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If governments made loans for university education available to a billion more people, that would dramatically increase their future earnings potential and quality of life. Yet this would be flagged as a "worrying increase in inequality" if you count their debt against them but don't count their newly increased earnings potential in their favor.

Similarly, increasing access to healthcare would extend people's working lives. This is a fantastic outcome. But this would increase the number of years that people would be able to save over, and so this again would be flagged as rising inequality because some people will have been able to save for longer. Instead of people retiring at 50 with far greater savings than 18 year olds, you'd have people retiring at 60 with even greater still savings than 18 year olds. Yet those 18 year olds will when they are 60 achieve the same "wealth", so those 18 year olds are not being "wronged" by this inequality.

The primary adjustment that needs to be made is simply to start counting earnings potential as an asset, instead of ignoring it and claiming as a result that people are worse off than they really are.