This Week’s Inequality Roundup: May 30, 2025
Wealth redistribution is already happening, but in the wrong direction
Income inequality isn’t a niche interest but one of the leading issues of our time. Almost everything else that’s going wrong in the world is connected to or caused by this issue.
Yet anytime anybody suggests a potential fix, such as a correction to the tax structure, a break-up of monopolies or the introduction of Universal Basic Income, the far-right tends to paint this as a lot of poor people wanting to take money from the people who “earned” it.
Nobody earns billions. Millions can perhaps be earned, but to amass billions requires exploitation of workers and often smaller businesses and the environment.
We cannot continue funneling more and more of the world’s wealth to a small number of people. Our system is set up to do this but we could decide to change that any time if we have the political will to do so.
We are currently redistributing money from the poor to the wealthy, and the badly named “Big Beautiful Bill,” if signed into law, would accelerate that.
History doesn’t tend to be kind to societies that allow inequality to spiral unchecked. Just ask Marie Antoinette.
I curate this weekly roundup of memes and analysis every Friday. Subscribe and never miss another roundup. In addition to the roundup, I also post original work on this subject every Tuesday and Thursday.
Poverty and Privilege
On Saturday, May 31, I launch a new feature called Poverty and Privilege. It’s the true story of Richard, a man with generational wealth, and Lauren, a single mom struggling to keep her household afloat. The twist is they both have Ivy League educations but life has turned out very different for each of them.
Richard first became aware of Lauren’s story when he volunteered to help her son, who earned a scholarship to a fancy prep school but didn’t have the right clothes. Richard knew this was a story worth telling so he reached out to me and I am happy to tell it.
It is, indeed, a story worth telling. Look for it every Saturday here on Untrickled.
And now here’s the roundup. It’s a one-stop shop for everyone who cares about income inequality and a great place to discover new writers. If you find one you appreciate, subscribe!
Shared by The Peaceful Revolutionary
Shared by
Homelessness & Capitalism
The Peaceful Revolutionary
If homelessness was just down to laziness then there would be no such thing as the working homeless, of which there are many, and if it was just due to using illegal drugs then the percentage of homeless people would be primarily rising and falling with such drug use, instead of mostly rising with increases in the cost of rent and falling when the the rate of unemployment goes down.
How many politicians are psychopaths?
Brian Klaas, The Garden of Forking Paths
Most of all, these days, I despair not just for the fact that we mostly have terrible people in charge—and we certainly do—but also that a disturbingly large proportion of them do not seem to care at all about other people who are less fortunate in life.
Infinite Contempt For Working People Is Not an Acceptable Default Position
Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work
Major corporations spend huge sums of money on advertising and public relations to give themselves the warm halo of entities that have human personalities, and yet they act towards their own workers—their valued team members, who are their highest priority, etcetera!—in a bestial way that is a rejection of the most basic form of shared humanity. The ability to convince the general public that the standards of common decency that we all expect from one another do not apply to the entire field of business is one of the greatest tricks capitalism ever pulled.
Faking Wealth is Like Faking Orgasms
Michelle Teheux, Untrickled
If you fake an orgasm, you’re teaching your partner to keep doing the wrong things, and never discovering what actually works for you.
It’s a recipe for bad sex.
If you fake wealth by performatively spending money on the things that are marketed to you, you’re teaching yourself and others to chase things that don’t satisfy, and you may never figure out what truly does.
It’s a recipe for poverty and dissatisfaction.
Just How Many More Successful UBI Trials Do We Need
Katie Jglin, The Noösphere
This fear that ‘free money’ — such as universal basic income (UBI) — would kill motivation and productivity has been around almost as long as the idea itself. And at its core lies a tired myth, echoed by thinkers across time and cultures: that human nature is inherently lazy and rotten and that without pressure or the threat of hardship, people will do nothing all day, every day. Yet a growing body of evidence — including Germany’s recent large-scale basic income trial — points in quite a different direction.
‘The most important book you’ve never read’ made me an anti-capitalist
Elizabeth Lukehart, The Suburban Wilderness
(Donella Meadows) was part of a team of systems scientists at MIT who were funded by a think tank called the Club of Rome. Their task was to come up with a solution to what Italian industrialist and Club of Rome founder, Aurelio Peccei, and several of his early collaborators called the “problematique.” This was the complex set of intertwined, global problems that constituted the “predicament of mankind,” which included things like poverty, inequality, pollution, scarcity, disease, and war.
Peccei believed that, in viewing these things not as distinct problems to be dealt with separately, but as one big web of issues that connect to and influence one another, it would lead to a more complete and effective understanding of how to solve them. In a complex system like our global socioeconomic system, making changes in one area (say, discovering a new source of energy like oil) will often affect another area. If you work to solve a problem in one area without thinking about how it connects to another area, you often get unintended negative consequences.
The Next Luxury Item for the Rich: Talking to Humans
Michelle Teheux, Untrickled
In the future, just talking to another person might be a luxury only the rich can afford. Having a real human say, “How can I help you?” will likely cost $100 per hour.
The rest of us will be stuck arguing with bots.
Quit Ignoring Poverty in America
A Substack Live with Walter Rhein and Michelle Teheux
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.
All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park
For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.
Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.
When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.
Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.