Wealth & Poverty Class 1: The paradox of widening inequality

Friends,

Welcome to the first of my 14-week “Wealth and Poverty” classes. They’ll appear here every Monday at 2 pm PT, 5 pm ET (but of course you can retrieve them whenever you’d like).

Many thanks to those of you who joined Heather and me live yesterday evening. You can either watch our “watch-a-long” version of the class with our commentary (above), or click the video below to watch the original recording without commentary.

Even though this isn’t a real classroom and I’m not with you in person, I hope you find this course both enjoyable and challenging.

Don’t expect to learn by just watching and listening, though. I want you to be an active learner — which means answering questions I pose and putting various puzzle pieces together. I’m not going to tell you what to think. I’m going to try to provoke you into thinking harder and more deeply.

I’ve also selected some readings for you, which will be listed on this page right after each class video. Just click on the link. My goal is to expose you to a variety of perspectives. Don’t worry if you can’t get to all of them. There’s no exam! But as I tell my students, the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

Here are the questions we’ll focus on in this first class (you may want to watch the class with someone else, and discuss them):

• Is some inequality both inevitable and necessary?

• At what point, if ever, does inequality become a problem? How do income and wealth inequalities overlap with race and gender?

• Why did these inequalities begin to widen so dramatically starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and why have they continued widening since then?

• Finally, where do our about what constitutes a fair economic and political system come from?

And here are the readings for week 1 (just click on each to retrieve the reading).

Week 1 Readings:

• Matthew Stewart, “The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy,” The Atlantic, June 2018

• Robert B. Reich, Why Are the Wealthy Pouring So Much of Their Wealth Into Politics? Substack, March 18, 2026

• Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2016

• Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, and Omar Ocampo, “White Supremacy is the Pre-existing Condition: Eight Solutions to Ensure Economic Recovery Reduces the Racial Wealth Divide,” Institute for Policy Studies, 2019

If you’d like to have access to more readings and handouts, you can visit the full course website here.

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This course is free but if you’re able to help with expenses, please consider a paid subscription.

A huge thanks to the Wealth and Poverty team — to Michael Lahanas-Calderón, Kyle Parker, and Dan Davis for preparing these course videos to be shared with all of you. And to Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse for making all this happen on this page.