Dystopia – Economic and Social Inequality Dictionary. Grow Your Vocabulary

Dystopia - Economic and Social Inequality Dictionary is a dedicated reference work for exploring dark futures built on class division, scarcity, and structural injustice. Instead of treating inequality as simple background, this book places it at the very center of dystopian storytelling. It examines how wealth, status, and power shape every aspect of life, from where people are allowed to live and work to what they are permitted to dream about.
The aim is to help creators move beyond vague notions of rich and poor and toward detailed, believable systems of privilege and deprivation. Inside you will find carefully organized entries on the institutions, practices, and everyday realities that make unequal societies function. Topics include corporate city states, tiered citizenship, debt bondage, slum economies, guarded enclaves, and the hidden infrastructures that keep elites comfortable while the majority struggle.
Each entry explains how a specific form of inequality works, how it might emerge from real world trends, and how it would feel to live under it. The focus stays on practical building blocks that you can drop straight into your stories, games, or roleplaying campaigns. This dictionary is designed for writers, game designers, and worldbuilders who want their dystopian settings to feel grounded, coherent, and emotionally powerful.
It shows how inequality is maintained not only by overt violence, but also by zoning laws, education systems, resource allocation, propaganda, and carefully managed hope. You will see how transportation networks, policing styles, access to clean water, and control of information can quietly reinforce a rigid hierarchy. The entries pay close attention to the daily routines of both privileged and marginalized characters, so you can portray each side of the divide with convincing detail.
At the same time, the book treats economic and social inequality as a moral and emotional question, not only as a technical one. Many entries highlight possible fault lines where resentment gathers, friendships are tested, and quiet acts of solidarity begin. You are encouraged to think about how people adapt to unfairness, how they justify their positions, and what it takes to challenge an order that seems permanent.
Notes on common clichés and pitfalls help you avoid turning poverty and oppression into empty scenery, and instead guide you toward stories that respect the humanity of those at the bottom of the ladder. Dystopia - Economic and Social Inequality Dictionary can support you at every stage of creation. You might use it early on to design the whole structure of your dystopian society around resource scarcity or entrenched class systems.
You can also consult individual entries when you need a specific detail, such as how a luxury high rise might be defended from the surrounding districts, or how a state run lottery for housing or education could be twisted into a tool of control. Whether your project follows street level survivors, corporate heirs, underground organizers, or all of them together, this book offers the concepts, language, and narrative hooks you need to bring a deeply unequal world to life with clarity and weight.