Yes. The bigger the gap becomes, the more the economy will be geared towards serving the needs of the wealthy instead of regular people. If a trillionaire wants a mansion on Pluto or an AI to serve him, a large workforce and a lot of resources will be put towards that goal, making those resources and work more expensive to use for other goals. Your healthcare and shelter has to compete for resources and their prices will rise as the demand for overlapping resources goes up due to the huge purchasing power of the wealthy.

What we produce in this economic system is decided by money. If 90% of all money is in the hands of the wealthy, then 90% of all we make with out limited workforce and resources will be decided by them.

Those meals would most likely help a lot of kids become healthy productive members of society. That money would be saved by the families of those kids and used in other parts of the economy. A lot of the cost would therefore be returned. The money spent of this war is producing only destruction.

> The diversity of perspective and opinion

I don't think this is what social media provides. With social media people are able to choose one perspective and seem to just immerse themselves in a bubble so that they only get exposed to the view of their choice.

What they do there is not enough. All decisions should be made using some form of direct democracy, otherwise you leave an opening for power concentration again, which will lead to the same problems we're now facing. We can't make all decisions using referendums.

Could be, if we can come up with efficient ways to govern using direct democracy that lead to better decisions than what we now have. I don't see much work being done to come up with such a system, though.