You're not imagining it, and you're not alone. The system is rigged by the few at the top to keep the rest of us fighting for scraps.
But there are more of us than there are of them, and we're not powerless.
You're not imagining it, and you're not alone. The system is rigged by the few at the top to keep the rest of us fighting for scraps.
But there are more of us than there are of them, and we're not powerless.
The bar representing 1 million is 0.05 inches wide.
The bar representing 1 billion is 1000x larger, 50 inches:
19 horizontal segments 2.35in wide + 19 vertical segments 0.2in tall + tail segment 1.55in wide
Tower height, fortune amount (as of 11/21/25), width of a human hair
Ratio math:
If $465,000,000,000 = 442.1m
$1,000,000,000 = 0.95075m
$60,000 = 0.000057045m
$10 is 0.5% of $2000
This amount of spending is necessary for regular people to survive.
$5,000,000 is 0.5% of $1,000,000,000
Meanwhile, it's considered radical to suggest that the ultra-wealthy spend the same exact proportion of their money on anything other than private jets and mega-yachts.
Elon Musk's $1 Trillion 10-year pay package, Chicago minimum wage
Ratio math:
80 hours per pay period * 26 pay periods per year = 2,080 working hours per year
*60 = 124,800 working minutes per year
*60 = 7,488,000 working seconds per year
Assuming that Elon Musk actually works a full time 40-hour week for that $100B annual salary from Tesla (spoiler: he doesn't) he would make:
$48,076,923 per hour
$801,282 per minute
$13,355 per second
$13,355 per second * 2.58 seconds = $34,500 (annual salary at the Chicago minimum wage)
$100,000,000,000 per year / $34,500 per year = 2,898,551 years
US Federal Reserve: Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 (Share by Wealth Percentile Group)
US Federal Reserve: Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 ($ Levels by Wealth Percentile Group)
The bottom 50% of the population holds a total $4.2T in wealth
Forbes Real-Time Billionaire List
Tallying down the list in descending order, it doesn't take long to reach $4.2T by summing the top 51 richest oligarchs in the world. They would all fit on one CTA bus (in a world where they'd deign to step foot on one.)
Scale of Greed is a data visualization / economic activism / guerrilla street art / public storytelling / number sensemaking / capitalist critique series based in Chicago.
Each sticker design translates the often incomprehensible scale of wealth inequity using visual metaphors and the built environment to connect directly with the lived realities of everyday people.
Each of the six components has its own self-contained message in isolation. When viewed as a whole, the sequence starts small and zooms out through three increasingly expansive stages: the simplest comparisons of numerical magnitude, an individual’s relationship to labor and time, and the distribution of resources at the societal level.