Hello discoverers!

Inequality is one of those words that does its own damage just by showing up. By the time you’ve read it, your brain has already mentally filed it under ‘nothing I can do about’. That was before oligarchy stopped being an idea you mainly encountered in history books.

I’ve had this recent 70-page report on inequality called Resisting the Rule of the Rich sitting in my reading queue for months. I hate reading PDFs, but I finally read it so you don’t have to.

You already know it’s bad. Here’s how bad – just a few of the many stark numbers:

• For the first time, there are more than 3,000 billionaires in the world. At the end of 2025, their wealth hit a record $18.3 trillion – an 81% increase since March 2020.
• In the past year, billionaire wealth grew three times faster than the average annual rate of the previous five years.
• The wealth gained by billionaires over the last year is enough to give every person on earth $250 – and still leave billionaires more than $500 billion richer.
• The world’s 12 richest billionaires hold more wealth than the poorest half of humanity – more than four billion people.
• Since 2000, for every dollar of new wealth created globally, 41 cents went to the top 1%. The bottom half of humanity received 1 cent.

The report shows that the most unequal countries are up to seven times more likely to experience democratic erosion – such as weakened courts, restricted civil liberties and the slow normalisation of authoritarian practices.

When wealth at this scale converts into political influence through media ownership, campaign financing and direct access to power, democracy starts functioning less like a shared system of governance and more like a shareholder meeting most of us weren’t invited to.

Before anyone mentions philanthropy, the billionaire’s get-out-of-jail-free card: the late German billionaire Peter Kramer called it a bad transfer of power from politicians to billionaires because it is no longer “the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich who decide”.

The report suggests we establish an Independent Panel on Inequality – essentially what we do for the climate (IPCC) but for economic injustice – to give policymakers timely, accurate guidance on runaway wealth concentration. (The IPCC comparison is either inspiring or a warning, depending on your level of optimism.)

The policies such a panel would champion are kind of obvious but – as you’d expect – politically difficult: tax extreme wealth, cancel unsustainable debt in the Global South, break up monopolies, raise wages, fund public services properly.

There’s a mention of philosopher Ingrid Robeyns, who proposes an ‘extreme wealth line’ – a cap beyond which private wealth is taxed heavily and redirected to public purposes. If we accept a minimum wage, why not a maximum wage?

What this report did, more than anything, was shift something in how I relate to inequality. I’ve always cared about it, but it always felt like a condition rather than a mechanism; something out there in the world that is just a measure of a flawed system – like the rise and fall of the unemployment rate. But that framing misses the point.

Extreme wealth concentration is a one-way ratchet that steadily reshapes the rules of politics, media and public life – until what we call democracy is less a check on power than a polite fiction around it. None of that is inevitable, the report insists – and I want to believe it. What does seem clear is that treating inequality as a condition instead of a mechanism is exactly the kind of passive acceptance that lets the ratchet keep turning.

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai