Poverty in the United States is generally considered more severe due to a weaker social safety net, while the UK has higher relative income poverty rates, often affecting children. Although both are wealthy nations, the US has the highest overall poverty rate among developed nations, with extreme, deeply entrenched income inequality.
If you took away London, the UK would be poorer than the poorest US state. In fact, most of the UK is poorer than the poorest places in the Netherlands and Germany per capita.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), reported that in 2021, about 1 in 5 ( 20%) of people in the UK lived in poverty. In their report, the JRF said that over the last 25 years, children have had the highest poverty rates.
The poorest place in the UK, based on official English Indices of Deprivation (IMD) data, is often cited as Jaywick, a coastal village in Essex, frequently topping the list for overall deprivation due to issues like low income, unemployment, poor housing, and crime. However, areas like Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Hull, and parts of London (Hackney, Tower Hamlets) also consistently rank highly for deprivation, especially concerning child poverty.
So why are Americans so much wealthier than us? The Social Market Foundation (SMF), a think tank, calculated that the US is almost a third richer than the UK. This is largely due to wage growth since the financial crisis, which was, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the “worst in generations” in the UK.
The UK is often considered a cheaper place to live. The cost of living in both countries is not the same and can vary depending on where people choose to live. It's also important to note that the average salary for someone in the US is significantly higher than what it would be in the UK due to taxes.
No single group holds exactly 90% of the world's wealth, but extreme concentration exists, with the top 10% of the world's population owning the vast majority, around 75-85% of global wealth, leaving the bottom 90% with a small fraction, while the richest 1% owns a huge chunk of that, sometimes as much as the bottom 90% or more combined, according to reports from the World Inequality Database and Oxfam.
Based on this intuition, Banks and colleagues have carried out several studies using population-based data, coming to the conclusion that the English are healthier than the Americans, for all socioeconomic groups and across the lifespan.
Low-income households in the UK are 22 per cent poorer than their counterparts in France, meaning their living standards are £3,800 a year lower than their French equivalents'.
The most deprived neighbourhood in England according to the IMD25 is to the east of the Jaywick & St Osyth area of Clacton-on-Sea in Tendring (Tendring 018a). This area was also ranked as the most deprived nationally according to previous iterations of the Indices.
The key reason for London's high poverty rate is the cost of housing. The city goes from having one of the lowest poverty rates in the country before we take housing costs into account (15%), to the highest when we do (26%).
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2022 Current Population Report, 37.9 million Americans are considered impoverished. The census supplemental poverty rate, which adjusts for how government programs keep people out of poverty, was at 12.4% in 2022.
By 2050, China is projected to be the world's largest economy by total GDP, followed by the United States and India, with major shifts as emerging markets like Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico rise significantly, though Singapore and Luxembourg may lead in GDP per capita (average wealth per person).
