It's a pretty good indicator about the real impact of poverty in that society. If a lot of the wealth is concentrated, the people in the middle and bottom are very squeezed in terms of what society actually offers them (generally), whereas if the wealth is more evenly distributed, society tends to make sure everybody's getting along well, with health care and schools and what-not.

Of course, you can definitely throw the baby out with the bathwater on that one. If there's completely even income distribution, the only motivation you have to do any work is just because you like to work - and most people don't like to work much. And then people compensate with non-income power imbalance, usually, so things are still not equitable.

> If a lot of the wealth is concentrated, the people in the middle and bottom are very squeezed in terms of what society actually offers them (generally)

I'm not sure I understand the connection though. I don't see how one party having a large amount of wealth, however defined, necessarily precludes any other party from having any amount of wealth.

> whereas if the wealth is more evenly distributed, society tends to make sure everybody's getting along well, with health care and schools and what-not.

But the underlying underlying in statements like this is that wealth originates in the aggregation, and individuals subsequently claim a portion of it, which seems counter-intuitive and false.

Particular people build things like schools and hospitals in particular places, generating wealth for the specific people involved. 'Society' doesn't ensure that people have these goods; people create these goods for themselves, and generate society in the process.

I find the lack of increase in (inflation-adjusted) median wages to be the more interesting headline, not the distribution of wages per se. In effect, the average person has not seen any improvement in prosperity from the large productivity improvements that technology has brought us. I think that's problematic, in part because it makes it harder to argue that the tech sector's growth will bring prosperity to the average person (rather than just to us techies).

Perhaps the earlier "jobs are obsolete" argument is right, and people aren't reaping the benefits of technology as much as they might because the productivity improvements that it creates inhere in an economic abstraction layer that they're not participating in to the extent that they might.

If we imagined the way modern technologies might be applied to the productive capacity of a family homestead, for example, the improvement that technology brings to the homesteader's quality of life should be directly apparent, without the need to rely on macro-level metrics at all.

They may not have more money in their pocket, but they have an iPhone or android in there which I think qualifies as a pretty amazing form of "participation" in the amazing gains driven by technology.

>What does one person's income have to do with anyone else

If I make $10/yr I could be the richest man on earth or the poorest. It kind of depends on what everybody else makes too.

Right, but this sort of begs the question: why does it matter whether you're the richest or poorest? Isn't the relevant question the extent to which that $10 worth of wealth satisfies your own needs, irrespective what anyone else may or may not have?

Because social status (and the perceived security of that status) is very real and hugely important to a large % of people. Difficult to quantify, but absolutely a major driving force in real life. We all compare ourselves (to some extent) to those around us, no matter if we're working at McDonald's or as an executive at MegaCorp.