It’s not just in our society and time, but in any civilization and age, being rich has always been considered an advantage over being poor. Wealth, whether you define it as having many possessions, the means of acquiring more possessions (money), or an income guaranteeing those conditions in the future, has always been considered a laudable goal. It is understood that wealth is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to secure happiness, but it is also accepted that it helps to have the former to achieve the latter. Wealth is a great aid in realizing security, comfort, power, and even self-actualization; even if it is conceded that it isn’t the only way, it is also obvious that it helps.

Wealth can be acquired by inheritance, crime, luck, and by hard work–that is, by efficiently contributing to society those things which society is willing to pay for. This is the paradigm which is currently accepted in our contemporary meritocracy. We feel the major means of acquiring wealth is to do something which the society wants or needs, and which it is willing to donate its wealth to you in order to get it, even if your contribution is only your labor. It is further assumed that the ability to do this is facilitated by such psychological attributes as intelligence, ambition, perserverance, industry, courage, creativity and all the other values our society holds in such high esteem. The corollary to this is that if you have wealth, you must also possess these characteristics. I hope to show below that this is not necessarily the case. I also believe that one other characteristic also plays a role: luck. It doesn’t matter how blessed you are with these virtues, getting hit by a meteor during surgery can definitely be a setback. And winning the lottery can be advantageous at times as well.

But luck, like all those other characteristics, is distributed randomly through the population, as well as through time in any one person. There are also smart people, dim people, and many in between, and it is safe to say that all those other virtues which lead to wealth are also randomly distributed through the population, as are height, weight, and the ability to metabolize some proteins. Some of us are better than others, and most of us are somewhere in between. Our ability to accumulate wealth must then also be randomly distributed throughout the population, there are a few of us that don’t have it, a few that have it in spades, and a vast middle ground with varying amounts of it. The ability for each individual may also vary as a function of time, but the integrated result for an entire population will still be randomly distributed. The statistical jargon for this is a normal distribution, which can be represented as the famous bell-shaped curve, with a small lower and high end and a big hump in the middle where the average individual is most likely to be located. Adding up all these characteristics will yield another bell-shaped curve, indicating the probability distribution of the sum of all of these virtues. Even if some of those characteristics I mentioned are not distributed normally, their sum should be, because variations in the individual contributions of each attribute will have a tendency to cancel out.

It can be argued that those human characteristics we identified above can also be self-generated, that is, we aren’t necessarily born courageous or lazy, but we can do something about it and change ourselves to be more or less so. Even intelligence can be cultivated and improved through education, and the effects of luck can certainly be mitigated through prudence and preparation and a good insurance policy. But the fact remains, some of us will do this more than others, and the ability to transcend our limitations will also be normally distributed through the population, whether it be an inborn attribute, a result of personal effort, a combination of effects or…just luck.

If we accept these assumptions, it must follow that the distribution of wealth in any society must also be normally distributed, since the ability to acquire it is distributed in that fashion. If it is not, then there is something wrong. Here is where we have the ability to test our assumptions with observation, and I don’t have to tell you that wealth is NOT distributed normally, the vast bulk of people in most human societies have been very poor, and the rich have been very few. Furthermore, the number of those in between is often lower than either of the two extremes. Most societies in history simply did not have a middle class. The curve is generally a huge peak at the low end which rapidly drops off as wealth, however we decide to define it, increases. In most human societies, the vast amount of the total resources have belonged to the few. At the very least, the amount of resources each individual controls increases very quickly to the right of the curve. The preceding two sentences do not say the same thing mathematically, the former refers to the fraction of total resources, the second addresses the amount of individual-owned resources, but the trends are the same in either case.

It is clear then, that for most human societies, wealth is not distributed in the same way that the ability to accumulate wealth is distributed. One of our two assumptions is incorrect; either the abilities to accumulate riches are not normally distributed, or that those virtues we identified earlier have little to do with the acquisition of wealth. Fortunately, historical examples allow us to probe these hypotheses by comparing different communities, and by studying how they evolve over time.

It is difficult to gather economic statistics through historiography or archaeological investigation, but we all have a general idea of how wealth is distributed in most historical examples: the poor vastly outnumber the rich, and the rich are very, very rich in comparison to the poor. It is also safe to conclude that in recent history, this profile has started to change, with the numbers of the poor decreasing and the middle classes growing in size, either through technological change or the introduction of increasingly democratic institutions. I also believe the introduction of capitalism has played a major role in this process of the redistribution of wealth. The bulge of the curve has moved to the right, and the tails at either end have become closer in both size and in the area under the curve. Nowhere do we have a perfect bell-shaped curve for distribution of wealth, but the improvements in recent history have been dramatic, and hopefully they are indicators of a trend that will continue into the future. What’s more, this trend suggests that the amount of wealth we control IS correlated with our intelligence, ambition, etc. and that the closer the curve progresses to a fully normal, bell-shaped distribution the more equitable it is and the more desirable it is. It also implies that societies should pursue policies which encourage this development, and that existing policies should constantly be reviewed to determine if they are enabling this result. Most important, it argues that reversal of these trends are to be viewed with alarm, and steps should be taken to determine why they are occurring and what can be done to prevent them. Perhaps a regression to a left-biased or poorly-skewed distribution is the result of unavoidable and uncontrollable economic circumstances, but it is nevertheless a dangerous development which demands scrutiny and explanation. We should never take it for granted and we should always be suspicious that it is a deliberately engineered event. A humane and economically democratic society is NOT one where the wealth is evenly distributed. Economic freedom which takes into account the natural distribution of talent in a population will inevitably lead to a normal (bell-shaped) distribution of wealth, not a flat one.

If the wealth of a society is not distributed normally, if the rich and the poor are not both in the minority, and those in the middle not in the majority, something is wrong: there is a fundamental inequity in that society. Not only should the group with intermediate wealth be the largest, it should also possess the greatest total assets, with both numbers and total assets dropping off as we consider both left (poor) and rich (right). Both the wealth distribution in the most economically humane communities suggest this, and the general trend of historical development as well. Human societies are not tuned machines, and it would be naive to expect mathematical symmetry in the wealth distribution for any civilization, but the general shape of that normal curve must be present if there is to be economic justice, and its shape and symmetry must always continue to approach that ideal if there is to be economic progress.

Anything else is evidence of there being something terribly wrong.