One of the more irritating habits of modern neoliberal economists is their determination to confuse the wealth of countries with the wealth of the people who happen to live in them. They tell us that the United States is astonishingly rich, while Britain has become a byword for decline. They produce tables of GDP per head and average wealth, shake them theatrically before the cameras, and conclude that the average Briton ought to envy the average American. This is not economic analysis. It is statistical illusion.

I should begin by making an obvious concession. Britain has serious economic problems. Forty years of deindustrialisation, mass immigration, financialisation, asset inflation and managerial government have left the country poorer than it ought to be. Productive industry has been replaced by speculation. Young people struggle to buy houses. Infrastructure decays while taxation reaches levels unknown in peacetime. I have written often enough about these developments.

None of this, however, justifies replacing one false narrative with another. Britain has not become some impoverished backwater while the United States enjoys universal prosperity. The evidence points in almost the opposite direction.

The first trick lies in the word average. Suppose ten people each possess one hundred pounds. Their average wealth is one hundred pounds, and their median wealth is also one hundred pounds. Now suppose nine of them lose everything while the tenth acquires a million pounds. Average wealth has exploded upwards. Median wealth has collapsed to nothing. The country appears richer than ever. Almost everyone is poorer than before. This distinction disappears whenever neoliberal commentators begin celebrating American economic performance.

The latest UBS Global Wealth Report 2026 (reflecting end-2025 data) provides a striking illustration. On average wealth per adult, the United States appears to be one of the richest societies on earth. The average American adult supposedly possesses $696,277 of wealth, placing America second only to Switzerland ($910,382). Britain, with an average figure of roughly $292,808, appears almost modest by comparison.

The conclusion seems obvious only until one asks a different question. How wealthy is the typical American? Median wealth answers this question because it measures the individual standing in the middle of the distribution. Half the population possesses more. Half possesses less. Billionaires disappear into statistical irrelevance because they count only as individuals rather than as mountains of accumulated capital. The American miracle suddenly evaporates.

According to the same UBS figures, the median American possesses only about $68,998 of wealth. That places the United States 28th in the world. Britain stands around thirteenth, with median wealth of approximately $125,335. Italy ($131,001) exceeds America. Belgium ($277,166) exceeds America by an enormous margin. Australia ($210,783), Canada (~$147,811), Denmark ($203,771) and New Zealand ($206,617) all stand comfortably ahead. Even Slovenia ($81,366), Portugal ($76,978), and Austria ($71,378) record higher median wealth than the United States.

This is not a marginal statistical adjustment. It is the difference between measuring the wealth of oligarchs and measuring the wealth of ordinary people.

Over recent decades the share of wealth owned by the richest one per cent in America has climbed steadily while ownership among the rest of society has stagnated. Federal Reserve data shows the top 1% held around 31–32% of total US household wealth in 2025, near historic highs, while the bottom 50% held roughly 2.5–5.5%. More revealing still is the divergence between the top one per cent and the bottom half of the population. In the early 1990s, the average member of the top one per cent possessed perhaps six times the wealth of someone in the bottom fifty per cent. By 2011 that ratio had exploded to around seventy to one. Although the ratio has since fallen substantially, it still remains close to nine or ten to one in recent UBS and Fed analyses. That reduction has not come because the poor have suddenly become prosperous. Rather, it reflects changes in asset prices after the financial crisis and subsequent market adjustments. The underlying concentration of wealth remains exceptional.

The United States is therefore not principally a rich society. It is a society containing some very rich people. These are different propositions. The distinction matters because so much contemporary economic debate depends on confusing them.

Whenever someone observes that Britain has become relatively poorer than America, he usually reaches for GDP per capita. This statistic divides total national output by population. It therefore assumes that what is produced somehow belongs equally to everyone. Nothing could be further from reality. GDP tells us nothing about ownership. It tells us nothing about indebtedness. It tells us nothing about housing costs, medical expenses or educational debt. It says nothing about whether prosperity has been captured by technology monopolies, financial institutions or private equity firms while the population struggles to pay its rent. A hedge fund manager receiving a billion dollars of capital gains makes GDP larger. His cleaner does not become wealthier because of it.

