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The way I see it, political power grabs are simply a continuation of wealth accumulation. Money is limited in its value, but it's the best universal proxy for value that we have so people often equate them. It's better to see money as path to things that are actually valuable, such as food, water, shelter, and the ability to provide these for others or to hire them to do things. If you think about wealth in this abstracted sense, a notch away from money, then you can see how basic trading dynamics might apply. Yakovenko modelled the trading dynamics in a perfect game of chance (coin flips determine winners and losers). Something interesting emerged. http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/7/075032 What it shows is that if everyone starts with the same amount of money, after a bit of random trading, their wealth is normally distributed (this is obvious if you are familiar with the binomial distribution). A few people are doing well, a few are doing badly, and most people are around where they started. As the trading continues though, it turns into a power curve where most people are doing badly and a few are taking everything. Its the same thing that happens when a rich man sits down at a poor man's poker table. He can keep putting him all in on every good hand and he only needs to be right maybe 1 in ten times and he wins everything. There's a runaeay effect after you hit a certain point. Of course, things are a lot messier at this higher level interpretation of wealth since its harder to attach numbers to wealth in the form of political power, good health, and other factors which have a compounding effect (good health and political power help you make more money, but they cost money, so there's a feedback loop, but you xan equate them for simplicity). This is why people complain about a shrinking middle class. The good news is that human life is messy we often allow our relationships to balance things out. The bad news is that we have gotten better and better at sterilizing our social and physical environments so the past might not predict what's coming next. |