Wouldn’t reducing inequality also reduce the creativeness, invention and innovation on which progress depends?
Rather than stimulating innovation and progress, great inequality wastes the talents of a large proportion of the population. The evidence shows that it reduces children’s educational performance as well as reducing social mobility. Economic studies of the relationship between the extent of inequality and economic growth rates have mixed results: most suggest that greater equality is beneficial to growth but a few suggest the opposite. As a check on how inequality might affect creativeness and innovation, we have now looked at the relationship between inequality and the number of patents granted per head of population. There is a weak but statistically significant tendency for more equal societies to gain more patents per head than less equal ones.
