Why must everyone go down to the lower common denominator? Wouldn't moving everyone to the average also be equality? For most middle-class Westerners that would be a reduction, but for most people on Earth that would very likely be a small improvement, and in some cases a significant improvement.

The real problem is that it's logistically impossible. Someone living in the middle of a desert just can't have access to the sort of food wealth and stable energy supply we have because the technologies to get those things to where they are don't really exist yet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to move everyone towards the average a bit though.

"Next time it will work because the workers will be properly motivated!"

If we were talking about a fixed, concrete goal, then I'd agree with you. Reducing poverty, reducing world hunger, increasing standards of living, etc are things that can be accomplished by setting some absolute, concrete moral goals, which moving towards by any measure might be considered morally good. But "inequality" on its own is, prima facia, a term that requires comparison to the point of "perfect equality".

Doing good things might result in less inequality, but reducing inequality for the sake of itself is just justification of envy. There's nothing inherently "evil" or even negative about it.

On a side note: "Reducing inequality" is an activists dream. They can sell political solutions forever for a problem that will always exist, by some form of the definition.

(Unless we were to oversimplify it and set some standard deviation type hard-target for income distribution, but I've not heard anyone suggest this, let alone an appropriate "fair" target distribution. I'm not for it, but it's at least a measurable goal.)

How do you know that, though? Have you had the opportunity to be in the exact same place he was for the exact same time? Do you sincerely believe there aren't, in the billions of people on earth, someone with better resource allocation skills than Bezos? Having more money is not proof of ability.

Yes, lots of people were alive in the exact same time when he started Amazon.

Most people don't even try, but it doesn't stop them from accusing people who put in the work and who take the risks from just being lucky.

You have to consider luck, there's a ton of people in the world who put in the work and didn't get anything, and it's not just because they didn't work hard enough.

Would you also say Steve Jobs was merely lucky, and everybody else could have founded Apple? Perhaps people just don't know enough about what those CEOs do?

And of course at a basic level, it is always luck, because even being born, being healthy, the place where you are born, intelligence, and so on, are luck.

I think to assume people don't deserve stuff because they were lucky is rather backwards.

Imagine you had a brain tumor, and you need brain surgery. There is a surgeon who was very lucky - he was born white, male, to a wealthy family, so that he could afford to go to the best schools to become a really good brain surgeon.

Would you then say that guy doesn't deserve your money, because he was just lucky?`

I'd say that's just bullshit. It doesn't matter why or how he got his qualifications by luck, magic, whatever. What matters right now, what makes you willing to give him money, is that he can provide you with the best odds of a successful brain surgery.

You are welcome to pick a random poor person from the street to perform that surgery, for the sake of fairness. After all, it isn't their fault that they weren't able to afford the education to become a brain surgeon, right?

And if you say that brain surgeon should have to operate on you for free, that is exploitation, plain and simple. You dispose of his body. In the end he would be punished for becoming a brain surgeon, because people would feel entitled to his services and would make him work 20 hours a day, with no compensation.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068