" Superior abilities... are the source of everything that is great and useful. Reduce everything to equality and you will bring everything to a standstill.

One sometimes hears the same argument expressed today in the idea that the new information economy will allow the most talented individuals to increase their productivity many times over.

The plain fact is that this argument is often used to justify extreme inequalities and to defend the privileges of the winners without much consideration for the losers, much less for the facts, and without any real effort to verify whether this very convenient principle can actually explain the changes we observe. "

― Thomas Piketty , Capital in the Twenty-First Century