Marx and nature

I was watching a course on modern western history:   A History of the Modern Western World

 

One of the lectures is on the radical response to the misery caused by the industrial revolution -- in particular, the writings of Marx and Engles.

 

In the industrial societies, a few were very rich, while many were miserably poor.   M&E claimed that this is neither natural or fair.

 

It may not be fair, but I would claim that it is natural.    In effect, I have already claimed by, by saying there seems to be a centripetal attraction to power.

 

There are two things that I think give support to this claim -- observation and logic.  The observation is that it appears that in relatively large, complex societies, it appears that a small fraction of the population tends to hold most of the wealth and most of the power.   I don't actually have a list of all complex societies, with a ranking of wealth vs percent of the population holding it, but in the examples I do know of, one percent of the population holding about 30% of the wealth seems to be pretty typical.   Something that happens spontaneously, over and over again, can reasonably be considered the effect of some kind of natural force.

 

The other support is logic, e.g. the Pareto principle.  It is easier for the rich to make money, therefore those who are rich will tend to become richer, whether they make new wealth de novo (actually from natural resources) or take it from others.   In the latter case, the divide widens more quickly, but even in the former, there can still be a growing gap.

 

Of course, even if it is natural for the rich to be very rich, that doesn't mean it is fair or good or that we are stuck with it.   However, while it may be possible and from our point of view, good on the whole, to create an environment that is artificial in many ways, it is also true that the law of unintended consequences remains in force.  It may be good to build a society with a more equal division of wealth, but it is probably something better done with subtle tools and attention to the effects of the tools, rather than with some kind of blunt instrument.

 

BTW, wikipedia says of the Pareto principle:  [It was named] after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population

and adds ...

Pareto noticed that 80% of Italy's wealth was owned by 20% of the population.^[4] He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.