Who is wealthy ?

The source of all wealth is the amount of energy it is able to control. So wealth can be thought of in terms of energy - the larger the energy you are able to invoke, the wealthier you are. In spite of its huge debts , the US is the wealthiest nation on earth because it is able to harness the greatest energy.

All source of Earth's energy is our Sun. And the earth receives just a million billionth of the Sun's energy. The Sun acts as the ultimate lender , allowing people on earth to hoard a little or a lot of its energy as wealth. Bill Gates and Larry Page might have a minute percentage of the sun's energy hoarded up as a few billion dollars, and a person like me might have an even insignificant percent of sun's energy as my bank balance. The Sun if switched off, can just wipe the accumulated wealth of all earth in a very short while. So the wealthiest as well as the poorest on earth are dependent on constant loan from the sun.

Looked this way, the inequalities do not appear so glaring.

Rather than fight for a small slice the pie ( a million billionth of Sun's energy), Science has been steadily trying to increase the size of the pie. Scientists talk about Type 1 , Type 2 and Type 3 civilizations which harness the energy output of a Planet, Star and a galaxy respectively. A type 2 extra terrestrial civilization, for instance can build a spherical shell around its star, completely harvesting all its energy, thus making its citizens vastly wealthier than the wealthiest citizens of Earth.

Thus, the poorest individual of a type 2 civilization would be vastly richer than Bill Gates. Not very surprising since the average American today is far richer than an African tribal chief.