I assume you don't know who Robert Sapolsky is in the parent comment. "how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer" is the observation of someone who is above

I assume you don't know who Robert Sapolsky is in the parent comment. "how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer" is the observation of someone who is above you in the hierarchy of A (A is whatever measure you want, usually its financial wealth or social status). This involuntary comparison allows you to derive your relative position, and this is a biologically stressful activity when you are toward the bottom of the hierarchy. This constant reflexive update is not great for people in a highly unequal society because its a constant stress inducer and has direct physical and mental health implications that bleed over into things like the political sphere. Both "pointy" hierarchies and flattened hierarchies are bad. Flattened hierarchies are when we are all equal, and thus society stagnates. Pointy hierarchies are the traditional kings at the top, serfs at the bottom. These inevitably collapse at some point for multitudes of reasons. There is probably a happy, more stable medium. Societies that are becoming unequal have a gradient trending toward the pointy hierarchy state. Poverty is a specific threshold of material wealth, and is related, but ultimately orthogonal to the discussion.