Everyone who isn't like PG (so, 100% of the population) is finding it difficult to make enough money to have a life in the most basically fulfilling sense: education, retirement, support for loved ones, and good health.
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754?logi...
So, PG: great news about the Forbes 100, I guess?
This exactly. PG arguing the relevance of the Gini coefficient is oblivious to the the crumbling state of the public infrastructure in the US and the declining accessibility of high quality public goods to the working and middle class.
The Gini coefficient is an indicator, not an objective in and of itself.
Investment in public goods might even make the super rich even richer by making the corporations they own more effective through better trained workers and less loss due to poor infrastructure.
We get it, these people pay you. Just say it: "I can see nothing wrong with the current distribution of wealth because the lenses in my eyeglasses are actually solid gold, a gift bequeathed to me by the Duchess of Facebook." The guy needs meritocracy to not be a myth, because he's styled himself as some kind of kingmaker who can selectively pluck only the most deserving young founders from a bubbling vat of Stanford alumni DNA. It's been a good run, but it's just getting gross now.
I don't think he's ill-intentioned, but like many people in his position, he's probably just personally unaffected by the crumbling of public goods.
He'll never take a dangerously overcrowded train, nor will he ever worry about whether his kids are in a safe school. Inequality seems mostly like a set of interesting stats to him, with little real world negative personal impact.
I don't believe he has ill intent because he has taken concrete steps to examine the issues (i.e. YC's UBI experiment), but it sounds like he's limited like anyone by the environment he mostly exists in, where he reasons about issues like inequality too much from data like the Forbes top 100 list.