&gt; the public conversation about economic inequality is way too sloppy, and that we should focus not on crude statistical measures like economic inequality but on the specific underlying components<p>This is a ridiculous thing to day.  For one thing there is no public conversation about income inequality.  The press is owned by corporations, whose majority ownership is billionaires.  Even this forum is owned by Y Combinator, a corporation which owns shares of companies who have collectively raised billions of dollars.<p>I mean, elected political parties like Hezbollah in Lebanon have television channels like Al-Manar.  When someone like Javed Iqbal in the US sets up receiver satellite cards so Americans can watch this channel - he was sent to prison for over six years.  That&#x27;s the &quot;public conversation&quot; in the USA.<p>There have been somewhat open channels of public discussion on the Internet like Usenet.  Which is why the US government and last-mile monopolies got together to work to crush Usenet a few years ago, which for the most part worked in severely harming it.<p>Then it&#x27;s also in the interest of the idle class heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work to try to muddle the conversation.  The idle class is who has been working to take the &quot;focus&quot; <i>off</i> &quot;specific underlying components&quot;.  It&#x27;s farcical that the people working to confuse the issue then go on to complain how it seems so unfocused.<p>It&#x27;s pretty simple - any created wealth is created through work.  Heirs who do not work can then only live by expropriating surplus labor time from those of us who do work.  It&#x27;s as simple as that.  It&#x27;s been happening for 10,000 years, whether it&#x27;s called slavery, or serfdom, or modern wage slavery.  It&#x27;s all the same thing.  Among we who do all the work and create all the wealth has been awareness of the 1% parasites who feed off of our labor.<p>If the focus of the issue is confused, it&#x27;s because the offending group wants it to be confused - the people who own the press, who jail the Javed Iqbal&#x27;s who allow different views from elected parliamentary parties, who crush public forums like Usenet etc.