The fact that technology brings both bounty and spread, and brings more of both over time, leads to an important question: Since there’s so much bounty, should we be concerned about the spread? In other words, we might consider rising inequality less of a problem if people at the bottom are also seeing their lives improve thanks to technology.

Income inequality and other measures of spread are increasing, but not everyone is convinced this is a problem. Some observers advance what we will call the ‘strong bounty’ argument, which essentially says that a focus on spread is misleading and inappropriate, since bounty is the more important phenomenon and exists even at the bottom of the spread. This argument acknowledges that highly skilled workers are pulling away from the rest—and that superstars are pulling so far away as to be out of sight—but then essentially asks, “So what? As long as all people’s economic lives are getting better, why should we be concerned if some are getting a lot better?” As Harvard economist Greg Mankiw has argued, the enormous income earned by the “one percent” is not necessarily a problem if it reflects the just deserts of people who are creating value for everyone else.2

Capitalist economic systems work in part because they provide strong incentives to innovators: if your offering succeeds in the marketplace, you’ll reap at least some of the financial rewards. And if your offering succeeds like crazy, the rewards can be huge. When these incentives are working well (and not doing things like providing huge, risk-free rewards to people taking inappropriate risks within the financial system), the benefits can be both large and broad: innovators improve the lives of many people whose purchases, in aggregate, make the innovator rich. Everyone benefits, even though not all benefits are the same.

The high-tech industry offers many examples of this happy phenomenon in action. Entrepreneurs create devices, websites, apps, and other goods and services that we value. We buy and use them in large numbers, and the entrepreneurs enjoy great financial success. This is not a dysfunctional pattern; it’s a beneficial one. As economist Larry Summers put it, “suppose the United States had 30 more people like Steve Jobs—. . . . [W]e do need to recognize that a component of this inequality is the other side of successful entrepreneurship; that is surely something we want to encourage.”3