot be just ignored - but the feedback of negative information from the citizens reaches also outsiders. In US, one thing seems to go well - bussiness. And while they sure do get a lot of money, there is also one more kind of propaganda, that might influence the view: marketing. Unfortunately, in a world where in many sectors more capital comes from investors than customers, you can get far with just marketing…
In brief, I think there is an issue of reporting here. Things seem bad in the EU, because bad things are reported in the EU. This reminds me another anecdote: You will read in many places that Nordic countries have low income inequality, but high wealth inequality compared to other countries. Indeed, if you look at the tables, this seems to be the case. You will find many complex mechanistic explanations of this phenomenon on the internet. But if you read into the original Credit Suisse report (https://web.archive.org/web/20250401062226/https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/research/publications/global-wealth-databook-2022.pdf), you can find this paragraph: