[dane-pgp]

If we accept the (increasingly uncertain) assumption that democracy is sustainable, and that taxation policies reflect the wishes of the majority, then we would expect (to a first approximation) that the wealth distribution in a country would match the average or majority wishes of the citizens in that country.

As for what the "desired" wealth distribution is, a naive view would be that everyone believes that we are all inherently of equal worth, and therefore we should all have roughly the same amount of total assets over the course of our lives, but a lot of people instead accept the premise that if there were no reward for working hard, people would freeload.

Fortunately some research has been done on what the desired amount of inequality is, and here is an article[0] which compares that desired distribution to the actual distribution, and also to the distribution that people think exists in America. The results are quite illuminating.

One way to bring the actual distribution in line with the desired distribution (other than improving democracy/representation and education) would be with an explicit annual wealth tax. For simplicity it could be designed to only apply to people with more than $5 million in net assets, and it might have to be agreed in coordination with other advanced countries (like the recent global minimum corporate tax rate agreement). The revenue could be redistributed into public services like free healthcare and college.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/america...

[baash05]

There's a third option to the inherent equal worth vs freeload. That is, that people are just not of equal inherent worth.

I'm a coder, and I do not believe for an instant that I am as valuable to the population on the whole as a nurse or a doctor. I mean even even just reading your last full sentence one might argue you feel the same.

If you were trapped on an island, would you want a DR or a coder with you?

[dane-pgp]

I think the problem is that "How much is someone worth?" can't (or shouldn't) have a financial answer, in the same way that slavery is morally wrong.

(Yes, technically it is necessary to calculate things like the amount of money a society should spend to increase the number of Quality-Adjusted Life Years of the population as a whole, given that there are finite resources and competing things to spend them on, but even then we don't typically try to judge recipients by their skills or professions.)

If I were trapped on an island, I wouldn't want a doctor or a coder to join me, I'd want to not be trapped on the island. That's dodging the question a little, but just because a doctor might be more useful to me in some circumstances doesn't necessarily mean that I want society to produce worse outcomes for coders (or anyone else) than for doctors, except to the extent that providing better outcomes for doctors is necessary to produce more/better/enough doctors.