Other than pure envy, it's hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates' income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same.
Nobody reasonable begrudges anyone who is wealthy for creating commensurate value. The issue is with wealth that accumulates to those who don't, like CEOs who run their companies into the ground or bankers who crash the entire economy.
If you're creating value, the wealth society has given you is probably a bargain for society; if you're not, it's an inefficient allocation of resources, a symptom of a systemic fault that hurts everyone else.
It's actually rather more worrying if what they're giving their children is a strong education and an absolutely ferocious work ethic. An aristocracy that simply bequeaths money and social position to its children will eventually fall. And aristocracy that bequeaths the actual skills required to earn more money than everyone else is self perpetuating.
Strong education + ferocious work ethic + skills to earn money seems like a weird definition of meritocracy to me, especially given that later in the article we acknowledge that this combo doesn't actually seem to be getting good results. A strong education does not necessarily imply you know how to apply it, and there's certainly a long history of people without that advantage succeeding. The dirty secret of working long hours is that much of it is either for show or spent doing shit work. And the 'actual skills' in question are still very frequently having the right connections.
Don't tell me it got hostage to the wrong ideology--tell me why all those professors we paid millions of dollars to study economics couldn't provide a convincing rebuttal to that ideology in advance of the crash. Don't tell me that regulators were stupid or bankers got greedy until you first explain to me why tens of thousands of very well educated people, most of them graduates of colleges and professional schools that had aggressively winnowed them based on intelligence, barely outperformed a bunch of upstart micks, third-generation coupon-clipping WASP dimwits, and central bankers who still worshipped the barbarous relic of the gold standard?
I... what?