I've been thinking about this a lot this past decade or so, and it is an interesting question. One thought I've had is that a perception (real or not) of inequality is baked into our species as being bad, particularly when it gets extreme. Why might that be? Well, if my neighbor generally has more resources than me, it's usually not that big of a deal. You maybe have more or better food, or some nicer things, but if my needs are met and I have things I can enjoy, I don't get worried.

Now, if you suddenly have a lot more than me, say you have enough to provide for other people in a meaningful way, I start to get concerned. Why? Because you don't just have more than me, you start having power over me. And if I don't stop inequality increasing, that could quickly get to the point that I can't do anything about it. Your power can become absolute, for all practical purposes.

I think humanity has learned culturally, if not genetically, that really bad situations arise if someone has way more than you. Power corrupts and all that, and gross inequality becomes power.

Of course, these days, it might not be "real", meaningful inequality (Jeff Bezos has a lot of wealth, but it is wealth tied up in Amazon, mostly, and the US Government has far, far more wealth), but the perception is there, and the perception is enough to trigger concern.

Yeah, that's a good point about power.

You could probably go further and tie some of that discomfort into competition for mates. If my neighbor had more than me, I might start to worry that he will outcompete me in the market for a mate. I'm not sure this matters as much today - but one can imagine it did for most of human history when communities were much smaller and the majority of men died without leaving offspring behind.

It's an interesting idea, I don't know if there is something to it or not. It's hard to discuss anything involving gender roles these days.

This is really well-stated. The goal should be reducing poverty, not inequality. China for example has drastically reduced the number of people living in poverty while also seeing massive increases in income inequality. Few people would make the case that the average person in China is doing worse than that they would have been 30 years ago, despite the fact that there is clearly more "income inequality".

That was a very small ruling class exploiting pretty much the entire population. That's very low levels of inequality.

Typically that would be viewed as high inequality. If the ruling class of .1% controls 99.9% of the wealth then the "average wealth" and the "median wealth" will be extremely different aka wealth inequality.

That would be high inequality, yes.

However, if the ruling class of 0.1% has 10% of the overall wealth, then that would be very low inequality. I would expect that to have been closer to the truth under the old USSR or the old Cuba, see the graph at: https://voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/FromMay2014/novo... taken from: https://voxeu.org/article/inequality-and-property-russia-190...

That's high inequality, isn't it?

Also I always laugh at how the CPSU was supposed to bring true communism but instead just kept the power indefinitely.

"After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it?" heh

It is possible to have very high inequality and [pick one] comfortable/uncomfortable poor people.

How much someone has relative to their neighbour doesn't control their quality of life.

Yes, exactly. What matters is do you have the resources to comfortably meet your needs or not. It does not matter if some people have many times more resources than you, that does not affect your situation. You might be envious, but that's neither here nor there really in your day to day quality of life.