1. As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit

Comment #31826 by seforsythe on April 14, 2007 at 1:31 pm

Regarding the discussion of well-offness in Europe vs. America:

Economists use "Purchasing Power Parity"-adjusted GDP/capita to remove disparities among countries. Here is a site that shows the rankings in terms of PPP:
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html

Another "hard" statistic used to compare distributions of wealth is the Gini Index. The EU has a combined index of 0.31; the US index is 0.45; Scandinavia averages about 0.24. The index is a measure of the equity of any distribution (income, wealth, etc.), with 0.0 being perfectly equitable (flat distribution) and 1.0 being perfectly inequitable (i.e., one person has all the wealth and everyone else has none). The difference is hard to interpret unless one looks at the company that the US keeps: look in https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2172.html
for the Gini indices of most countries. Generally, the countries with indices of .45 or above are not any that I would want to live in.