Please tell me again how a billionaire says wealth inequality is OK. Didn't read the whole piece, but on its face it's farcical to listen to anything someone so wealthy has to say on the subject, even if it's pg.
It means the rich can get richer without the poor getting poorer since they are creating wealth, not taking it in a zero-sum or rent-seeking way. So relative inequality increases but the mean standard of living for everyone including the poor rises.
"Poverty and economic inequality are not identical. When the city is turning off your water because you can't pay the bill, it doesn't make any difference what Larry Page's net worth is compared to yours. He might only be a few times richer than you, and it would still be just as much of a problem that your water was getting turned off."
> It means the rich can get richer without the poor getting poorer since they are creating wealth, not taking it in a zero-sum or rent-seeking way.
Except outside of the most abject poverty that is fairly rare in the developed world, utility/disutility is more a function of relative economic status than absolute economic status. So, in the only sense that matters, this is at least oversimplified; you have to improve absolute wealth on the lower end considerably just to offset the disutility of increased equality and break even. It is possible to increase inequality and have everyone better off in utilitarian terms, but improvements in the usual economic measures are not sufficient to show that because those are poor proxies for utility.
http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html