not actually income inequity, but perhaps a better measure of how poor people actually are. I feel its not a zero sum game. I don't feel bad that someone has a million dollars and I don't either so I might not have the proper thinking on this.

Wealth inequality is irrelevant.

Wealth inequality is not irrelevant to economic development or policy outcomes.

Exactly. Wealth inequality is irrelevant.

It is better off if one person has a billion dollars, and the other 9 have between $20,000 and $100,000, than if ten people have $10.

Exactly. Wealth inequality is irrelevant.

Richard Reeves in The Guardian called the book "a thorough-going attempt to demonstrate scientifically the benefits of a smaller gap between rich and poor", but said there were problems with the book's approach. "Drawing a line through a series of data points signals nothing concrete about statistical significance [...] since they do not provide any statistical analyses, this can't be verified."

In 2010, Tino Sanandaji and others wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which they said, "when we attempted to duplicate their findings with data from the U.N. and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), we found no such correlation".[21] The same group of researchers published a report for the Taxpayer's Alliance providing details of their data analysis and coming to the conclusion that "the most straightforward measure of health simply has no robust correlation to income inequality when comparing industrialized countries using standard OECD and UN statistics".

Indeed. For example, I'm sure the concentration of wealth among people in the finance industry was totally irrelevant to the policy decisions regarding TARP and the rest of the financial bailouts. /sarcasm

I agree that absolute wealth matters more than relative wealth, at least up to a certain threshold of comfort. Nevertheless, the reality is that concentration of wealth = concentration of power, and that has both economic and political effects. Wealth inequality is not irrelevant to economic development or policy outcomes.