This is the blog of Ant Miller, senior research manager and dilettante geek at large at the BBC.
I wail moan and cuss about the challenges and fun to be found here.
These are my personal opinions, and not those of my employer. Or anyone else here for that matter.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

A big question

Struck me the other day walking in the sunshine;

Why should the decendants of the best gamblers get to consume the majority of the worlds resources?

It sounds extraordinary when put like that doesn't it? But in essence this is the situation that capitlism leads us to. Gamble on life, and win, and you get the lions share of the goodies. Inheritance of material wealth has taken a fairly simple principle with real benefits and turned it into an incredibly skewed social model, and much of the principle of modern government and statehood in the west at least is predicated on preserving just those inherited wealth mechanisms.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If it were not for the risk takers who usurped kings and tyrants we would all be living in a stable medieval community happy with our lot. America and the New World would still be in the stone age and science would not have the risk taking genius of Newton, Bell, Fleming etc.

We might be happier though - except for the benefits of modern dentistry and drugs.

In addition you have only identified the sucessful gamblers. For every winner there have to be many more losers.