Why is wealth inequality a problem? People should be free to pursue maximum compensation for their skills and abilities, not be limited because they are better at somethings than other people.
When people talk about wealth inequality as a bad thing they're normally talking about self-perpetuating wealth inequality, or wealth inequality that is caused by things that are seen as inherently unfair, like the family you are born into.
A lot of people who have comparative wealth and have worked hard for it feel they have earned their wealth, disregarding the fact that a lot of other people work equally hard and do not have the same amount of wealth. This sort of thing muddies the issue.
Also muddying the issue is the fact that some people think that if X amount of money could lift Y poor people out of poverty, vs making rich person Z marginally richer, it is self-evidently the case that it is better and therefore right for X to be spent on the Y rather than person Z. I.e. as long as some people are below a minimum acceptable level of wealth, all wealth inequality is, in this view, bad.
People who think wealth inequality is a problem are being short sighted.
>wealth inequality that is caused by things that are seen as inherently unfair, like the family you are born into.
I, like my father before me, am making sacrifices to benefit my future generations. It's not unfair, it's called being responsible and thinking about the future.
> Is it wrong to work hard to improve your children's future prospects?
Nothing is wrong it.
> I'd be really interested to hear why people disagree with this
It's a blatant strawman.
If you provide for your child 1000x what they need (during childhood and/or via inheritance) that is not bad (in the scope of this discussion, no other details implied). What is bad is if you have 1000000x what your children need and you built this on the backs of people who will squaler in poverty until the day they die and the only thing you use the wealth for is to acquire more wealth. That is bad. The strawman makes it sound like you are defending an average middle class engineer saving up for their children's college as if they were in the wrong, as if they were on the winning side of increasing income inequality.
Nobody here is arguing against a middle class person saving up for their kids college. They're against people who actually have ridiculous amounts of wealth and the rapid growth of that inequality.
A certain amount of inequality encourages economic growth and innovation. Zero wealth inequality would be perfect communism. A lot of people--myself included--presume that would retard growth due to a lack of incentives.
The maximum amount of wealth inequality would be for one person to own the entire world, and for everyone else to have nothing. This is practically impossible, of course. We can only approximate it, such as by 1% of Earth's population owning 99% of its wealth. This generally encourages the other 99% of the people to take some of that wealth by force, without regard to any increased productivity the current owner may be able to squeeze out via economies of scale or capital investment, or whatever.
A medium amount of inequality encourages people with less wealth to do neat and interesting things in order to become more wealthy (economic mobility), and for those with more to make capital investments that increase productivity, purchase luxury goods, and finance megaprojects (concentration of capital).
So the problem is when the amount of wealth inequality moves away from the optimal profile, which remains undiscovered. My perception is that we are moving away from the optimum, rather than toward it.
>A lot of people--myself included--presume that would retard growth due to a lack of incentives
No need to presume anything, we have a number of examples to look at throughout history. Actually, stunted economic growth is the best case scenario for socialist systems. Most of them achieve no more than mass starvation and death of millions of citizens.
I was trying to be diplomatic, as this is a matter heavily influenced by one's political beliefs, and somewhat resistant to the application of historical facts--such as the Holocaust, Holodomor, Killing Fields, Gulag Archipelago, Great Leap Forward, and Juche.
A certain number of socialist believers must be retained to keep a system of unequal property from running away into oligarchic plutocracy. It's like putting a harmonic damper on a pendulum, to keep it from swinging too far, while still retaining the same amount of energy in the system.
It's not like the other side of the political spectrum takes their crimes seriously: the trail of tears, Churchill's starving of 2 million Indians, the Holocaust (which somehow gets misplaced onto socialism even though Hitler purged the socialists in his party years before it started), the African slave trade, Belgian Kongo, 1973 CIA funded coup of Allende in Chile, Contras in Nicaragua, CIA funding of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Conflict Minerals, Irish Potato Famine, Private Prison Industry, Drug Cartels, etc..
A certain number of selfish and ambitious property-believers must be retained in a system of equal distribution, in order to keep the pendulum from swinging too far in that direction.
Ideological purity is murder. Don't waste your intellect arguing over the various types of extremism.
If there were no socialists, capitalists would be living in a hellish dystopia. If there were no capitalists, socialists would be living in a hellish dystopia. So just stick the chocolate in the peanut butter (or put the peanut butter in the chocolate) and enjoy your mixed economic system.
Wealth inequality is a problem because it is an inefficient distribution of society's resources. When we divert productive capacity to build someone a yacht instead of feeding the homeless, we allow many to suffer in exchange for the marginal improvement in happiness for one person.
It can be argued that inequality leads to more utility being created overall, but I feel this justification is rarely scrutinised in much detail. Instead it is elevated to a moral premise that those who are able to earn more "deserve" their excess share of society's resources, regardless of how many suffer for their consequently smaller share.
Personally, it seems to me we have the resources to feed and shelter everyone in our society, and I'm highly sceptical that doing so would create less utility overall than whatever it is we're doing with those resources instead. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this argument extends to the world as a whole.
Why should people be free to pursue maximum compensation? Why can't they be free to pursue any unprofitable work that benefits society as a whole instead of chunking out more candy crush/Farmville/clash of clans clones or other making pointless artificial rents (e.g. something you use to own, but now only available as an electron-SaaS) or other economic/socialogical waste?
Dumb luck? What is dumb luck? So the wealth differences between a high school drop out and a college grad can largely be attributed to this "dumb luck"?
It's "dumb luck" that my parents were middle class instead of drug addicts, it's "dumb luck" that I was born and raised in the USA instead of a place without electricity and running water. It's "dumb luck" that I was raised somewhere where the walls weren't poisoning me with lead during my child-hood. It's "dumb luck" that I wasn't raised in a ghetto where the only kind of success anyone knew about was in joining a gang or leaving forever.
Dumb luck is also being born into a family where you'll inherit millions of dollars, but tell everyone you worked hard for it.
A lot of people who have comparative wealth and have worked hard for it feel they have earned their wealth, disregarding the fact that a lot of other people work equally hard and do not have the same amount of wealth. This sort of thing muddies the issue.
Also muddying the issue is the fact that some people think that if X amount of money could lift Y poor people out of poverty, vs making rich person Z marginally richer, it is self-evidently the case that it is better and therefore right for X to be spent on the Y rather than person Z. I.e. as long as some people are below a minimum acceptable level of wealth, all wealth inequality is, in this view, bad.