There is an important psychic dimension to the concentration of wealth that has profound consequences for our current predicament that I wanted to get at. Here is where you start to see the differences of quality with additions in quantity cropping up. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
First a logging analogy: picking up a couple of branches in your arm is one thing. Even picking up a heavier log: yeah you're using more muscle power, but for the most part it can be done safely with the right amount of effort. Something changes when you start to manipulate things heavier than yourself. When we set about to fell a large tree, or move around an 800 pound log to get it onto the mill, this process is very different from simply manipulating tools with muscle power to achieve the desired result.
Because you know that when heavy things get to moving, it becomes more and more difficult for the interested individual to affect their trajectory. So you really have to think about what you are doing, and plan on where the heavy things are going, and take special care in that process, and move very slowly and deliberately. The quality of the work changes dramatically with the increased mass involved: you shift over to an abundance of caution and technique and longer term planning.
Take manipulating an 800 pound log. A whole host of considerations comes into play that didn't before: what is the slope its on like? How much force to exert before it gets moving and how much should it move? Where do you stand? Where are you going? What is downslope? Upslope? And so on.
And then of course it should be added that when all that mass is moving too much and too fast, the set of considerations shifts in the other direction. There is no time to think and very little that you do is going to change the situation. Instincts take over and the objective is simply to not be crushed.
With that in mind, let's talk about money. Say you lend someone a couple of bucks to go grab themselves a sandwich or something. You're not going to sweat that transaction too much. Depending on the nature of the relationship, the repayment of that amount may have a certain meaning, but you're not gonna spend the energy worrying over that amount. But then say you lend someone a thousand? A couple thousand? Or you invest 10, or 100 thousand? And then beyond that? The amount goes up and the very quality of the stakes goes up.
The same is the case with commodities: say you literally spill a glass of milk. There's a reason for the common admonition to not cry over such things. Of course with environment that calculus changes: a cup of spilt milk has a different meaning in a depression, but nevertheless. The kid going out and wrapping the family Jaguar around a tree has a very different set of considerations, and a house lost in a fire even more so, and so on.
When you get at a certain scale, the movement of millions and billions say, you have the integrity of countless lives and institutions and possibly even nations connected to such things. The fewer people in ever greater control of these movements could be anywhere from completely oblivious to such stakes or excruciatingly aware, or anywhere in between, but the effect of the success and failure of such movements is universal enough and readily perceivable.
There's a reason for that supposed paradox of thrift you see in so many really wealthy people, who have everything and are so much more personally stingy with the dispensation of their resources. A lifetime of hoarding and manipulating wealth happens for a reason, and of course changes you; not so easy to reverse either. Given certain quantities and stakes, the very culture changes.
Which is what you see in cultures in the construction industry and in agriculture and in logging. Where people are working with much more dangerous conditions, such as being closest to the manipulation of heavy materials and high energy processes, you get the accompanying high stress and hair trigger stress responses and strict cultures of skill and competency and the accompanying regard and trust that comes with such things (not to mention the contempt and derision in the face of the lack these things).
In the case of extreme wealth inequality, the changes are universal: a severe stress and desperation in those who have nothing, and a rapacious need for more and profound fear of loss in those who have everything, which makes for a very brittle and supercritical social structure, needless to say. Though of course it took a terrible rupture in trust and social consciousness to provide the momentum for such extreme wealth accumulation. The changes in quantity follow the changes in quality, and vice versa.
