The Inequality Lab
Inequality is not one thing but three questions. Where do life chances begin? What shape does the world actually take? And how did the gap between nations grow so vast? Three interactives follow: chance, structure, history. Each is a face of the same fact: that outcomes are distributed by forces larger than any individual.
The world is not random. It is structured. So is inequality.
The Birth Lottery
Rawls asked us to choose a society from behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing who we would be. Every person alive has already made that draw, and never chose.
Press the button and be born, at random, into today's world, weighted honestly by where people actually are. Then ask what you did to deserve the result.
Illustrative figures, rounded, from World Bank (income, life expectancy) and UNDP (schooling), c. 2023, across a population-weighted sample of ~5.6 billion people across 25 countries.
Merit begins after the draw. The draw decides most of the outcome, and no one drafts their own ticket.
The Champagne Glass
Marx read inequality in who owns. The shape below is what ownership looks like when the whole planet is stacked into ten equal tenths of people. It is not a pyramid. It is a goblet.
Each bar is a tenth of humanity, poorest at the bottom, richest at the top; its width is the share of the world's income, or wealth, that tenth holds. Switch between the two and watch the stem thin to nothing.
Global shares, World Inequality Report 2022 (approximate; decile splits interpolated from published top-10 / middle-40 / bottom-50 figures).
Averages hide the goblet. The world's mean income sounds comfortable; almost no one lives at the mean.
The Great Divergence
In 1820 the richest region on Earth was perhaps three times the poorest. Weber asked why some societies industrialised first; the slider below is the two centuries of advantage that answer compounded into.
Drag through time and watch average income per person pull apart. In the early 1800s the world's regions were poor together. Then a few pulled away, and the distance became the defining fact of the modern world.
Real GDP per capita, approximate, drawn from the Maddison Project regional series (2011 international dollars). Values are rounded for illustration.
Inequality between nations is not ancient and not natural. It is roughly two hundred years old, which means it was made, and can be unmade.
Chance places you, structure holds you, and history explains the gap. None of the three is a matter of merit; all three are products of collective choices. That is why inequality is a question for sociology.
∴ The companion lab Open the Methods Lab →