Why are people from UAE and Dubai so rich?
They aren't all rich on average. And oil and gas is actually now only about 25% of the economy in the UAE (incredibly!). There are good reasons why it felt that way, though: The UAE and a number of other oil-rich nations all realize that they need to diversify away from oil revenues. International investment and tourism are the main ways in which they hope to attract capital (free trade/full foreign ownership/no-tax zones, World Cup, etc.). Business and government are often one and the same or working closely together, and they are extremely savvy about cultivating your experience in their company, and want to make sure they are doing everything in their power to get you to like and spend money in their country. Essentially, you are visiting their version of Las Vegas. Additionally, they have taken on massive debt to create those kinds of cities and experiences. According to the World Bank and the CIA (see here), the per capita GDP of the UAE on a Purchasing Price Parity basis is about 18% higher than in the US. Since much of the oil wealth is controlled by the state, it is not certain how evenly that income is distributed (World Bank and CIA statistics do not provide R/P or Gini data for UAE, while it is provided for most nations).
Because you already have the answer as part of your question. The wealth is concentrated in the parents generation and they are pulling the rug after them. This is done in various ways: from costs of education to costs of entitlements to costs of housing to salary stagnation. Good point. One of my former clients is an Indian immigrant who moved here to have the opportunity to create a better life. He was really passionate about affiliate marketing and created an empire here. Anyone who immigrates like that is dedicated and is more likely to succeed. I don't know nearly as many native born Indians as Koreans or Chinese come to think of it. "I'm not sure what ""rents"" you are talking about, but corporate profits are completely different from high net worth individuals. And actually, most corporate profits are reinvested (literally) or returned to investors, many of whom are less-than-rich or are institutional investors like pension funds or investment funds who in turn provide those profits to their beneficiaries.   If you are suggesting that the financial industry somehow contributes nothing to society, then you must lack an understanding of the importance of liquidity to a modern economy. For an example of what happens when liquidity dries up, look no further than 2008 or Greece today.   If you want your cell phone, iPad, internet, etc, then you need a financial system because there is no way a company like Apple is getting enough funding to undertake massive projects like the iPod or iPhone without major multi-national banks who can provide the leverage to make it possible. Though Apple is an admittably poor example of this as they are now so wildly successful that they have a huge pile of cash that they actually are hording. Then again, look at the investor outcry that the Apple horde unleashed. As I said, it's bad business to stockpile cash and the investors let Apple know this. So Apple distributed that cash back to investors in the form of a dividend. Much of Apple stock is owned by non-1%ers and they all now have a sweet check for thousands of dollars (on average) in their mailbox due to evil corporate America." "You're right, but netting $150,000 a year isn't really even that tough for a savvy individual with the skill set of talented developer.  ""Creating an app"" is far from the only option to make that money anyways (in fact, you're probably correct in your condescending tone mentioning it).    Why would an intelligent skilled worker tether themselves to a desk in Seattle, when they could easily do just as well financially, and live where, and work when, they please?  There are definitely some people who would value the steady, and certain, paycheck.  But, becoming a talented developer requires a level of ambition and self-motivation in and of itself that caters to entrepreneurship well.   The issue is that MSFT doesn't want to pay what good programmers are actually worth, according to the market.  So, they run PR campaigns and lobby the government to bring in workers that will happily work for under true market rate.  Granted, these Visa workers pay taxes, and get great jobs.  That doesn't really hide the fact that these workers help lower the wages that they ""should"" be paying, according to basic supply and demand." Why is one person more succesfull than another?  At the end of the day I think it simply comes down to personal choices, some people will choose to invest their time in profitable indevours and some will not.   This of course assumes people have a reasonable access to a mean of improvement (free education, vocational training, etc.) "I think you came up with a worthy Masters/PhD research project, it is a great question. This is in Australia so it is difficult for me to have complete perspective.  However, I can speak about the US of A. To your first point relatively few people inherit their wealth.  According to a brief web search about 38% of billionaires, and 20% of millionaires inherited their wealth.  The rest are self-made. Again, in the US, income mobility is very common.  Some act like high level earners are just born that way, but studies have shown that a great deal of income mobility exists.  I personally know people that have grown up without indoor plumbing, and extremely poor but now earn in the top 5% of wage earners.   Quid's points are valid.  For example a Starbucks, new I-Phone, and a brake job on your car are somewhat catastrophic if your income is 50K/year, hurts if your income is 100K, and an inconvenience if you make 250K/year.  These situations are normal and happen regularly.  The first person may have to take a pay day loan to pay for these items, the second credit card interest, the third probably has the money in the bank.  