I don't ever mind sermons but they usually inspire me to do research and I just don't have time this weekend.

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:

Pretty crowded with resources-extraction economies, although I'm curious about Mongolia -- according to Wikipedia Mongolia's mining sector has it ready to become the next Tiger economy or whatever. Didn't know that.

Of course, what we want isn't an absolute top ten, it's a list of how the countries with large inequality are growing compared to the countries with "small" inequality. As I understand it that's what they attempted to do at the IMF.

More importantly -- what about the conclusion that wealth redistribution has essentially no proven negative side effects in the long term?

I'm not pro- or anti- on this issue (generally I don't feel like I know enough about economics to tell what's good and what's bad), but it seems to me that they're saying we could "focus on the welfare of the poor" by focusing on inequality and not have a net negative effect on the economy.