If you click through the headline for that first claim is "The 12 countries where poor children are more likely to get rich and actually achieve the American Dream than in the US". It's a claim about social mobility, not inequality. I don't think the author is reading the data backwards

It links to this article with a graph showing that Brazil and South Africa have some of the worst income mobility in the world: https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-where-intergenerat...

I live in Colombia and was in Brazil recently. They're both amazing countries with great people. Go to a comuna or favela and you'll quickly see that it's incredibly difficult for lower income people in these countries to climb into a different social class.

Well, that'd probably explain South Africa - the end of apartheid there has done wonders for the number of black South Africans in better-off jobs, even if it hasn't done all that much good for overall inequality or the economy as a whole, and I suspect this one-off event has messed with however they're measuring social mobility.

> "It's easier to achieve the American Dream in China, South Africa, and Brazil than it is in the US." South Africa and Brazil are two of the most unequal countries in the world as measured by the Gini Coefficient. I think the author is reading the data backwards.

Gini Coefficient and social mobility aren't perfectly correlated. I.e. imagine a society where people's accumulated lifetime wealth is highly unequal but where a 100% inheritance tax effectively resets familial wealth every generation.

They are even opposed, in some sense. The more inequality, the more potential for mobility there is.. at least if you are measuring mobility in absolute terms.

Since much of China's wealthy (idk about Brazil and SA) are newly wealthy, any billionaires are likely to be 1st generation wealthy. Before the 80s, being wealthy was basically banned.

> seems like this is cherry picking a market low

The point is to show that the system is rigged so badly that even during (inevitable) times of crisis, the wealth at the top keeps increasing. The idea being that any group completely insulated from disaster is being insulated unfairly by the suffering of the rest.

March may seem like cherry-picking, but for those in the US managing their household finances, March is when everything went belly up.

The point is that it's not a real increase in wealth. It's like measuring unemployment rates from April to today and concluding that the pandemic created millions of jobs.

It’s BusinessInsider. The article was probably written by a 25 year old intern and the author just edited it.

The BI model is to churn out as many articles on “business” as it can. Clicks are king so headlines are dramatic.

>South Africa and Brazil are two of the most unequal countries in the world as measured by the Gini Coefficient.

maybe using hyperbole for rhetorical effect.

According to The World Bank Data, South Africa has the highest Gini in the world: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?most_recent...

Brazil is up there. Some of the data is old, let me know if you have a better source. I wasn't trying to exaggerate.

I meant that maybe the original article was trying to exaggerate to make a rhetorical point about U.S inequality.