For some innate, almost gravitational reason, money always flows to the top, in terms of concentration of wealth and influence.
It doesn't sink or tag the bottom for much longer before it invariably makes its way upwards again and consolidate into fewer hands.
Of course in this context, money more or less means currency.
I'm not sure if it's a coincidence that the term 'currency' comes from the Latin 'currere', meaning 'to run' or 'to flow'.
There's a current in large bodies of water such as oceans and rivers.
And as an element, money seems more related to water than any other element.
Maybe, the wind comes close, given its invisible force and its ability to gather immense momentum and thereby moving vast resources.
Unlike water however, money doesn't naturally seek equilibrium. More often than not, it pools and compounds where it already exists.
I think it was during the 17th century when it was discovered that the principles of compound interest and investment could turn modest sums into vast fortunes, accelerating this upward movement of capital.
It looks to me that this was the formalization of a powerful financial engine and not merely a philosophical insight born from Albert Einstein as it's commonly misattributed nowadays.
From a philosophical point of view, I find this moment historically pivotal.
Capital could be deployed to generate more capital, almost independently of labor or direct production.
This became or say the "mathematical blueprint" if you like, for money making more money.
One characteristic of the industrial age that always seems stark to me is on how it solidified this dynamic.
When the concentration of capital is a primary driver of power and production, it's less of a meritocratic system than an aristocracy of capital, which often comes at the expense of equitable distribution. Cause and effects.
The Industrial Age did took this 17th-century insight and scaled it globally.
Factories, railroads, and vast corporations required immense capital, and those who commanded it could amass even more, creating empires while millions toiled in conditions that offered little upward mobility.
A mental image that comes to mind is of a colossal apex supported by an ever-wider, less-resourced base.
The subtle and often overlooked consequence of living within such a system is accounting for the human element.
When the current consistently pulls capital upwards, what does it mean for those caught in its undertow? Why strive relentlessly when the game feels inherently rigged?
Arguably, the human psyche wasn't designed for such persistent upstream swimming or rather maybe it hasn't adjusted yet to this brave new reality.
We evolved in small communities where resources, even though sometimes scarce, circulated more organically.
Today's economic currents create a kind of existential exhaustion.
Forget the " just work harder and you'll eventually succeed" camp, the constant awareness that the system itself is designed to carry your efforts elsewhere is like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom, except the hole grows larger the more you pour.
On the other side of the spectrum, we humans are remarkably adaptive creatures.
In response to these currents, we've developed curious forms of resistance such as alternative currencies and sub economies that attempt to create eddies and counter-currents.
These efforts rarely reverse the main flow, but they can create small pools of different possibility, perhaps, economic tide pools, if you will, where different rules might briefly apply.
Bitcoin emerged from the 2008 financial crisis as an explicit attempt to create money that couldn't be controlled by traditional banking systems.
For a time, it did seem to create exactly the kind of economic tide pool we're describing, early adopters could participate in a financial system with radically different rules.
Yet even here, we see the old patterns reasserting themselves, such as bitcoin mining consolidating into industrial operations.
Whether these tide pools can grow large enough to meaningfully redirect the greater current remains an open question.
I think their very existence suggests that the probability of that happening is not zero, although the odds are long from a practical pov.
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