All of this exaggerates the effect of an ""emergency"" on one's net worth.    To me there is also a chicken-and-egg effect in wealth building and income.  How does one build wealth?  By investing wisely, planning ahead, budgeting, delaying gratification, finding opportunities, etc...  Now if you take those same skills to your workplace isn't it likely you will receive more responsibility, promotions and raises?  I believe so.  And this too exaggerates the effect on one's net worth.  If investing helps you to earn more, then you will have more to invest. To me one of the untold stories of this graph is not just investing, but first building a stable financial base.  Having a sufficient emergency fund, having enough and the right kind of insurance, keeping loans to a minimum.  Without doing those things first investments might need to be withdrawn, often at an inopportune time, for emergency purposes. Thanks for asking this!" There are many reasons but perhaps the most telling is that these small foreign companies usually have not experienced diminishing marginal returns. This means they grow faster, which means higher returns for investment. However a lack of infrastructure, and of political and economic stability, make these investments risky! Quite a lot of reasons but mostly supply and demand.   Some areas of Africa are extremely remote and just don't have things there that some of the population now want.   I would guess it won't be like this for much longer but right now it is and i have met plenty of people taking advantage of that fact. Well, the headline is kind of true. Open boarders make all developed country labor much cheaper so the trend of the rich getting richer and every other native poorer (especially when considering externalities) would be exacerbated. What makes this article true, for The Economist, is that for The Economist 'The West' means the 'Rich People of The West Who Read The Economist'. The schools you refer to used to be based in the US until businesses decided to go global for cheaper labor. After the dot Com bubble burst the US tech schools disappeared.    Those adventurous enough picked up and moved to places like India, Russia, China,  etc and built lucrative businesses. Haven't they been predicting this since 2012? The luxury housing market keeps going up due to huge demand, influx of $ from the economic and stock market boom, and technological epicenters of innovation such as the Bay Area. Not a bubble "The basic idea is that money's worth is dependent on what it can be used to buy. The principal driver of monetary exchange (using one type of currency to ""buy"" another) is that usually, transactions for goods or services in a particular country must be made using that country's official currency. So, if the U.S. has something very valuable (let's say iPhones) that people in other countries want to buy, they have to buy dollars and then use those dollars to buy the consumer electronics from sellers in the U.S. Each country has a ""basket"" of things they produce that another country will want, and a ""shopping list"" of things of value they want from that other country. The net difference in value between the basket and shopping list determines the relative demand for one currency over another; the dollar might gain value relative to the Euro (and thus a Euro will buy fewer dollars) because Europeans want iPhones more than Americans want BMWs, or conversely the Euro can gain strength against the dollar because Americans want BMWs more than Europeans want iPhones. The fact that iPhones are actually made in China kind of plays into it, kind of not; Apple pays the Chinese in Yuan to make them, then receives dollars from international buyers and ships the iPhones to them, making both the Yuan and the dollar more valuable than the Euro or other currencies. The total amount of a currency in circulation can also affect relative prices. Right now the American Fed is pumping billions of dollars a day into the U.S. economy. This means there's a lot of dollars floating around, so they're easy to get and thus demand for them decreases. It's more complex than that (for instance, the dollar is also used as the international standard for trade in oil; you want oil, you pay for it in dollars, increasing demand for dollars even when the United States doesn't actually put any oil on the market to sell), but basically think of different currencies as having value in and of themselves, and that value is affected by how much the market wants that currency." Because the macro numbers are not always relevant on a micro level and vice versa. Saudi Arabia has a GDP per capita far higher than any European county. Would you want to be a worker (i.a slave) in Saudi Arabia or a worker in Sweden?  The United States is a rich country. A very rich country. But businesses going great in most major cities, and the average salary growing, doesn't really change the life of the minimum wage worker in rural New Mexico who can hardly get by without food stamps. "As was stated, households earning over $250k/yr don't all get their income one way. Below that threshold, even in the six figure range, most households are in one of two categories; salary/wage/commission workers, and those living off of nest eggs/entitlements (retired, disabled, welfare). Above $250k, though, are a lot of disparate types of incomes: Now, you specifically mentioned wage earners above $250k. Wage earners typically have the same ""tax havens"" that most of us do; the difference is usually that they are better able to make use of them: In other words, there are many ways for a high-end wage earner to live the good life and write a lot of it off." I think that's unreasonable. If you had read the article and clicked on the Amory Lovins link you would have seen this - an article in which he talks about there being more oil in Detroit than Saudi Arabia.  Energy + Genius The Saudi Arabia Beneath Detroit Amory Lovins, 10.09.08, 06:00 PM EDT Radical efficiency can decouple us from oil for far less than making more.