&gt; A more equal society is a better society. Always.<p>If you can read Russian and aren&#x27;t familiar with the concept of уравниловка, I suggest looking it up.  My search on the English transliteration (uravnilovka) doesn&#x27;t turn up good descriptions offhand.<p>If you can&#x27;t read Russian, I&#x27;ll summarize.  It&#x27;s basically the argument you&#x27;re making: that everyone should be equal, and that the most expedient way to accomplish this is to drag down the people who stick up.  Which is true: that _is_ the most expedient way to accomplish equality.  Historically it also leads to everyone living in communal apartments and a stagnating economy that eventually causes your country to have a revolution because people get so fed up with it.  It just takes several decades for the pernicious effects of stifling economic growth and innovation to show up.<p>Now maybe you didn&#x27;t really mean &quot;always&quot; when you said &quot;always&quot;, of course.  Maybe you meant &quot;keeping all sorts of things equal, more equality is preferable&quot;.  I may be able to buy that, but then you need to convincingly argue that those things can be kept equal.<p>(We could also have an argument about the data cherrypicking and other shenanigans in the book you mention, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s really all that germane here, since you&#x27;re making a blanket argument which has simple historical counterexamples.)