He's saying that inequality is the wrong thing to optimize against. Rather than attacking inequality writ large, it's best to attack the negative causes of it.

He's saying that inequality is the wrong thing to optimize against. Rather than attacking inequality writ large, it's best to attack the negative causes of it. The author ignores this, and says that economic inequality is bad, full stop. PG does a much better job than the author of making his point. Consider the case of global warming. It's caused by CO2. But lots of things produce CO2. Some, like people and farm animals, are good. Others, like coal, are less so. Attacking CO2 production as a whole, rather than the CO2 production we can do without, is likely to lead us to make poor decisions about what sorts of CO2 we limit. Creation of wealth is good. Concentration of wealth can result from the creation thereof. That's not a bad thing. Fighting economic inequality by limiting the creation of wealth would be asinine. That's what PG was saying, which the author went out of his way to not acknowledge.