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Income inequality in Russia over the period of the USSR
(hexbear.net)
Source: Piketty's World Inequality Report 2022
I shared this deep in a dunk thread earlier and figured there's probably many comrades who haven't seen this data. I think it's very good rhetorically because a lot of libs have an incredibly vibes-based impression that the Soviet Union was just an Animal Farm old-boss-same-as-the-new-boss situation.
Instead, this demonstrates that Russia underwent one of the most dramatic inversions of income inequality of any country in recorded history.
For comparison here is the US over the same time period:
China:
And the UK:
Be interesting to see this for wealth in addition to income
Yeah it definitely would be. If you follow the link for the source you'll find some data but it's not as exhaustive. One of the refrains in Capital in the 21st Century is that wealth inequality is always more dramatic and extreme, and another is that it's incredibly irresponsible for states to not be recording and publishing data about wealth so citizens can make informed decisions. (You can already hear the libness coming out - it's a good book if you can get past that)
for a second I thought you were talking about Das Kapital and were calling marx a lib and I was genuinely impressed
Wealth inequality won't be much bigger in China specifically because communism almost completely flattened it a few decades ago so it hasn't had that much time to build up.