[...] it is easy for all the participants in the economy to convince themselves that their participation is what matters, that they are the authentic creators of value, that their effort is what ought to be rewarded most handsomely. And everyone has a point. But while we can rely on economics to do some of the work of sorting out who deserves what, we are kidding ourselves if we think the invisible hand can be trusted to handle the whole job. Left alone, the invisible hand is simply the thudding fist of the powerful. [...]

[...] The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn't rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

That is not a radical statement. People take what they can take, and it is only the interplay of countervailing forces and the tolerance of the masses that limits that impulse--that works to create institutions that limit that impulse.

[...] People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can them capture for himself.

[...] Is there any reasonable story available which explains how it is that poverty in developing countries, or in the ghettos of disadvantage in rich countries, is a necessary part of the system that provides us with smartphones and luxury cars and enriches a relative handful of executives and financiers? Is it really the case that one can't be got rid of without threatening the system that provides for us the other?

Of course not. The worst inequities of industrial history were never a necessary accompaniment to the march towards greater prosperity. [...]

But we should also realize that those societies do not belong to us. If we are lucky enough to find ourselves within them, we can argue credibly that we are contributing to them and therefore deserve a share of the benefits that flow from them. But the fact that we are lucky enough to be within them and contributing to them does not confer on us the exclusive right to such a position. If anything, it confers on us the responsibility to try and make the society as robust as possible, so that its membership can be extended to as many people as possible. No one deserves to be poor. No one deserves to be arbitrarily rich. Rich societies can find ways to justify their great wealth relative to others: their members can tell themselves stories about the great things they did that others could not have done that made them wealthy beyond imagination. Alternatively, they could recognize the wild contingency of their wealth, cultivate human empathy, and do what they can to extend the wealth of humans to everyone.