What happens when we stop asking how much people make and start asking how fairly it gets shared? That question drives the new web-based dashboard “Who Shares the Wealth?” at gini.commandos.cloud, a free, public tool that explores global income inequality before and after taxes. Built from this week’s 2025 TidyTuesday dataset, this project combines data journalism with civic technology, creating transparency around economic justice.
Making Inequality Visible
The dashboard uses Gini coefficients, the standard measure of income inequality, to reveal how wide the gap is between pre-tax and post-tax income distributions across dozens of countries. More importantly, it shows where taxation actually works to reduce inequality and where it doesn’t.
Consider South Africa, which ranks among the most unequal countries both before and after taxes. Now compare that to Denmark and Germany, where robust redistribution policies create significant drops in Gini scores. These aren’t just numbers floating in academic papers. They’re policy results made visible, showing the real-world impact of different approaches to economic justice.
A Tool, Not a Take
The design philosophy was straightforward: build something anyone could use, regardless of technical background. Visitors can select a country to explore its before and after Gini values, compare two nations side by side, or scan global rankings of inequality and redistribution performance.
Unlike most economic data tools, this one doesn’t require a login, subscription, or institutional affiliation. No gated content. No dark UX patterns. Just clean data, responsibly visualized and made accessible to everyone from students to policymakers to curious citizens.
Why This Matters
We live in an era where economic debates often lack a shared baseline of facts. This project represents one attempt to restore that baseline. It doesn’t claim neutrality because inequality isn’t neutral. But it does strive for clarity. By showing what redistribution looks like at a systemic level, the dashboard invites deeper, data-informed conversations about the kinds of systems we want to build.
The tool becomes particularly powerful when you realize that countries with similar pre-tax inequality can end up with dramatically different post-tax outcomes. The difference lies in policy choices, and those choices have measurable consequences for millions of people.
Open Source, Open Data
True to the principles of transparency that drive this work, both the code powering the dashboard and the underlying datasets will be open-sourced. This means researchers, developers, and advocates worldwide can build upon this foundation, adapt it for their own contexts, or simply verify the analysis for themselves. Open data deserves open tools.
Acknowledgments
This project wouldn’t have been possible without key contributions from several organizations and individuals. Special thanks to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Lovable for their development platforms, Jon Harmon for his technical expertise, the Data Science Learning Community (dslc.io) for fostering the collaborative environment that makes projects like this possible, and the Indiana Community Action Association for their continuing support of the Woods Foundation.
What Comes Next
“Who Shares the Wealth?” marks just the beginning. Future expansions could include time-series views showing redistribution trends over decades, integration with population-level wellbeing metrics, and downloadable reports for use in classrooms or advocacy work.
In the meantime, the dashboard is ready for public use. Visit gini.commandos.cloud, explore your country’s statistics, and share what you learn. Social justice through the power of information. It’s what we do.