Global billonaire city ranking and U.S. Metro area millionaire ranking

[dc_denizen]

What is the average financial asset holding of the average Moscovite, compared to the average new yorker, I wonder. these lists mostly rank the concentration of wealth, in places like Russia.

[muppet]

Japan is famous for having a very equal society and economy with a low Gini Coefficient - hence why there are far less billionaires. It's a good thing - the wealth is more evenly spread for all rather than being just concentrated on one individual, and being locked up in his family for the next century or two.

[Shawn]

^--- I said something like this the last time a similar list was posted: if you could produce a list ranking cities or metro areas by the percentage of people making USD 100,000 - USD 150,000 a year, Tokyo would come in number one, by both total numbers and on a per capita basis.

In Tokyo, you don't see the types of flashy, ostentatious displays of wealth that you see in Hong Kong and Singapore, or even New York. That's a cultural thing, but it's also a reflection of there being less concentrated super wealth. A whole lot of upper middle class, but not a lot of oil sheik or Silicon Valley / Wall Street C-suite-level money. Chinese super wealthy buy lots of property, but they don't live there - it's just a safer place to park money, well outside of the Chinese financial ecosystem.

[muppet]

Agreed. Oligarchs do not generate wealth in the same way as spreading out the wealth more evenly does, whereby it gets spent more locally, or generates wealth through reinvestment.

If one looks at Eastern Asia in microcosm, places like China - with it's central control - forced it's banks and manufacturers to move the economy and land reform up the value chain. South Korea did the same at the barrel of a gun - under it's former dictators they imprisoned the country's richest men for a week until they caved in to reinvesting their profits and forcing them to strike out to foreign markets (and why you get brand leaders such as Hyundai, LG and Samsung nowadays, rather than stopping at Korean-only Chaebol conglomerates, that swamped the majority of the local economy with only 5 brands).

Compare that with Philippines or Thailand, whose self made oligarchs were abso fine with resting on their laurels after cornering the local markets in basics such as rice, tin or rubber- no head up the value chain, and spiriting the countries wealth away to the US, Switzerland, Singapore and UK where the money will sit for generations in vaults. Malaysia likewise, tried to reform and move up the value chain under Mahathir who wrested control, but under corrupt economic heads ended up the same as Thailand anyway. All these oligarchs just ate up govt loans from the taxpayers to reform, failed at reforms, had their debts written off by the taxpayers, and threw it into festering real estate, at home and abroad. Asian tigerhood squandered by the time of the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

Japan's failure at evening out land reform led ultimately to the militarisation and taking over of govt by the Second War, which proved disastrous for them. But in the period following the devastation when power was broken from the ruling families, forcing its loans onto the leading companies, and the cutthroat competition of the postwar rise Japan managed to head up, and get rich with endless modernisation and reinvestment.

In short, oligarchy is something to be very, very wary of economically. They lack any impetus to reinvest the capital into foreign markets or the risky climbing of the value chain. The companies burn the ladder behind them, swamp any local competition, and the profits rot.

[mrnyc]

while they may have a main address, many of these very wealthiest of people dont live any one place.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by muppet

Japan is famous for having a very equal society and economy with a low Gini Coefficient - hence why there are far less billionaires. It's a good thing - the wealth is more evenly spread for all rather than being just concentrated on one individual, and being locked up in his family for the next century or two.

Agreed x 1000. Otherwise the wealth trickles up or stays fucking put.

[edluva]

Originally Posted by Shawn

^--- I said something like this the last time a similar list was posted: if you could produce a list ranking cities or metro areas by the percentage of people making USD 100,000 - USD 150,000 a year, Tokyo would come in number one, by both total numbers and on a per capita basis.

In Tokyo, you don't see the types of flashy, ostentatious displays of wealth that you see in Hong Kong and Singapore, or even New York. That's a cultural thing, but it's also a reflection of there being less concentrated super wealth. A whole lot of upper middle class, but not a lot of oil sheik or Silicon Valley / Wall Street C-suite-level money. Chinese super wealthy buy lots of property, but they don't live there - it's just a safer place to park money, well outside of the Chinese financial ecosystem.

which is why i love cities in egalitarian societies such as tokyo, or many of the northern european cities. i'm less interested in cities where extreme wealth concentrates in a few, and the remainder of the populace consists of the poor. cities built and run by a large, thriving, cosmopolitan upper middle class are loads more interesting to me. the wealth and sophistication of such cities is much more tangible to me because it is more ubiquitous and in your face. such places represent what i consider genuine wealth.

within the 1st world, los angeles represents among the worst of the former example. it consists of extreme wealth in a few, peppering the sea of millions of poor working class. even compared to other cities with extreme wealth (ny, sf, etc), los angeles has a serious deficit of skilled urban middle class (with urban values) who would otherwise serve as an enlightened political base from which progressive leaders can be bred. hence, the "dumb", yet still blue, resistant-to-progress city that LA has become.