eli5: How did society form to give the greatest benefits are to very small portions of the worlds population a way that be , and has it always been like this.
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Are you actually 5?
Please rephrase the question, this doesn’t make any sense…
There are people who have money and power. The people with money and power structure society to benefit the people with money and power.
Many societies are democratic republics, where the people vote in leaders. The voted in leaders continue to structure society to benefit the people with money and power, as they are now in that group. They distract the people by telling them that this is for the best, or that the other political groups are bad because they will take away your cherished somethingorother.
Even if you reorganized society and distributed wealth equally, you’ll find it’ll end up with it aligning in the same way over the course of time because certain people who are more competent and driven will eventually rise up by working towards their goals through a combination of hard work and better luck. There’s no insidious agenda of people at the top trying to keep it that way. Some figure out a way to make it to the top of the competence hierarchy while others aren’t cut out for it and the ones who get more resources will utilize it to generate more wealth and influence.
Unfortunately this isn’t really a question that can be ELI5ed. There’s no single law of social or historical development that applies across the world and across history and that explains inequality (or at least, not one that’s widely agreed on).
It’s possible to talk about how significant inequality first developed in societies, and I think there are similarities in this process around the world. But from there societies travel along many different paths.
At a global level there’s a big difference between “rich” countries and “poor” countries, which is another, complicated, story in itself.
Geography is a huge factor. The United States has more navigable waterways that the rest of the world combined. Shipping by water is the cheapest method of shipping by a long shot. It also has one of the largest swaths of farmland in the world. It also has natural deep water ports. And vast deposits of oil, gas, and coal.
The United States is wealthy because it’s where the natural resources are. Whoever lived in the United States during the industrial revolution was going to end up being the world superpower.
think of what you mean by benefit. lets say benefit means resources. lets say the average person has 10 resources. average value of resources is equal to total amount of resources divided equally among all the people. some people have more than 10, fewer have 20, fewer have 30, even fewer have 40 and so it goes all the way up. There is a small probability that someone gets 1000 resources. however with many people small chance events are bound to happen. the point is, the farther away from the average value the fewer people have that value. No matter how much we raise the average value, there will always be a few people that win the lottery.
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