Economic inequality is often measured through income and wealth, but this week’s Field Notes pushed me to ask a different question: what happens when economic gaps begin to shape who can access education, security, opportunity, and power? The World Inequality Report revealed the scale of wealth concentration. But looking only at the numbers felt incomplete. The UN’s research on poverty showed that inequality is also produced through the systems surrounding wages, housin

Government budgets can look like pages of percentages and financial decisions. But behind every number is a choice about what a society is willing to protect. A 2026 submission by the Center for Economic and Social Rights, ISER, and GRADE argues that the way governments raise, distribute, and spend money is directly connected to economic and social rights. Their example from Uganda is striking: in the country's 2025/26 budget, debt servicing represented about 36.5% of s

Two people can work equally hard and still face very different economic futures. The ILO's 2026 report Inequalities in the World of Work examines earnings inequality using labor-market data from around the world. It finds that differences between economic sectors and formal versus informal employment play a major role in explaining earnings gaps. It also identifies inequality of opportunity linked to circumstances outside an individual's control and finds particularly l

Poverty is often discussed as though it simply exists—something governments must reduce after it appears. A 2026 report from the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights challenges that assumption. Titled The Manufacturing of Poverty, the report argues that poverty can be produced and reproduced by economic and institutional structures, rather than being an unavoidable side effect of economic life. The accompanying UN roadmap describes poverty as involv

The numbers in the World Inequality Report 2026 are difficult to ignore. The richest 10% of the world receive 53% of global income, while the bottom half receives only 8%. Wealth is even more concentrated: the top 10% own about three-quarters of global wealth, while the bottom 50% own just 2%. But what stayed with me was not simply the size of the gap. It was what wealth allows people to do. Money affects more than what someone can buy. It can determine the qualit