> Technology makes wealth inequality worse by giving people leverage and compounding differences in ability and amount of work. It also often replaces human jobs with machines. A long time ago, differences in ability and work ethic had a linear effect on wealth; now its exponential.

This is a factor, but not much of one.

Let's see who is wealthy. The top ten of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans.

#1 Gates - grandfather ran a bank, and had a million dollar trust fund for him.
#2 Buffett - father a Congressman, grandparents owned a chain of stores
#3 Ellison - grew up middle class, self-made
#4 Koch - inherited oil company
#5 Koch - inherited oil company
#6 Walton - inherited Walmart
#7 Walton - inherited Walmart
#8 Walton - inherited Walmart
#9 Walton - inherited Walmart
#10 Bloomberg - grew up middle class, self-made

The incubi hovering over Silicon Valley are the limited partners whom VCs raise money from. Like the Forbes 400 list, or like the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, most of the wealth is inherited.

I've sat next to too many Chinese and Indian guys, running the whole show for some Fortune 500 company in terms of their databases, storage, or some programming group, who were on H1-B visas and making a pittance and living in a small apartment in some crappy neighborhood to think that "work ethic" and "ability" is what is making all the money. These people not only have a work ethic (like many in society), they also have the technical ability. They have the ability and they're using the ability. And making nothing.

Those who get wealthy expropriating the surplus labor time profits of we workers who work and create wealth - they are the ones who are benefiting, not the "hard working" or "able". Watch the documentary "Born Rich" by one of their tribe. How many of the people interviewed their have the ability to know which data structure is proper for a certain project? Or how to set up BGP connections on a Cisco router? And so forth. They are benefiting due to the new technology, but it is they who benefit, the hard working able people building and implementing these things are getting scraps from the table.

While GDP per capita has risen over the past decades, inflation-adjusted wages per hour have fallen. Things have gotten better for those who do not work, and worse for those who do work and create wealth.

The only answer from those who parasitically expropriate profits from the surplus time of those of us who work and create wealth is this - "spend more of your time studying math. Go into debt to pay for college and spend four years paying for your own job training. Then you might live as well as your parents did, who did not have to do these things (or who would live better than you ever will by doing these things."

Ultimately an economic system built on this has too many self-contradictions. Once you drain all the spare money from the average worker, no one has any money to buy the things these companies make. They can go into debt, but that just kicks the can down the road and makes the ultimate crash work.

In fact Sam Altman's business, Green Dot, is predicated on this new reality. Poor people don't have the credit to get credit cards, so they go to Green Dot and get charged exorbinant amounts of money. His business is one of the heaviest into the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.