A website is a digital version of what’s on it. A website's menu, like a book's table of contents, is an overview of the website. Our website menu is also like an overview of what’s on our website. Except in our case it's not just the items of the menu that are an overview of Real Economics but, uniquely, it’s also the shape of the menu itself: the pyramid. A wide one.

Economies are generally depicted as pyramids. In almost all cases, the pyramids are divided into vertical sections with the highest section representing the upper class, the middle section the middle class, etc.. In our case we’re going to depict an economy not using sections inside the pyramid but using the shape of the pyramid itself.

In our pyramid, similar to a traditional economic pyramid, the highest part of the pyramid represents the upper class with the most wealth and the lower parts of the pyramid represent the lower class with the least wealth. 

Except in our pyramid, differences are measured using the actual dimensions of the pyramid itself. Simply speaking, the farther the top of the pyramid is from the bottom, the more wealth inequality there is (without changing the pyramid’s size, as we’ll do below). In 2025, when this was written, the economy would probably be akin to the shape of the Transamerica building in San Francisco. For those not familiar, it’s simply a pyramid with its top far from its bottom, the state of transamerican economics today.

Let’s try to get a more clear picture. Imagine taking a standard pyramid and then pushing the top down. You would get a pyramid with its top closer to its bottom. Now imagine taking an economy and pushing its top down. You would get an economy with its top closer to its bottom. You didn’t push the wealthy people down, you pushed their wealth down, to the bottom. Think about that last sentence.

Now it’s important to note, the distance from top to bottom, changes, as the overall size of the pyramid changes. Meaning, if the wealth of an economy (represented by the size of the pyramid) increases than the distance, or difference between the top and bottom increases, but not necessarily does the inequality of wealth need to increase. As we’ll soon see, we can actually keep the inequality low regardless of how we scale the economy.

Imagine now taking a standard pyramid and then pushing its top down as we did before. You would again get a pyramid with its top closer to its bottom. Now make the overall size of the pyramid bigger. The distance between the top and bottom got bigger, but the proportion between the top and bottom stayed the same. 

When we scaled up the size of the pyramid, we maintained the same ratio between its top and bottom. A greater distance but the same proportional distance. More wealth, same inequality.

Similarly, making the overall economy bigger in size, increases its overall wealth, increases the difference (in the distance) between the top and bottom, but keeps the same ratio in that difference, meaning the top got wealthier but the bottom got wealthier in the same proportion that the top did. More wealth, less wealth inequality.

We reached a conclusion that reducing the height of an economic pyramid brings the top closer to the bottom, reducing wealth inequality. Interestingly enough, as we reduced the height of the pyramid we naturally increased its width. Wide hips, strong ships. Fattening the economy doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, and less wealth inequality doesn’t either. 

This page was taken from our book, “The Book of Real Economics Incorporated.” For more see pages x of the book.

P.S. Why is the symbol of this page in the menu a tree emoji? Because a lot, if not most of the trees are pyramidal-looking. And trees, in many ways, are also the foundation of the environment and therefore of the economy. Pyramids + nature = a perfect symbol to start with.