The supposed 'inevitability' of wealth distribution bothers me. I was thinking from the perspective of Self Organised Criticality. But using the SOC sand-piles as a metaphor, surely we can interfere with the 'natural' erosion of the slope, either by encouraging many small corrections, or by creating barriers that divert the erosion away from identified areas? We're not able to stop the reversion to a critical state, but we are able to influence local eddies, and reduce the chance of being hit by medium size corrections.

And then on another tack, I think it was '6 degrees of seperation' that also made this point about the skewedness of distribution being inevitable. He used an example, (through the fog of my brain), that simply the dominance of a feature in a terrain meant that anything thrown at the terrain would be more likely to stick to the dominant feature, so it would inevitably grow faster than other features

But surely such a feature can be premature, and rewarded to the detrimant of the collective. An example would be where a newly designed and regulated form of economic affirmative action intended to correct inequality leads to the fast emergence of a new small elite that is able to entrench itself to the detriment of the other potantial beneficiaries and the larger collective. The consequences are unintended, and the policy and regulations clearly need to be changed.

At it's most cynical, at least you'll be able to create a new elite every time you tweak the rules to mitigate against the unintented consequences. Is that redistribution?

Doesn't ethics have to come into it? We need to collectively interfere in an ongoing attempt to maintain sufficient consensus

Perhaps the world is moving toward a leveling of services, instead of income? Writing from the US, I would care much less about my relative income if when I became sick I knew I would have access to health care, if when I had children I knew they would have as much education as they could responsibly engage, and when I got old or unable to work I knew I could live with a decent dignity despite the fluctuations of the capital markets.

Having said that I do think an important part of a modern society's dialogue is the degree of wealth inequality that is optimal for both fostering innovation and providing hope for a better future thus minimizing societal unrest. As the US de-suburbanizes over the next few decades perhaps there is an opening for this dialogue.

For instance, here in rural New England, back in the day, farmers never really wanted to get rich – that was something city people worried about. It's not that they were poor, but their wealth – as measured by them – was greater when living the rural life. Wealth inequality didn't matter much to them. Middle-class suburbia acculturated people to equate wealth with money, and now people think food comes from stores.

Anthony and Michael, really liked your takes on this thought. I didn't mean to make it seem inevitable, but was thinking that it is a property of a system which isn't effectively addressed the current public discussion. Another thought for Michael, the notion of the services is interesting if you swap the term services for resources. In West's article he basically noted that services/resources would be exhausted if not for innovation given the exponential features of social complexity. The challenge is that the research seemed to point to the inevitability of arriving a point of "continuous innovation" or catastrophic collapse more here...