Jim Manzi compares America to the entire European continent:
I took the data on income by quintile for each country in the EU, and ordered them from poorest to richest for Europe as a whole. If you start with the 1.5 million people who are the lowest quintile in any country of the EU (it turns out to be the lowest quintile in Bulgaria), then add the 0.5 million who are the lowest quintile in Latvia, and keep going until you have about 100 million people, you have an estimate for the lowest quintile for Europe as a whole. This bottom quintile includes, for example, a majority of the population of Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania, and the bottom quintiles of the UK, Ireland, Italy and France. You can then build each of the quintiles this way. …It turns out that America and Europe as a whole have extremely similar levels of economic inequality — Europe’s is just chunked by country
The Dish 
