I drafted the beginning of two replies but they were quickly becoming sermons. It's a big issue. "lower net inequality is robustly correlated with faster growth." Faster growth isn't necessarily a sign of welfare. It is mostly a sign that the economy is small, because small things can grow faster than large things. The Top Ten list is not exactly crowded with tourist hotspots: Libya, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Turks and Caicos Islands, Niger, Turkmenistan, Panama, Macau, Cote d'Ivoire I was going to say that people want to live in places with high inequality, because that is where there is the most economic activity and wealth. But that list is not very promising either. Haiti is high on all the measures of inequality. It makes sense that large relative differences in some measure does not say much about absolute values of that measure. Therefore I think we should focus on the welfare of the poor, measured in absolute terms, not compared to extremely wealthy people who happen to live nearby.