Usury

Just one of the reasons.

The other mathematical reason is gambler's ruin. A person with larger pot by chance or design can gamble riskier investment much longer and can diversify it more.

Poorer people play a martingale, rich people play a multi-armed bandit. The less of a backstop in the society, the bigger the difference in outcomes.

Rich play with armies and even if they lose they are well off. Poor play as soldiers and have nothing, not even their life, when they lose.

>>If you want to know why wealth tends to concentrate over time, followed by a collapse, this is it.

Hi, do you mind to elaborate this a bit? I do not understand why before we have concentration and collapse later.

My understanding is that you are wrong. At least in the United States it had a dual metal standard and use that to provoke inflation.

Ignoring before the Fed, we have

https://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com/2011/03/100-years-...

It's very difficult, in my recollection of Graeber's 5,000 Years of "Debt"[0], to find a period of time "before fiat currency," during which "loaning someone money" was even possible. As I recall, what we recognize as currency has been, throughout most of history, minted exclusively by states in order to furnish armies. Before that, what passes for currency doesn't, largely, function in any way analogous to our use, today.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

Nobody wants to talk about usury because the concept is an old timey superstition that went away after the Reformation or Vatican 2, according to tastes.

Also, it's how the elites extract surplus value from the economy, and they let just enough of the top 20% in on a much smaller bit of the grift that most people who matter can't conceive of it being morally wrong.