The wealthy people I work for strive towards giving their wealth away as best as they can to maximise their impact. They are also susceptible to health crises and family tragedy like everyone else. All the money in the world can't bring back family members or magically solve incurable health issues. While there must be some bad apples, my experience has led me to believe that it's unfair to categorize all wealthy people as uncaring, greedy and selfish.
My big takeaway from watching how 'the other side' lives, is that money is like a magnifying glass of who you really are. If you're genuinely virtuous--for example generous and caring--the wealth allows you to express that. I'm sure if you're greedy or have an addictive personality, you'll be even more destructive to yourself, those around you, and wider society. I'm extremely lucky to have the ability to not have to work with people like that.
Most of the rich people I have known are actually better people than the average person. I guess the fact they have everything they want allows them to better focus on improving themselves and thinking about their actions than someone who barely have enough to survive. A starving dog is more dangerous than a well fed dog.
There are exceptions of course, some are psychopaths. But I have always been impressed by how nice the rich tend to be in person.
Now about the wealth distribution. In developed countries, the rich are usually not sitting on top of a mountain of gold, mountains of gold are not of much use anyways. Most of their wealth is actually in their businesses, buildings, etc... Businesses get people to work and produce things for people to use, buildings house people, etc... Only a fraction of it is actually used for their luxurious lifestyle, the rest runs the economy.
Now the question would be, wouldn't it be better if money went to the people instead of a few billionaires. Well, yes and no. Yes, for obvious reasons, concentrate wealth too much and that's how you get slavery. But also no, because too much equality is not always a good thing. We need some people with crazy money to do crazy stuff, Elon Musk comes to mind, no billionaire, no SpaceX to do what NASA failed to do.
While it is not about money, another interesting example is the discovery of the Hubble deep field. The director is awarded 10% of the telescope time to use as he sees fit. Kind of like a "telescope billionaire". Robert Williams, the then director, decided to use a substantial fraction of his time looking at an empty patch of sky, discovering many galaxies as a result. It was a bit crazy, and he couldn't have done that if he went through the usual procedures, and it payed of in the end.
That's why I think we need some inequality. Not too much, people deserve to live with a minimum of comfort, but not too little, we need to make large scale personal initiatives possible.
we are way past 'some' inequality. and a lot of that capital sits in places where it doesn't do much to stimulate the economy. then there are the vast swaths of the economy that aren't actually productive or actively detrimental (here's looking at you, financial services, payday lenders, and fossil fuels). further, more inequality means more economic capture (private interests in control of regulation), which decreases our ability to deal with those harms as a society. then you have folks like the koch bros. I like musk as much as the next guy, but I question whether we're at a net positive.
I think it's not a one-dimensional slider, with 'too much' inequality at one end, and 'not enough' at the other end.
I think it has more facets than that, so that it's still possible for everyone to have a decent quality of life (in as much as wealth can help with that), while at the same time, allowing those "big ticket" explorations by a lucky minority of people.
I agree though, with questioning whether we are currently at a net positive. What I described above is more like a Star Trek utopia. Maybe possible, certainly not happening at the moment.
My big takeaway from watching how 'the other side' lives, is that money is like a magnifying glass of who you really are. If you're genuinely virtuous--for example generous and caring--the wealth allows you to express that. I'm sure if you're greedy or have an addictive personality, you'll be even more destructive to yourself, those around you, and wider society. I'm extremely lucky to have the ability to not have to work with people like that.