Chapter 6

"But the larger philosophical debate will rage on: If the pie is growing, how much should we care about the pieces?" In part of chapter 6, Wheelan describes the issue of income inequality between rich and poor. While economic growth makes the whole pie bigger and the poor are increasingly better off, the gap between the rich and poor is also growing. Some studies would say that "we should care about how much pie the poor are getting, not how much pie they are getting relative to Bill Gates," but others show that relative wealth has an effect on people's incentives and could have a negative effect on economic growth. The philosophical question which cannot be completely answered by economics is then that of how much we should care about the gap between rich and poor and how much we should do to lessen it.
The central focus of the chapter was on the extreme importance of human capital. The better education and skills a person has, the more productive they are and the higher chance they have of adapting to economic change. Wheelan illuminates the high value of education and how it works to grow the whole economic pie by increasing human capital and productivity. The more opportunities people have to gain education and skills, the more they are likely to be productive and the less likely they are to be impoverished. Education is instrumental in decreasing poverty as people with more knowledge and skills are less likely to be poor.