CW:SA
Saudi Arabia locks up and then executes political dissidents, sometimes even their families too. They assassinate people that portray them in a bad light. There is extensive slavery in the country, rivaled only by their other Wahhabi neighbors. Not only are they an absolute monarchy, the aristocracy (royal family) hoards all the wealth, there is no social mobility for those not closely related to a prince. They just let a bunch of pilgrims die from denying them access to indoor facilities. They are currently fighting a literal (littoral?) genocidal war, going on for the past TEN years.
They have been aligned with the West and committed to anti-communism and anti-secularism and against pan-Arabism from the beginning, they bolster the Israeli project, and have their deepest, most fundamental political relationship with the US.
We rightly criticize people saying “Russia would be worse” as a counterfactual with flimsy evidence, but for this case, there’s enough to extrapolate. If Saudi Arabia is not as bad as the US, it’s not for lack of trying, it’s because they simply aren’t powerful enough.
But try starting a “party for socialism and liberation” in Saudi Arabia and see how well it goes. Their “liberalization” is a charade.
This is not how averages work.
There is a global average (mean) wealth per capita. Some countries have wealth above the average, and most have wealth below the average. Any change in the internal inequality does nothing to change this: the average of 50k and 60k is 55k, and the average of 10k and 100k is also 55k.
For the mean American wealth to be below the global average would require America as a whole to be losing wealth to other countries, and for the Netherlands and Germany and Sweden to be below average, with Spain and Italy above average. That’s why the map didn’t look very believable.
A bar chart that shows the 50th, 90th, and 99th percentile of wealth in selected countries would be a lot more informative in this case.