The Pay Check

For the last seven weeks, we’ve gone around the world to see how the pandemic led to more or less economic equality. There were some pleasant surprises and some devastating stories. In the season finale, we ask: what about the next crisis? How do we ensure more stability and security when something earth shattering inevitably comes along? That led reporter Jeannette Neumann to a small town in Spain’s Basque region, which boasts a strong track record of security and stability, thanks to a crisis-tested economic model.

One of the defining trends of the pandemic has been the creation of extreme wealth at the very top. This week on The Pay Check we take a look at the booming fortunes of the world’s growing billionaire class through one man: Larry Ellison. (Net worth, give or take $90 billion.) Ellison co-founded the tech company Oracle but he may be better known for how he spends his money: yachts, mansions, a tennis tournament. In 2012, he bought an entire Hawaiian island, Lanai — home to 3,000 people. For a decade its residents have anxiously watched Ellison slowly kill their small businesses and push up rents from afar. Then, during the pandemic, Ellison moved there. Bloomberg Wealth reporter Sophie Alexander traveled down to the island to see how the billionaire’s presence has accelerated his plans, and how locals whose family’s have lived there for generations, are managing.

Even before the pandemic, the proportion of women in India's workforce was falling. Covid made it so much worse. This episode of The Pay Check looks at where India's working women went during the pandemic, why they haven't come back to the workforce, and why that's a blow to the country's broader economic ambitions. Archana Chaudhary and Ronojoy Mazumdar travel to a girls school on the Ganges with one primary mission: Keeping girls in school, often at odds with families that would prefer to get them married.

An increase in teen pregnancies in Kenya is part of a shadow pandemic that ripped through developing nations during Covid, setting women’s progress back generations. In this episode of The Pay Check, journalist Jill Filipovic visits a dance school in Nairobi, Kenya that’s fighting to help girls manage their lives and re-enroll in school.

When the Covid-19 pandemic started, many people expected inequality to get worse in the U.S. But at least for the bottom 50% of Americans, something surprising happened: Many of the least advantaged boosted their wealth. To start to understand why, we look to cash payments. No-strings-attached money went to people in need in the form of federal stimulus, the child tax credit — and local guaranteed income programs. As pandemic rescue aid wanes, is there a path to making monthly cash payments permanent? Reporter Susan Berfield looks to Jackson, Mississippi, to find out.