That doesn't make sense to me. If you give money to poorer people, it allows them to invest in themselves at a higher rate of return than you can achieve.
No; ten people accruing compound interest (for example) on $100 is not nearly as good as one person accruing compound interest on $1000, and then distributing the dividends. Why? Because fixed costs eat away the interest gains of the ten much more than the one.
Every system has friction. You have to concentrate power to overcome friction and get things done. We'd be knocking off the world's problems a lot faster if we could "focus fire" on them. Ten diseases that might each take a decade to cure with 1/10th the donation could be solved half the time or less if each disease got a year of all the donations. But charity is more about signalling your clever pet cause than global optimization of future world-states, so nobody will let go of their second-best (or, realistically, 897th-best) charity.
If it is indeed socially optimal to concentrate wealth, then we should advocate a regressive tax policy and encourage the poor to donate to the upper middle class.
Do you know of published research that supports this conclusion? I'm honestly curious.
