Am I Reading this Right?

That Denmark, with the world's lowest Gini index measured by income, also has the  third highest measured by wealth?  Different years. but still.  For income use the World Bank number.  And kudos to plucky little Namibia, first in wealth inequality, third for income.

I see Wiki provides data on pre-tax income Ginis, but also pre- and post-tax for selected (first-world) countries (OECD data, a bit different from the World Bank stuff above).  Anyway, this one shows Denmark  Ginis of 0.416 pre- and 0.248 post; for the United States, the numbers are 0.486 pre- and 0.378 post.  These pencil out to a ratio of 1.66 for Denmark, 1.28 for the US.   Can we take this as a quick-and-dirty  index of the relative component of wealth transfer in the two tax regimes (i.e., much higher for Denmark than for US)?

Tall Dutch

Tacitius in his Germania says you'd better watch out for those Germans--those dudes are tall.  Well now he would say that, wouldn't he?  He's Italian.  But lately I learn that the Dutch (maybe Tacitus would have thought them German) are now the tallest people in the world, with an average height for all adults of a bit over six feet (All?  Men and women together?).   Good diet, they say, lots of cheese; good child care and relatively equal income distribution (the Netherlands Gini index, on not-quite-up-to-date data; comes in at about 31, versus the US (and world average) number of 41.

Walking the streets of Amsterdam, I'd have to agree that there are plenty of tall Dutch.  Yet there don't seem to be quite as many as you would expect, given the data.   Maybe the point is not that there are so many really tall Dutch as that there aren't that many short ones.

Also: people remark on how the increased height is a fairly new phenomenon, that military recruitment records (in particular) confirm that the Dutch were shorter as Century ago, and hey, isn't that true of all of us?  Yet again, the really tall people you see around here don't seem to be concentrated among the very young.  An awful lot of the six-plusses that I  see look to be pretty close to my age.  But as Groucho said, who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?