Sixteen items plotted from named sources, each contradicting a load-bearing claim of the "age of abundance" thesis: that productivity gains accrue to workers, that growth is broadly distributed, that markets are broadly owned, that public spending is competitively allocated, and that the costs of growth land where the gains do. Every item carries an evidentiary-tier label — peer-reviewed, federal data, think-tank, NGO analysis, industry tally, corporate reports — so the strength of a number is visible at the same size as the number. For the platform's own findings on specific actors, see the findings ledger; for forward trajectories, scenarios.
Productivity up 90.2%; typical-worker hourly compensation up 33.0%. If pay had kept pace with productivity since 1979, the typical worker would earn $16.40 more per hour today.
Net productivity is the percent change in output per hour worked in the nonfarm business sector, less depreciation. "Typical worker pay" is the inflation-adjusted hourly compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers (~80% of the private workforce). Before 1979, the two series moved together. The post-1979 divergence is the headline empirical observation that distinguishes the post-war productivity-shares-with-workers regime from the post-1979 productivity-accrues-to-capital regime.
In 1989, the top 0.1% held about 7% of US household net worth. By 2024, that share had grown to 13.9% — $22.5 trillion of the $161.9 trillion total.
"Net worth" here is total household assets minus liabilities. The DFA series integrates the Financial Accounts of the United States with the Survey of Consumer Finances to produce quarterly distributional measures. Independent academic estimates (Piketty, Saez, Zucman via the World Inequality Database) yield substantially similar long-run trajectories.
Of the Pentagon's $4.4 trillion discretionary budget across 2020-2024, 54% went to contractors, and the top five primes — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (RTX), General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman — took $771 billion of that: roughly one in every six federal dollars spent on defense.
Calculation: Quincy's report compiles prime-contract awards by parent corporation across the 2020-2024 fiscal years. "Non-contractor DoD spend" includes military personnel, operations & maintenance not paid to contractors, base support, family housing, and other internal-DoD obligations. The five-prime share is the headline measure of defense-industrial concentration that the platform's own findings on defense-procurement opacity sit alongside.
EPI's realized-compensation series (what CEOs actually took home, including exercised stock awards) at the 350 largest US public firms: 21-to-1 in 1965, 31-to-1 in 1978, 281-to-1 in 2024. CEO pay is up 1,094% since 1978; typical-worker pay is up 26%.
Only the three attributed anchor years are plotted — no interpolation. "Realized" counts stock options and awards when exercised or vested, which is what makes it the take-home measure; EPI's alternative "granted" measure runs lower but shows the same order-of-magnitude climb. The ratio compares CEOs of the 350 largest publicly traded US firms with the typical (median-proxy) worker in their industries.
In 1983, the first year of comparable BLS data, 20.1% of wage and salary workers were union members (17.7 million people). In 2025 the rate was 10.0% (14.7 million) — while the workforce grew by tens of millions.
The membership rate is the share of employed wage and salary workers who are union members; comparable data begin in 1983. The decline is the standard institutional explanation offered for Item Nº 001's divergence: the post-1979 period is precisely the period in which the share of workers with collective bargaining power halved. Correlation is noted here as chronology, not proven mechanism — the academic literature on the link is substantial but contested in magnitude.
Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts: corporate equities and mutual fund shares are held ≈50% by the top 1% of households by wealth, ≈49% by the 50th-99th percentiles, and ≈1% by the entire bottom half of US households.
Shares are approximate latest-year values from the DFA percentile series; the middle segment is the arithmetic remainder. The practical consequence: when policy is justified by "the market is up," the benefit distribution follows this bar. Retirement accounts are included — indirect holdings through 401(k)s do not materially change the concentration picture.
The first peer-reviewed study to attribute emissions to household income — including investment income — rather than consumption. The top 1% alone are linked to 15–17% of national emissions, with 38–43% of their footprint coming from investments. Fifteen days of income for a top-0.1% household generates as much carbon as a lifetime of income for a bottom-10% household.
