There is an air of defensiveness to pg's original essay. It's saying "Hey, we are producing extreme inequality, but we're doing it by actually making valuable s

There is an air of defensiveness to pg's original essay. It's saying "Hey, we are producing extreme inequality, but we're doing it by actually making valuable stuff, so don't blame us!" And his solutions, which are generally ignored by the critics, make sense. But, as this article points out, he missed a core assumption - in his defensiveness about the productive inequality of Silicon Valley, he missed that the vast majority of the growth in inequality comes from nasty rent-seeking behavior. He acknowledged that such behavior is dishonest and kind of criminal, but he failed to acknowledge its scope. So the WP article has a fair criticism here. Unfortunately, the WP article also couches its fair criticism in the usual point-missing, inflammatory finger-pointing crap that most critiques of his essay have done. It could have risen above on the strength of its facts, but it chose the mud. Sigh.