The Assetless
The difference was simple: some had assets, others had salaries, and inflation tipped the balance.
Turks, we often use the word: geçinemiyoruz. It doesn’t translate neatly into English. Something like “we can’t make ends meet” — but with a particular exhaustion in it. Not just hardship. Futility. You work. You work hard. And still, you fall behind.
That feeling now has data behind it.
Between 2019 and 2023, Turkey’s top 1% increased their share of national income from 18.9% to 24.4%. Nearly six percentage points in four years. The top 1% took a larger piece of the pie than at any point in modern Turkish economic history — during the same years that most Turks watched their real wages collapse, their savings evaporate, and their cost of living spiral to 85% annual inflation.
This was not an accident. It was a redistribution — silent, automatic, no vote required. When the lira loses value, import prices rise, wages erode, and anyone holding property or foreign currency gets richer. The difference was simple: some had assets, others had salaries, and inflation tipped the balance.
What makes this moment different isn’t just the scale. It’s who is absorbing it.
For a long time, economic hardship in Turkey had a familiar face characterized by rural poverty, informal labour and seasonal workers. The urban middle class understood itself as something else. Not rich, but stable. The teachers, the engineers, the civil servants, the small business owners. They had a promise: work hard, stay employed, and the future would be manageable.
That plan, it seems, is no longer.
What’s replaced it isn’t just lower income. It’s a different kind of vulnerability — the kind that previously belonged to the working poor. When you have no assets underneath you — no inherited property, no savings cushion, no investment portfolio — there’s no buffer. A medical crisis. A job loss. A landlord who decides to double the rent. Any one of these is potentially catastrophic now for people who, five years ago, would have absorbed it. You are one bad month from a cliff edge, and you know it.
Turkey’s Gini coefficient is 0.41. The bottom 20% takes 6.4% of income (there is new calculation by Hasan Tekgüç that shows the divide is deeper). The top 20% takes 48%. These are not the numbers of a country experiencing a temporary shock. They are the numbers of a country that has made a choice — even if it never said so out loud.
Turkey is not alone in this. The assetless are losing ground in Berlin, in Seoul, in São Paulo (not to sound like ab NYT article but it is the case nonetheless). A generation of people with degrees and jobs and no property, no cushion, no stake in the system — that is not a Turkish story. It is the defining economic story of the last two decades, playing out at different speeds in different places. In Turkey it just happened faster and harder, which makes it easier to see.
I think about what this does to how people imagine their lives.
A young teacher in Ankara earns enough to cover rent and transport. If she’s careful, food too. But savings? A down payment? Starting a family? These aren’t things she’s been forced to defer. They’re things she’s stopped believing in. The planning horizon has collapsed. And when the future closes like that — when the promise that effort leads somewhere stops being credible — it doesn’t just make people poorer. It makes them different. Angrier. More susceptible to whoever is pointing at something to blame.
I’ve spent years watching Turkish politics and I’ve never seen the temperature this high for this long. Some of that is specific to this government, this moment. But some of it is structural. When the social contract breaks down — when the data shows, plainly, that the system is taking from the many and giving to the few — people don’t stay calm and wait for the next election. They look for exits. From the economy, from the country, from the idea that things can be fixed.
The standard economic response is: be patient. Stabilise first. Growth will eventually reach everyone.
Growth doesn’t automatically redistribute. It distributes to whoever has the power to claim it. In Turkey that’s meant asset holders over wage earners, financial capital over workers, the Istanbul real estate market over everyone else. Real median wages have consistently failed to track productivity growth — not just in Turkey but across most of the OECD. The trickle-down mechanism isn’t slow. It’s broken.
If you want distribution to change, you have to change it directly. Not as a bonus once growth is secured. Because an economy where consumption runs on debt instead of wages isn’t growing — it’s borrowing from its own future. And Turkey has been doing that for a long time.
Turkey’s middle-class erosion is not a natural disaster or an inevitable consequence of being a middle-income country. It is the result of specific decisions: fiscal policy that protected capital over labour, monetary policy that treated employment as collateral damage, a housing market left to become a speculation vehicle rather than a social good. Decisions can be reversed.
The political question — and it is political, not technical — is whether we decide this situation is acceptable or not. Whether a young engineer in Istanbul who can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment is evidence of a failure that needs fixing, or just the way things are now.
I know which side I’m on.
Because Turkey’s stability — its democratic resilience, its social fabric — depends on enough people believing the system can work for them. Once that belief goes, something else comes in to fill the space.
On a personal note and somewhat connected to the context above, Orban losing means a lot but not that much😊