Nor does GDP explain why the United States contains some of the world’s richest corporations alongside levels of homelessness that would shame many supposedly poorer countries. In January 2025, an estimated 745,652 people experienced homelessness on a single night nationwide—the first year-on-year decline in nearly a decade, yet still extraordinarily high. Walk through parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco or Seattle and one encounters conditions that scarcely resemble the triumphant narratives presented by neoliberal economists.

The extraordinary productive power of the American economy coexists with remarkable financial insecurity for millions of its citizens. This is not because America lacks wealth. It is because wealth has become increasingly concentrated. There is an ideological reason why this distinction is so often ignored. The dominant economic orthodoxy since the 1980s has been neither classical liberalism nor genuine free-market economics. It has been something altogether different. It has favoured financial liberalisation, unrestricted capital mobility, monopolisation through mergers, repeated central-bank asset inflation, and a tax structure that often rewards capital gains more generously than productive enterprise.

None of this bears much resemblance to the competitive capitalism described by Adam Smith. He admired dispersed ownership, competitive markets and suspicion of monopolists. Modern neoliberalism has instead produced gigantic financial conglomerates, technology monopolies and investment funds whose scale would have horrified nineteenth-century liberals. The result has been rising average wealth alongside increasingly uneven ownership of that wealth.

Britain has travelled some distance along the same road. The Thatcher settlement accelerated deindustrialisation while encouraging financialisation centred on the City of London. The consequences remain visible today. Manufacturing employment declined. Property became an investment vehicle rather than simply somewhere to live. Finance increasingly displaced production as the commanding sector of the economy. Yet Britain never developed wealth concentration on the American scale. That partly explains why Britain’s median wealth remains higher relative to its average than America’s. Britain is poorer overall. It is nevertheless somewhat less unequal in accumulated household wealth.

This also explains another favourite rhetorical device. Every few months some commentator triumphantly announces that Britain is now “poorer than Mississippi.” The comparison normally rests on GDP per head adjusted for purchasing power. It ignores differences in household assets, healthcare financing (where the US system imposes heavy out-of-pocket costs on many), educational debt (which burdens younger Americans disproportionately), pensions, taxation and public provision. It compares accounting identities while pretending to compare human lives. No serious economist should be satisfied with that level of analysis.

Indeed, the obsession with GDP often reveals how detached modern economics has become from ordinary experience. An economy exists to satisfy human wants. Wealth exists to provide security, independence and choice. When the typical citizen owns little while depending upon continuous employment merely to survive, it is difficult to argue that spectacular national averages demonstrate widespread prosperity.

The United States undoubtedly remains one of the world’s most productive economies. It dominates advanced technology, higher education, financial markets and scientific research. It produces remarkable entrepreneurs and remarkable companies. None of these facts should be denied. But neither should we pretend that these achievements automatically enrich the median citizen. High rates of innovation and entrepreneurship coexist with barriers like expensive healthcare, uneven public services, and asset-price inflation that benefits owners far more than renters or the asset-poor.

Likewise, Britain’s decline should neither be exaggerated nor sentimentalised. We have become poorer than we should have been. We have allowed productive capacity to decay while governments of every party inflated property values and expanded managerial bureaucracy. Those are genuine failures. They deserve criticism. They do not justify replacing one statistical deception with another.

Average wealth answers one question: how much wealth exists in total? Median wealth answers a different question: how much wealth does the ordinary citizen possess? The neoliberal economist habitually prefers the first question because it flatters the existing economic order. The second question is much less comfortable, because it reminds us that a country may become spectacularly rich while leaving much of its population with comparatively modest assets.

That is perhaps the lesson of the American figures. The United States is not a poor country. It is one of the richest civilisations in history. But its immense prosperity belongs disproportionately to those at the summit of its financial hierarchy. The typical American is therefore considerably less wealthy than the mythology suggests. Equally, the typical Briton is considerably wealthier than the mythology allows.

Statistics illuminate only when they measure what matters. Otherwise they become instruments of persuasion rather than tools of understanding. GDP, average wealth and other favourite indicators of the neoliberal establishment increasingly serve precisely that propagandistic purpose. They celebrate the riches of nations while quietly concealing the circumstances of the people who actually inhabit them.

A civilisation should be judged not by the fortunes of its billionaires, but by the security enjoyed by its ordinary citizens. On that measure, the gap between Britain and America is far narrower than the fashionable economists would have us believe.