Economic Inequality (2016)
PG, this is a thoughtful essay.  Yet I&#x27;ll point out a flaw in this thinking below.<p>Intellectually Honest merits here: 
- you want to incentivize people to create value for society and optimize globally by raising the quality of life of (most) humans.  
- Wealth creation itself is not by default at the cost of others.<p>Intellectually Dishonest:
- That startups and wealth creation converge on a quality of life optimization function for humanity.<p>In other words: startups and wealth creation operate within the randomness of free market.  And most software technology in the last 30 years has not unlocked some kind of massive step function value in global problems.<p>If we could align more Venture Capital funding and R&amp;D output to solve fundamental problems (in other words: can we solve access to affordable nutritious food, reduction of common disease, reducing cost of housing ahead of 5-minute media formats or SaaS Invoicing Applications?)<p>Housing has continued to become less affordable and poverty still prevalent in the US.<p>- That there is a binary debate: &quot;should there be wealth or not?&quot;<p>Social Programs, funded by government, funded by taxes on higher earners and large capital gains, are one lever to address this.<p>The reason the inequality gap matters is less that its a metric of the _delta in absolute wealth_ but more that opportunity and livability of average Americans has a worse outlook in the last 20 years, not a better one.