Despite the global economy growing by more than 10x since 1980, from $11 trillion to over $110 trillion, today only 7% of the global population live on more than $50 a day—roughly $18,250 a year. That amount is barely above the poverty guideline for a single person in the United States. Most of the income and wealth created has gone to the top earners.
Source: Pew Research Center
The richest 10% of the global population take home 52% of the world’s income while the bottom 50% take home just 8.5%. What’s even worse than income inequality is wealth inequality. The top 10% own 76% of all wealth generated while the bottom 50% own just 2%, according to research from the World Inequality Lab. And as important as income is, wealth is what enables most people to manage shocks and build more resilient lives.
The 2025 Oxfam report on inequality, Takers, Not Makers, describes how wealth for the richest continues to skyrocket, with the expectation of five trillionaires within a decade, while the number of people living in poverty globally hasn’t budged since 1990.
The solution is often to expose and shame the rich, call for increased taxes on them, and then to redistribute income and wealth more equitably. The impulse is understandable and perhaps even noble. The only problem is that it isn’t working. Worse still, it is unlikely to ever work.
Since Oxfam released its first report on inequality, global inequality has increased significantly. Since 2015, wealth of the top 1% has surged by over $33.9 trillion, according to Oxfam’s findings. “The wealth of just 3,000 billionaires has surged $6.5 trillion in real terms since 2015, and now comprises the equivalent of 14.6 per cent of global GDP,” one of their report notes. It also notes that billionaire wealth is growing at a faster rate than in previous years.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, mounting fiscal pressures, and rising nationalism, this trend is likely to intensify rather than reverse.
The mechanism we rely on to fix inequality, the government, is itself deeply entangled in it. Those with the greatest influence over taxation and redistribution are often the very people who benefit most from the current system. Expecting such a structure to take from itself and give to others is unlikely to lead to major reform.
If redistribution cannot deliver, then perhaps the solution lies elsewhere, not in taking from the top, but in redesigning how the entire system functions.
A different way to think about inequality
What if we are thinking about inequality all wrong? What if we thought about inequality as a feature and not a bug?
In her book, Thinking in Systems, the late Donella Meadows, reminds us that highly functioning systems have three characteristics: resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy. It’s the characteristic of hierarchy that’s important here.
Meadows reminds us that “the original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better. This is something, unfortunately, that both the higher and lower levels of a greatly articulated hierarchy easily can forget. Therefore, many systems are not meeting our goals because of malfunctioning hierarchies.”
In effect, Meadows is describing how well functioning systems, from forests and coral reefs to families and schools exhibit this quality: those with more exist to serve those with less.
In a tree, roots empower the leaves while the leaves sustain the roots. The trunk and branches are intermediaries of exchange and balance. When any layer becomes parasitic, taking more than it gives, the system weakens. Disease spreads, growth halts, or collapse follows.
Consider the following examples.
| System | Higher (More) | Lower (Less) | Help |
| Family | Parents with more reasoning and ability | Children with less reasoning and ability | Parents feed, clothe, bathe, protect, and provide for children |
| Building | Steel, concrete with stronger more material properties | Glass, wood with weaker material properties | Steel and concrete serve as the foundation for glass, wood, and other parts of a building |
| School | Teachers with more knowledge of a subject | Students with less knowledge of a subject | Teachers exist to serve students by teaching them |
| Body | Skeleton, bones with stronger material properties | Organs, central nervous system with weaker material properties | Skeleton and bones protect the human organs |
| Forest | Tall canopy trees with deeper roots and stronger trunks | Understory plants, shrubs, fungi, and soil organisms with less access to sunlight and weaker structures | The canopy captures sunlight and produces organic matter that falls to the forest floor. |
| Coral reef | Coral polyps and reef structures with stronger material and biological properties | Fish, crustaceans, algae, and other marine life that depend on the reef | Coral creates the calcium carbonate structures that provide food, shelter, and protection for thousands of species. |
In well functioning systems, the healthiest hierarchies exist not to dominate, but to serve. For instance, concrete and steel exist to serve glass and wood. The goal then should not be to take from steel or concrete and give to glass and wood.
Share of population responsible for inventions during the British Industrial Revolution
The same is true for societies. The goal is not to take from the rich and give to the poor, but to design systems in which those with more—wealth, knowledge, or capacity—exist to serve those with less. That is how the natural world sustains itself and how healthy economies grow. When the higher levels of a hierarchy enable the flourishing of the lower levels, prosperity expands from the roots upward. This is the essence of market creation, which I have written plenty about here. Inequality, then, is not our greatest danger, it might just be our greatest opportunity to build systems that serve rather than exploit.
