Previously I talked about wealth having certain effects on the concentration and disposal of power: namely that growing wealth raises living standards and thus the bar for maintaining legitimacy, as well as the ability of the populace to fight back and take power. Yes, given certain conditions, these things remain to be true, but the augmentation and movement of wealth has some very complicated and interesting effects, effects that can be contradictory, so we should go into this in more detail.
The historical record has shown that wealth accumulation - especially imperial wealth accumulation - can be just as traumatic in the long term as it is beneficial in the short term, and in certain cases, vice versa. What comes immediately to mind is the surge in wealth that the Roman Republic experienced after the Punic Wars: the opening up of new swathes of conquered land and resources, much of which were gobbled up by the wealthy actors left standing after so much of the fighting population was wiped out, accelerating that fatal dynamic in which the large estates absorbed more and more of the smallholder farms, which played a prominent role in the destruction of the Republic.
This internal process also gradually produced gradated generations of ruling elite accustomed to greater and greater levels of unearned wealth. Embedded within those generations were the fretting public intellectuals, concerned that traditional measures of virtue and "grit" were being eroded in the process. Every empire, after having become engorged on the spoils of its power, eventually enters what we often loosely call a "decadent" phase, with its intellectual critics complaining of a growing "softness" and "complacency.
Or what of external processes of wealth transfer? The Chinese would speak of the nomadic steppe peoples living closer to the trappings of settled society as "cooked" in contrast to the "uncooked" tribes further out and living deeper in the steppe wilds, less influenced by the effects of civilization. Dynamics within the steppe regions themselves would bear this out, with the stronger tribes emerging within the harshest cauldrons of the wilds and putting pressure on the settling tribes on the periphery, living closer to the settled societies, who were themselves fretting about their growing softness in being exposed to the effects of that settling, sending their youth back into the deeper wilds to renew those old faculties of self-sufficiency and war-making. Very similar dynamics were at play in the Germanic tribes interacting with the Roman Empire and with each other.
In general, no one actually enjoys living the harshest and most austere lifestyles which produce the hardiest warrior conquerors, and humanity tends to move away from the pain and towards the wealth and resources, while fretting about becoming "soft" all the while. But this rule doesn't just refer to a movement towards settling and civilizing and engaging in agriculture: many nomadic peoples, such as the Native American plains tribes, often reported back as some of the happiest cultures, and fought ferociously to maintain their lifestyles when they were threatened. Anyway, it always gets much more complicated the closer you look, and I'm veering off topic besides.
There is a temporal quality to the movement of wealth and the effects of that movement on culture and collective psychology as well. For example, these effects could be seen in the contrast between generations during the radical movements in the US in the 60's and 70's. You had the older generations of radicals who were formed in the cauldron of the World Wars, and who, exhausted after the sheer intensity and desperation of that historical period, were ready to rest upon the accumulated wealth that those massive efforts brought about, who in turn butted heads with the younger generation of radicals coming of age, who, fed on stories of the pursuit of the global pursuit of collective justice, were at the same time demoralized by the tide of accumulated wealth and the fear of softness that that tide entailed, and wanted to urgently do something about the injustices that remained, and then who eventually in turn wished to rest on their own accumulated wealth after the intensity of their own efforts.
These are broad generalizations, but you do see themes like this crop up in the accounts of activists trying to understand themselves and their own movements.
Perhaps one aspect that can be given more weight is the concurrent concentration of power, and how that power extracts and dispenses of the stores of wealth at its disposal. More recently, we can observe the effects of "hot money" in which advanced and mobile finance capital touches down in a developing country, effectively destroying its local economy under camouflage of a temporary boom, and then when that sugar rush inevitably crashes, the capital is withdrawn and the country with its trashed economy is abandoned to its fate.
Which raises the question of what modern financial wealth even is? That money can be so good and useful in global trade, and which at the same time can be used by the powerful to destroy and plunder the assets of weaker powers. Wealth is a multifaceted phenomenon after all: a siege engine takes a lot of time, effort, and resources for a human army to put together, and then that mobile "wealth" is rolled forth to take apart another army's urban stronghold brick by brick. For that matter, you can brain someone to death with that brick of bullion that could feed and clothe you, if you really wanted to.
To further complicate on the macro level, the modern global reach of capital, the closing of geographical frontiers, the fuller contemporary domination of settled society and the "Anthropocene" filling up of free land with productive enterprise or human habitation, all represent an epochal shift in how wealth concentrates and circulates historically, which makes up yet another dimension of the analysis to account for.
All of this is to say that there are very broad historical trends that can be traced out, and the effects and nature of accumulated and circulating wealth can be very generally understood in a certain way. But how that wealth moves over time, and how those effects are born out, can vary wildly in terms of the passage of time, geographical concentration, velocity, collective purpose, machinations of the powerful, transfers of power, and so on.
