Dean. You continue to surprise me with the depth of your knowledge in this area.
You are correct that, from a historical perspective, a very very few control all the wealth and power. The rest have always lived in near starvation and abject poverty: much worse that what passes for poverty these days in North America.
Empires and civilizations have always imploded on themselves once they exhausted the resources available to them. Communist Russia is just the most recent example and it was not a particularly bad implosion because it was more an inability to effectively use the resources available.
