Do the math. It's literally division.

When you have 335M people in a wealthy nation - that's a large number already. Introduce a small amount of inequality - and the numbers will still be enormous. The US has MASSIVE inequality - the worst in the history of the world - surpassing the Belle Epoch in France before WWI. I'm not pretending the world nor the US is equal.

But the inequality is NOT the reason people are poor. And it's not the reason that you're not rich.

Is inequality a thing? Yes.

Is it causing problems? I think so. I think this is the interesting thing to talk about.

Is it the reason you don't have yacht or that we don't live in a utopia where no one has to work? Definitely no. Not worth considering when the smallest amount of math disproves it completely.

The US has far more poor than other countries with similar or even lower GDP per capita so it must be at least part of the reason many people are poor. Most rich nations produce enough that in principle there need be no genuine poverty (as in, inability to readily access necessities - having to make choices like buying food or obtaining medical care etc.). And one thing nobody's really noted is that a certain amount of poverty itself isn't necessarily a huge problem providing anyone who does find themselves in that situation can readily get out of it. I actually wonder if the world wouldn't be a better place if we all spent some percentage of our lives undergoing a degree of poverty. But financial mobility is at something of an all-time low in the US too as I understand it, meaning a lot of poverty is entrenched and intergenerational.

Belle Époque was circa 100 years after the French Revolution.