The Spirit Level [1] makes a good argument for why more equal societies benefit everyone within them. At the very least, I think it's fair to say that "Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse" is not definitively true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Ko...
Which is why we need governmental solutions, laws, taxes, etc and can't rely on just good will.
I havent read the book you recomended, but I will check it out. I'd also recomend the book "On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake" as it's a great description of how global elites have largely captured government for their own ends since the gilded age.
Profit, dividends, and buybacks are unpaid wage.
Is that an accurate description of CEOs worth billions of dollars though? How hard are they supposedly working? I'm probably lazier than most of them as an IC with disabilities and non-work interests... but it's not humanly possible that they get ~40,000 times as much done in a day as I do.
But you do understand why a popular singer or a football player get that much more than you?
OP is saying "in terms of goals, the end goal should be reduction of poverty, not reduction of rich people".
You're saying "in reality, data says that reduction of rich people tends to correlate with reduction of poverty", thus opening up reduction of rich people as one potential path towards the reduction of poverty.
I don't think it's been definitively demonstrated that the existence of rich people necessitates the existence of poverty. I would agree that, in reality, the creation of rich people tends to also lead to the creation of poverty.
It's his name on the front of the book, but he is not necessarily the primary author. That sounds a little unethical to me.
[0] https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/380231/James-P...
[1] https://theconversation.com/why-you-dont-need-to-write-much-...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/featu...
Taylor Swift, perhaps? Paul McCartney. You only need one example to disprove the case.
It doesn’t seem ridiculous that if you make something and charge $10 and 100 million people pay you that you’re necessarily doing something unethical.
They’re such outliers that it’s still a safe assumption someone has done something exploitative if they’re a billionaire.
Secondly they are receiving endowments from many individuals and organizations on top of tuitions and cuts off the top of grants researcher working there receive.
Thirdly they arent just getting simple compound intrest from money setting in a savings account instead they run private equity funds and hedge funds, which are themselves morally suspect
They had a rough first 10 years breaking even vs GDP/c under Batista but there was rapid advancement after that until collapse of the Soviet Union.
Source: Capital by Piketty
That may be true, but I personally also think curbing the wealth of the extremely wealthy is a worthwhile goal in its own right. It's dangerous to give individuals so much power, which is one of the most common lessons in the last 10,000 years of media and also blatantly obvious from the ways many billionaires (and non-billionaires, frankly) use that money to manipulate, harm, disenfranchise, and silence the public.