Its almost certainly true that well-implemented policies of reducing income inequality would fix some of these problems, but that completely ignores negative side effects. The negative side effects are what makes that type of high level policy making bad.
I don't think it's possible to effectively address the bad consequences without limiting inequality. It certainly doesn't seem possible right now, in the U.S. (do you expect to see publicly financed political campaigns any time soon?) If pg wants to be taken seriously he needs to make a serious proposal about how we can have tons of economic inequality without the seemingly inevitable bad consequences of it. And I note that some of the proposals you mention (e.g. lots of public funding for education) are merely redistribution in disguise and do in effect take money from the rich and give it to the poor. Truthfully, pg doesn't care about the consequences of inequality because they don't affect him or his buddies, so he likes to pretend that some pie-in-the-sky scheme can magically make everything ok without actually changing the status quo.
The real problem might just as well be obesity, teenage births, imprisonment, educational performance or drug use.
If inequality is just one of the symptoms and not the real devil, then eradicating inequality would probably be rather destructive. Just like eradicating drug use seems to be destructive, because the underlying cause is mental problems.
Income redistribution is a valid goal of taxation -- not because the government needs to tax the rich to fund the poor (the government can fund whatever it wants since it issues the currency) but because tax policy can reduce the types of extreme inequality that cause instability.
When people become wildly rich, they often misattribute that success to their own hard work, ignoring the social conditions that made their success possible, and the role that "good fortune" plays in all such success stories. This talk by Michael Lewis is an excellent summary of why this "meritocratic mindset" is dangerous:
So yes, we should definitely address income inequality directly through tax policy.
We should also address the root causes of poverty, which are primarily lack of government will to pursue full employment since the Friedman/monetarist view of macro economics won out over the Keynsian economic theories during the supply side inflation caused by the oil shocks in the 1970s.
Obviously, nothing with multiple disparate causes and effects is bad per se. But inequality does have at least one negative effect, which is that it distracts the attention of institutions (government, press, academia) towards serving and protecting the interests of the wealthy.
In my view the rhetoric of "attacking" inequality is overblown, even if I'm guilty of having used it myself. Instead, let's just say that some form of redistribution -- to use a broad term -- is not an "attack" per se, but simply a practical way to maintain a decent society.
Arguably the latter is a symptom of the former. So there are broadly 2 approaches to tackle the problem - reduce inequality, or use draconian measures to control the people who got the wrong end of the inequality stick.
It's not clear that reducing income inequality is bad, please explain. The arguments against eliminating income inequality rest on the idea that people won't do a hard or bad job if it didn't pay more than other easier or nicer jobs. While there are very likely jobs that people wouldn't do for a small multiplier on some ideal base pay for some ideal good job. Increasing marginal tax rates, which is the actual way that actual people suggest we handle income inequality, doesn't actually put a cap on pay.
Aside from the huge problems correlated with income inequality for which evidence and reasoning are readily available if you look, there's a basic problem with the idea that something like inequality could be a net good despite what people tend to think... it's that because the majority of people, who are on the losing side of inequality, despise inequality and that is already leading to huge political ruptures, populism, depression, demoralizing feelings of injustice, etc etc etc. (There are related basic problems with focusing only on "metrics".)
You'd think, but as it turns out, inequality has strong negative effects to the point that even the rich in an inequal country do worse than the more poor in a more equal country.
Inequality is not a bad thing. It's actually necessary to have inequality of outcomes otherwise you have no incentives for improvement. An example of a society with very low inequality is old-school communism where most people are equally poor - it's clearly not a good thing.
What is bad is extreme inequality where a lot of people are in poverty. I think most people would agree that poverty is a bad thing that we should try to reduce.
It's quite possible for poverty to decrease and inequality to increase at the same time. The old "a rising tide lifts all boats" analogy. It just means everyone is doing better but the wealthy are seeing more relative gains. If the whole pie is growing, it's easy to see how everyone could get more pie even if it's not distributed equally.
edit If you disagree please state why. Drive by downvotes do not convince me that I'm mistaken, they just lower my opinion of the average HN user.
Plenty. Inequality of power, inequality of influence, inequality of opportunities, inequality of access to education, housing, healthcare. All of that is wrong, and can be corrected.
I remember listening to a Ted talk where the speaker basically said, Get income inequality in check by whatever means and most of your problems go away.
Fair enough. Yes, PG is arguing that reducing income inequality is bad.
He did not address the hypothetical notion that there is a goldilocks zone of 'just enough' inequality, either side of which is suboptimal (due to the 'systemic destabilization' or some other deleterious effect of inequality having a dampening effect on productivity that exceeds inequality's positive effects on productivity after some level), and none of the critiques brought up such an argument either, so I didn't feel the need to address that.
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