From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Tue Feb 05 2002 - 12:09:18 MST
T0Morrow@aol.com wrote:
>
> In a message dated 2/3/02 10:12:11 PM, phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu writes, in
> relevant part:
>
> >Does the ability to earn money really vary by a
> >factor of a million from person to person, in their own right? How much
> >of that variance is from the person, and how much from the position in
> >society they happen to occupy, which any non-moron could exploit? If a
> >lot comes from the position (no one would say it all does, but a lot
> >might), then we could contemplate a society with fewer bottlenecks to be
> >occupied by lottery. (Or more but less lucrative ones.)
>
> Plainly, societal infrastructure plays a necessary but not sufficient role in
> creating large inequalities in wealth. Among hunter-gatherers, even someone
> twice as smart, strong, and liked as his peers will not own billions more in
> assets than his peers.
>
> Beyond that, I'm at a loss for hard measures of the relative influence of
> chance, innate ability, acquired virtues, and societal infrastructure in
> creating disparities in wealth. Perhaps social scientists can measure such
> things; I cannot say, as it is not my field of study. But I wax skeptical.
I have been listening, of late, to financial advisor Suze Ormon's CDs on
smart personal finance. She says that a law of finance is that money is
attracted to respect. People who treat money with respect attract more
of it, and those who do not repel it.
Certainly if the lowly masses continue to disrespect money by believing
in stupid communist fantasies, they will continue to repel money in
their daily lives, and that money will continue to be attracted most,
like interstellar gasses to massive star formations and black holes, to
individuals who demonstrate in their every act and statement their high
respect for the proper treatment of money.
In this way, you can apply a sort of gravitation law to the behavior of
money. Most people are minor asteroidal fragments or little chunks of
interstellar ice and dust. Some people coalesce into large asteroids and
comets. Still others form into protoplanets and terrestrial planets and
moons. Only a few become jovian planets and stars...
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