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I made a recent visit to Munich where I presented some of my dissertation work at the International Stone Center for Inequality Research’s wealth conference. It’s not directly related to my work – I don’t (yet) look at the spatial distribution of wealth concentration and its determinants – but I was curious to know how the largest German fortunes are distributed geographically. And, of course, that led me to wonder how billionaire wealth is distributed across Europe more broadly, then across China, and then across the U.S., such that I ended up with far too many maps for what was intended to be a very short segue into my actual presentation. Ultimately, I canned all but the German map and later discovered that Daria Tisch and Emma Ischinsky had already produced a much more interesting version in their excellent Socius article on entrenched German wealth (see Figure 2). Regardless, it was fun to make and so I’ll post both the data and code for my version below (made in R with ggplot2).

Ardent readers of the New York Times might be forgiven for worrying about the state of France’s economy today. After all, headlines on the front page this morning describe France as headed toward “another government collapse” with “financial woes […] pushing its government to the brink.” Borrowing costs are up, they note, Prime Minister François Bayrou will soon be left jobless, and the country’s infrastructure may very well seize up in coming weeks with large-scale demonstrations planned for Sept. 10th and 18th.