LILLITH · Lady Justice · the ledger of who was paid less

THE SOCIAL LADDER ✋ DRAG THE CANVAS

The more unequal a society, the harder it is to climb it — the rungs move apart. That relationship has a name: the Great Gatsby curve. Drag the country along the inequality axis to see mobility fall, then click a rung to stand on it and read your child's odds of ever reaching the top.

◆ LIT▲ AMBER
inequality (Gini)
mobility
you stand on
bottom
your child reaches top
the ladder

◆ LIT — verified / checkable

The Great Gatsby curve: intergenerational mobility falls as inequality rises — drag the country along the Gini axis and the mobility (chance of changing income rank) drops along the drawn curve, a real cross-country empirical relationship (Corak). Stand on a rung and the instrument reads your child's odds of reaching the top: higher inequality makes the bottom stickier, so the same child's climb is steeper in an unequal society. The inverse inequality–mobility relationship is the documented core.

▲ AMBER — the figure

The mobility function and the child's-odds numbers are stylised to the SHAPE of the real relationship, not a fitted model of a specific country; real mobility depends on schooling, place, race and policy, not the Gini alone. The direction — more unequal societies are less mobile, and the effect bites hardest at the bottom — is the real, measured content.

LILLITH: she holds the scales in one hand and the blade in the other — the measure, and the will to act on it.
David Lee Wise / ROOT0 / TriPod LLC  ·  with AVAN