It is interesting to analyze some data on wealth and poverty in two large nations like Italy and the United States of America, which have 58.9 million and 342 million inhabitants respectively.
In other words, the USA is 5.8 times more populous.
The US GDP in 2025 was 30760 billion dollars.
Italian GDP in 2025 was 2550 billion dollars.
In other words, the USA is 2.2 times richer (calculated based on per capita wealth, for each person).
But looking at society as a whole, the data is turned upside down because
poverty in the USA reaches 10.6% of the population (35.9 million people) while in Italy it is 9.8% of the population (5.7 million people).
Differences therefore begin to emerge, showing that the wealth of the USA is not enough to eliminate poverty. In fact, they have more of it.
But US hardship is expressed by a striking figure, the number of inmates:
in the USA there is a monstrous number of 2 million people imprisoned or under house arrest.
In Italy there are 68,000. Proportionally, in the USA it is 5 times as many, a sign of widespread social hardship.
Hardship is also evident from the prevalence of drugs and related deaths:
in the USA there are 28.2 million drug addicts and between 60 and 70,000 deaths per year from overdose (110,236 in 2022).
in Italy there are 123,000 drug addicts and about 300 deaths per year from overdose.
The disproportion is immense.
Connected to these problems, the issue of homelessness arises, with about 50,000 in Italy and 745,000 in the USA.
The last damning figure is that of suicides: 48,000 in the USA in 2025, compared to 3-4,000 in Italy.
Numbers are not everything, they don’t tell everything, but they tell us something.
In the USA there is great wealth and great despair. Also because drugs and suicides often affect even wealthy populations (see fentanyl abuse).
Let’s think about this when we desire well-being, forgetting to be well.
When we stop to desire what to have and what to do, and forget that we are made to love, to receive love, and to seek and find God.
The only true salvation for those who are desperate.
Paolo Botti
