This is true if you assume strict monogamy, of both housing and mates. When inequality becomes very great, the very wealthy can purchase a greater share of the available housing (see ghost flats in London and Vancouver) and monopolize the reproductive years of a greater number of mates (usually women). To give a very rough example - when inequality is within a bridgeable margin (say an order of magnitude), a young woman may decide to marry the nice young doctor/coder rather than chase the fabulously wealthy scion. Presumably the promise of high spousal and parental investment on the part of the less-wealthy potential mate compensates for the reduced immediate access to material resources. If inequality becomes very large, it may be rational for that same woman to roll the dice on joining the throng chasing the scion. Where polygamy is normal, this is often what we observe. The case for housing is less clear - I would be interested to know whether there was a time when desirable housing was more normally distributed, although I have heard this was the case for white Americans in midcentury CA.

When inequality becomes very great, the proportion of very wealthy goes down far faster than their ability to consume.

I'm sure Richard Branson has a soft harem (to borrow the pickup-artist "soft polygamy" terminology). If he has a new girl every day (I'm half his age and I doubt I could physically pull that off) that's still only 365/year. As inequality goes up there are far fewer Richard Bransons as a proportion of the population.

I'm just middle class, and I've often had 2-4 women in my soft harem at any one time. That means 100 guys like me - with no particular excess of money - can easily have the same effect as Branson would.

I did some calculations a while back. If all the high net wealth people in NYC have 10 houses each, they'll have the same effect on housing as building one more NYU. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022235#12022920

Our shortage of housing and attractive women is caused by an increasing middle class competing for them, and an inability/unwillingness (depending on how you characterize exclusionary zoning and an unwillingness to put down the fork) to increase the supply.

I did some somewhat similar calculations for my country. What you say is true and doesn't even just apply to the super-rich. The amount of people who have 10 or more times higher income than average is around 1 in 100 people in my country.

So the frequency drops by 2 orders of magnitude as income ratio grows by 1 order of magnitude.

In the US it's perhaps not 1:100, but it's also unlikely to be anywhere near 1:10.

So yes, the average person "suffers" from competition from people who are near their general level of income way more than from competition from rich people.

I'd like to point out - the increased participation of people in "soft harems" reduce the number of mates available in monogamy relationships. The resource "Exclusivity * attention" (what a lot of people value) is being destroyed by the increasing number of people engaging in polygamy; the number of monogamous mates available is reduced in the sense that it makes it harder for monogamous mates to find each other in a polygamous world. And inequality is increased - "superstars" have 365 mates instead of just 1.

I don't think you understood the point, I am not arguing against that. I am arguing that these "superstars" are not important because they are so rare compared to the increased number of partners they can have. They are, as a group, less competition for an average person than middle class people who mostly have from zero to a small number of partners but are very numerous.

Ok. Good point.

In a world where women can support themselves, being rich is just one factor of being attractive to women. There are plenty of guys who are very successful with women despite not being rich, because it is not a requirement that they be able to support them. So in theory, if you removed wealth inequality, certain individuals would just dominate romantic life for other reasons.

However, your argument is flawed in other ways.

There isn't a strict limit after which women will marry a guy for money (what you call a bridgeable margin - it doesn't exist). Obviously this is gradual and different for each woman. So the probability that a randomly selected woman would marry a guy for his money grows with his income.

In this situation, the order of magnitude of inequality becomes irrelevant because the two orders of magnitude richer than average guy will be an order of magnitude rarer than the one order of magnitude richer than average guy (in the worst possible case, in reality they will be even rarer). So even though the extremely rich guy can do "more damage" to the rest of society by hogging something, there are less of them, so in total they hog the same amount. So this order of magnitude doesn't actually make a difference.

These are great points, and I regret that I used an example that inadvertently framed the discussion around "women marrying for money"- In fact I believe that women have a surprisingly catholic breadth of mate choice criteria, and the data available on reproductive variability in modern societies seem to bear this out. As the preceding comments note, the existence of a Zipf-distributed hyper-elite is not necessarily a big problem for certain categories of goods. I am actually more interested in the effects of the collapse of alternative status hierarchies and how this affects different status 'tournaments'. Global competitions seem to converge on a single figure of merit, and I wonder whether jagged multimodal distributions on a single variable produce different 'competitions' than normal distributions or multivariate distributions. I would also note that an individual or group can affect a resource competition without directly consuming the resource itself.