The 1% own all of the property in the country, because their purchasing power is so enormous.

One of them earns ten times more than 99 of the others put together.

The 1% turn the screws on the 99% such that $200K actually isn't a high income any more. For example, monopolising land.

Money is just a number. What really matters is the share of resources; there's some sort of Schwarzchild radius beyond which the wealthy turn into black holes.

The problem is that this kind of thing can’t last long. For many reasons. Affording things means you can pay for the materials, labor, and markup that went into it. If everyone makes $200k, you can’t afford labor costs for anything produced domestically. You can import foreign workers, but then you’ve broken the constraints of the system and suddenly people are poor.

I think people misunderstand a bit. It isn't wealth that is the problem as such. It is that wealth is a symptom of inequality. If you for example have good accessible schools for much of the population where having a privileged background doesn't matter much then naturally it will be relatively hard to get rich because there is so much competition.

This doesn't follow. The economy is not a zero-sum game. edit: presuming a sufficiently elastic money supply.

A better way is to actually ask them how they feel and correlate with gini. Which is what the study did.

Even if 99% of people earned 200k and 1% earned 250k, there would be talk about how unfair the elite class is and how we need to tax those rich people so much more.