Poverty follows you past death
When even a resting place has to be bought, the poor go on being shut out after they die. Without money for a burial plot, the dead are left to wander with no rest, so inequality outlasts the life it shaped.
People treated as disposable waste
A society racing to get richer can come to handle its weakest members like rubbish. Remains get swept into a dustpan and dumped in a garbage can, and unborn babies are counted as medical waste. Ordinary people then learn to treat each other the same careless way.
Desperate trades for cheap symbols
When status markers become the measure of worth, poor people pay ruinous prices for them. People live in bomb shelters yet crave the latest phone, sell a kidney for cash, and take their own lives over seemingly trivial slights. The organ sellers and young suicides are the hidden casualties of this kind of progress.
Family made by care, not blood
The bonds that hold firmest can be chosen rather than born. A child abandoned by birth and raised by a stranger with simple love is tied to him more tightly than to blood relatives, even in the afterlife.