There is extreme inequality in America, and it is getting worse.

Bloomberg recently reported that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg is now worth more than $200 billion. He is not alone. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder Elon Musk and LVMH founder Bernard Arnault are also worth more than $200 billion.

This news is a searing reminder of the unequal distribution of wealth in America. In the same country as Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk, there are millions of people living without a reliable source of food. (Arnault lives in France.) Redistributing just a small portion of the wealth of the richest Americans could alleviate enormous human suffering.

The problem gets worse over time. According to Forbes magazine, “in 1987, the combined net worth of (the world’s) 140 billionaires was $295 billion.” But now, in 2024, there are “more billionaires than ever: 2,781 in total, 141 more than last year and 26 more than the record set in 2021.” They are richer than ever, with a combined wealth of $14.2 trillion, up $2 trillion.” from 2023 and $1.1 trillion above the previous record, also set in 2021.”

Forbes continued: “Most of the gains come from the top 20 companies, which have added $700 billion in wealth since 2023, as well as the United States, which now boasts a record 813 billionaires with a total wealth of $5.7 trillion.”

What could this enormous wealth do? Globally, Oxfam International recently explained that $1.7 trillion is “enough to lift two billion people out of poverty.” Thus, just a fraction of the wealth of a few people can lift billions of people out of poverty.

The problem, however, is not just the top 0.1 percent. As Pew Research notes, America’s upper class is getting richer while its middle class is getting smaller: “Income growth has shifted toward high-income households in recent decades. At the same time, the US middle class, which once made up the clear majority of Americans, is shrinking. Thus, a larger share of the country’s total income now goes to high-income households, while the share of middle- and low-income households falls. The share of American adults living in middle-income households fell from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019.”

Moreover, inequality in America is markedly worse than in other rich countries. The Gini coefficient is a generally accepted measure of inequality in a country. It uses a scale from 0 (complete equality) to 1 (complete inequality). According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in 2017, “the Gini coefficient in the United States was 0.434.” This number “was higher than any other G7 country, with the Gini index ranging from 0.326 in France to 0.392 in the UK and gradually approaching the level of inequality observed in India (0.495).”

There are many reasons for this inequality. Among them: technological automation, inherited wealth, weak corporate regulation, liberal trade policies, outsourcing of labor, insufficient taxation and broken public schools. Some inequality, of course, is also due to individual choice (people choose to spend time on less profitable activities) and work ethic (some people work harder than others).

And, importantly, there is nothing wrong with people becoming rich. Some inequality should even be encouraged. Hard work and ingenuity should be rewarded. And great business success motivates others to innovate and take risks that improve society as a whole.

But excessive inequality (see Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk) allows large-scale human suffering to be needlessly ignored. It’s not just unfair. As the International Monetary Fund has explained, this has wide-ranging social consequences: “Rising inequality breeds social discontent and breeds political instability. It also fuels populist, protectionist and anti-globalization sentiments.”

These problems are not surprising or difficult. These are the obvious consequences of a deeply flawed economic system. The same country simply cannot have several jackpot winners amassing billions while at the same time tens of millions are struggling to survive.