This makes me remember a passage I read in Nexus by Mark Buchanan (good book, read it!), where someone did an experiment to try to find the root of "the rich ge

This makes me remember a passage I read in Nexus by Mark Buchanan (good book, read it!), where someone did an experiment to try to find the root of "the rich get richer". They construct a simulation of an economy, seed the participants in it with a random amount of money, and let it run for "a long time". They end up with a distrubution of wealth that is very similar to what we see in the real world. The moral of the story: random chance will create the structure we're seeing in real life; being rich isn't proof that you're "better" than everyone else (supply your own definition of good), it's just as or more likely that you happened to be at the right place at the right time.