eli5: Why is the US commonly called the “wealthiest country” if we have 30T in debt?
In: 5
Edit: For general context, first look at [this graphic](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/wtjgyv/oc_countries_and_their_gdp_billion/), which is GDP, not wealth, per se, but it gives you a sense of scale.
The US is commonly called “the wealthiest country” mostly by Americans who learned it a generation or two ago when there was no other large country, by any measure, that was wealthier. Today, there are several countries that could make claims to be wealthier than the US.
That said, the 30T in *government* debt is just one part of the wealth of the United States. About 1/4 of that debt is owed to right back to the American government itself, and about 1/2 is owed to American citizens and American companies, and for them the government debt is an *asset*.
Most other rich countries also have large government debts as well, so comparatively, the US isn’t radically different. US government debt as a fraction of GDP is similar to Italy, France, UK, Spain and Portugal, and considerably less than Japan. It’s only twice as much as Germany’s government debt.
Meanwhile there are a LOT of assets in the United Sates:
* The total market capitalization of publicly traded US stocks (which are overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, owned by Americans) is about 50 trillion dollars.
* The first google hit suggests that the total value of all US private companies may be approximately $30 trillion additional dollars (though that is harder to estimate).
* The total value of all land and real estate in the United States is about $23 trillion. A fair portion of that is owned by U.S. companies, so we probably shouldn’t count all of it in addition to the two bullets above, but it helps give you a further sense of scale of US assets.
* The mean (*not median!*) net worth of the 120 million US households is about $700k, which is a total of about 84 trillion. Again, this double counts a lot of the above assets, since Americans’ net worth is made up of company ownership, land and government debt instruments.
However, the typical (median) American is less wealthy than the median citizen in several other rich countries. Countries such as Norway and Switzerland may also have more total wealth per person overall.
Yet, because the United States is one of the *largest, most populous* countries on Earth, in addition to being fairly wealthy per person, the sum total is that there is a LOT of wealth in the United States, and probably still more wealth than in any other single country.
[Source 1](https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124)
[Source 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt)
[Source 3](https://siblisresearch.com/data/us-stock-market-value/)
[Source 4](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-estimated-total-value-of-all-US-private-companies)
[Source 5](https://www.bea.gov/research/papers/2015/new-estimates-value-land-united-states)
[Source 6](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf)
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