I tend to agree with Gates. For example, I am middle class; one of my good buddies is a member of the super rich class (his family owns a professional sports franchise among other things). Our lives are more quantitatively different than qualitatively different. We both get up and drive to professional jobs, he just makes more than me and gets there in his choice of several nice cars. We both have houses; his is just a lot bigger than mine, etc, etc. There aren't many things that he does in his everyday life that differ from mine or most people's. The real qualitative differences in wealth are between the very poor and everyone else. If you have to worry about a cholera outbreak in your village, because your drinking water comes from a polluted stream, then you have a qualitatively different life than our experience.
Couldn't agree more. I can whine all day about how there's a clear difference between a son of rich parents paying for a college and a son of middle class parents trying to do the same, but at the end of the day neither of us has cholera.The real qualitative differences in wealth are between the very poor and everyone else.