Income-based accounting links emissions to the income streams they generate, drawing on a database of over 2.8 billion inter-sectoral financial transfers across 30 years — it complements, rather than replaces, consumption-based accounting. The authors' own policy conclusion mirrors this page's ownership receipts: because the top decile's footprint is driven by investment income, they argue a shareholder-focused carbon tax is more equitable than consumer-facing carbon taxes, which are regressive — a gas-pump tax hits a commuting worker proportionally far harder than an investor. Mirrors the global pattern: peer-reviewed estimates (Chancel, Nature Sustainability 2022) put the world's top 10% at 48% of global emissions and the bottom half at 12%.
Per passenger, per trip: a long train journey ≈0.25 t CO₂; a commercial long-haul flight ≈1 t; the average private-jet flight 3.6 t (from tracking data on 18.7 million flights); an 11-minute suborbital space-tourism seat at least 75 t — roughly 300 long train trips per launch seat.
The scale is logarithmic — each gridline is a 10× step. Gössling's flight-tracking analysis (~26,000 aircraft, 18.7 million flights, 2019-2023) found private aviation emitted 15.6 million tonnes of CO₂ in 2023, up 46% since 2019, serving roughly 0.003% of the world's adults; per passenger, private jets run 5-14× commercial aviation and ~50× rail. Two honest caveats carried over from the underlying sources: the 75 t suborbital figure is a per-passenger lower bound from the World Inequality Report, and rockets' absolute CO₂ today is tiny (well under 0.01% of aviation's) — the receipt documents per-capita intensity and its growth trajectory, not present-day tonnage. Stratospheric black carbon, ~500× more warming-potent per unit mass than surface soot, is the reason modelers treat that trajectory as consequential.
Oxfam and SEI's "Climate Plunder" (2023 data): the richest 10% account for 48% of global consumption-based emissions and the poorest 50% for 8% — the "champagne glass" distribution. Within the top decile, the richest 1% alone account for 16%.
NGO analysis, flagged as such — but the shape is independently corroborated in the peer-reviewed literature: Chancel (Nature Sustainability, 2022) puts the top 10% at 48% and the bottom 50% at 12% of 2019 emissions, and finds that 63% of global carbon inequality now runs within countries rather than between them — a reversal of 1990. The distribution above is consumption-based; attributing investment ownership makes it steeper (see Item Nº 011).
Roughly 800 kg CO₂ per day at the top of the distribution against about 2 kg per day — ≈730 kg per year — for the bottom half. Since 1990 the richest 0.1% have increased their share of global emissions by 32% while the poorest half's share fell 3%.
Consumption-based attribution, NGO methodology (published in the report's methodology note). The same report's budget arithmetic: if everyone emitted like the richest 0.1%, the remaining 1.5°C carbon budget would be exhausted in under three weeks. These are distributional accounting results, not measurements of individually observed persons — the confidence lives in the distribution, not any single named individual.
Attributing corporate emissions to owners by equity stake, the average billionaire's investment portfolio generates ≈1.9 million tonnes CO₂e annually — roughly 346,000 times the average person — and the portfolios of 308 billionaires together out-emit 118 countries combined.
The least familiar and most consequential category on this page: 50-70% of the super-rich's footprint is ownership, not lifestyle. Attribution by equity stake is a published NGO methodology and is flagged as such; Oxfam notes the figures are likely conservative because corporate emissions are under-reported, and counting full value-chain (Scope 3) emissions for a subset of individuals raised the total to ≈1.85 billion tonnes. The independent peer-reviewed US result in Item Nº 007 — 38-43% of the top 1%'s footprint from investment income — points the same direction.
Indiana University's Wilk and Barros found a fully-crewed superyacht emits up to ≈7,020 t CO₂ a year — "by far the worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint." Oxfam's flight-tracking of 23 identifiable billionaire jet fleets found an average of 184 flights and 425 airborne hours in a year — ≈2,074 t CO₂, about 300 years of an average person's emissions.
