Because workers don't receive what they put into the system in terms of effort. Profit must be made, which makes the workers unequal compared to capitalists that make the profit. Name one billionaire where their pay-to-effort ratio is worth that of say, a cleaner.

I think most "added value" is not worth as much as is made out when contrasted the amount of profit earned by shareholders.

I agree, complete equality is hardly possible but we're talking about vast wealth discrepancies which prop up the global capitalist system.

Genuinely surprised so many seemed to have missed my point here. Not sure if it's because it came across like I was supporting a conservative (I wasn't, just saying that their ideologies will always require some degree of inequality in wealth/happiness) or that there are more neolibrals on this sub than I assumed.

Don’t be afraid to learn about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

If they get too expensive, another exploited country is needed.

That's my point.

Western countries had the fastest growth during those two decades due to a post-war boom. ie. Workers were glad they were no longer being sent to die and the future looked bright.

The study you linked isn't conclusive and even mentions in the abstract that different measures could yield different results.

The results it found might not hold true everywhere because it uses data from places where poverty is very high, meaning that the conclusions may not be as broadly applicable as they might seem at first glance.

This source, which I found searching for "inequality gdp growth", explores that further: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-59858-6_19

There are other issues with it surrounding data quality as there often are with economic studies and as such they shouldn't be held in the same regard as scientific ones.

But more fundamentally, capitalism works by paying workers less than the value of what they produce, thus extracting surplus value from their labour. That is what I was getting at with my original point.