I like reading PG's essays but this one is a nonsense to me. What we (people) don't like about the rich is not their ability to make money, but their ability to corrupt the gvmt and screw the poor. All in the sake of more money.

I'm sorry, but that is just entitlement garbage that you are spewing. I don't dispute that there are certainly corrupt individuals in the world, but to cast every person of sufficient wealth as corrupting "the gvmt" and screwing the poor is near-sighted at best. I could give you countless examples of wealthy individuals that have donated significant amounts of money and time to help the poor, both domestically and internationally, although I suspect it would be ignored.

You are entitled to your opinion, but your response doesn't even address the reason the poster referenced the article. Instead, you launched into some diatribe about evil rich folk. Reading the full article probably won't change your opinion, but it does address this "us vs. them" mindset you are in to some degree. It also contains well-reasoned arguments for variation in income, including the one the grandparent post mentioned.

From PGs article: But since for most of the world's history the main route to wealth was to steal it, we tend to be suspicious of rich people

Frankly, to this exactly moment the greater part of rich people doesn't help us to get less suspicious.

I agree that progress has been made. There is enough food to feed everyone; but there is still starvation happening, mostly in Asia.

Your jpeg link has a graph with an unlabled axis and no source for the data.

A commonly accepted figure for people living on less than $2 per day is between 2billion and 2.7billion.

But that ignores the people living very close to that, who are at risk of severe hardship if they have a failed harvest.

(http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/05/poor_econo...)

> "To help clarify the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. If he's bad at it he'll work very hard and not end up with much food. Is this unfair? Who is being unfair to him?"

Now introduce one other person, on a different island. This person alters the environment; more rain, less rain, hotter climate, different water temperatures and salinity etc. These all make it much harder for the first person to grow crop and catch food. Sometimes his home is destroyed in flooding. The second guy is okay, he's living comfortably. He's a bit annoyed about the cost of petrol. If he watches a lot of news he may see the first guy being flooded out of his home. Is this unfair?