The 7,020 t figure is an upper-bound estimate for a large, fully-crewed vessel (helipad, submersibles, pools, ~100 crew); Wilk and Barros's sample of 20 billionaire yacht owners averaged ≈8,000 t total footprints in 2018, two-thirds of it from the yachts. The jet figures come from public flight-tracking of the 23 of the top-50 billionaires whose aircraft could be identified — individual-year estimates vary with tracking methodology, which is why they carry the tracking tier label. Context from the peer-reviewed side: private aviation as a whole emitted 15.6 Mt CO₂ in 2023, up 46% since 2019, serving ≈0.003% of the world's adults (Gössling).
Global orbital launch attempts rose from 114 in 2020 to a record 324 in 2025 (+25% over 2024 alone). SpaceX flew 165 of them — more than the rest of the world combined — up from 25 in 2020.
Why cadence matters more than tonnage: rockets' absolute CO₂ is currently tiny (well under 0.01% of aviation's), but rocket soot is injected directly into the stratosphere, where its warming effect per unit mass is ≈500× that of surface sources and it lingers for years (Ryan et al., Earth's Future 2022 — peer-reviewed). Modeled growth scenarios — flagged as models, not observations — project measurable stratospheric warming and delayed ozone recovery if cadence keeps scaling (Maloney et al., JGR Atmospheres 2022; Revell et al., npj Climate & Atmospheric Science 2025). Per-seat intensity for space tourism sits in Item Nº 008.
Amazon's 2025 carbon footprint rose ≈16% to ≈81 million tonnes CO₂e — its largest annual increase since the Climate Pledge, and more than New Zealand's national emissions. Google reported an 18% jump, the largest annual increase it has published.
These are the companies' own reported figures — self-reported corporate accounting, labeled accordingly; independent analyses generally find such totals understated rather than overstated. Fair counterweight, stated at the same size: Big Tech is also the largest corporate buyer of renewable power, and per-task AI energy is falling — the exhibit documents that absolute reported emissions are rising anyway, which is the number the atmosphere sees.
Approximately 489,000 heat-related deaths occurred each year across 2000-2019 (Zhao et al., Lancet Planetary Health); the 2025 Lancet Countdown puts the last decade at ≈546,000 per year. 2.4 billion workers are exposed to excessive heat (WHO/WMO), and 2024 set a record 639 billion potential work hours lost to heat — ≈$1.09 trillion, nearly 1% of the global economy.
The observed figures above are distinct from the attribution projections that circulate alongside them — Oxfam's modeled estimates that the richest 1%'s 2019 emissions alone will cause 1.3 million heat deaths over the coming century and $44 trillion in economic damage to lower-income countries by 2050 are conditional model outputs, and are cited here as such, not as observations. What needs no model: heat mortality and lost labor fall overwhelmingly on outdoor workers and hotter, poorer countries — the populations at the far left of Exhibits Nº 009 and 010.
The International Energy Agency puts data-centre electricity at ≈415 TWh in 2024 (≈1.5% of global consumption) and projects ≈945 TWh by 2030 — just under 3% of global electricity, about what all of Japan uses today — with AI-accelerated servers growing ≈30% a year in its base case.
The 2030 figure is the IEA's base-case model projection and is labeled as such; realized demand depends on hardware efficiency, load-shifting, and how much of the buildout actually lands. What the atmosphere sees depends on the grid mix that powers it — which is why Item Nº 014's corporate numbers (rising reported emissions despite record renewables purchases) are the realized edge of this trajectory so far. The capex comparison is the IEA's own: the capital spending of five technology companies now exceeds global investment in oil and natural gas production — the buildout is being financed at fossil-industry scale by the same concentrated ownership documented in Items Nº 006 and 011.
