Throughout human history someone being wealthy almost always meant someone else being exploited - from obvious chattel slavery to less obvious trading networks

That these exploitations often created empires that created institutions that themselves promoted higher efficiency in trade (like protecting from piracy and brigands) was a good thing. But trade, whilst always a win win, can be and for empires always was structured to win more towards the centre of the empire

This structural inequality is found everywhere. In strong and weak forms. A weak form is commonly known - wealthy people "cheat" to get their kids into MIT or Harvard, (or even being wealthy is a cheat) and then the networks formed their help with access to resources later (see VC funds two kids from MIT with idea for ...)

Strong examples of structural inequality are found in say the Russian Federations army where the head of the armed forces has multiple houses and yachts and oddly the conscripts are fighting on a dollar a day and often come from rural impoverished areas.

None of this your fault.

But we choose our structures, our institutions in the same way we choose our built environments. If we have Houston-like 20 lane highways with nose to nose traffic when we could have please t walkable cities with electric trams and steeet cafes then yeah, none of that is the fault of the people in the traffic jams.

But it was a choice. A choice made in these cases in a democracy.

And we just assume that if people were given informed choices they would not have gone "hell yeah 20 lane highway".

So the solution to bad structures, bad institutions, bad urban environments
is democracy. Is people making their voices heard and choices being made that are the informed choices people want (I assume most people will vote for "more equal")

Yet the next step is a leap of faith. Faith in democracy
and human intelligence

The networks will work to keep themselves in power and are a centralising force (gather more power to self)

but human wealth now depends not on control of land but intelligent use of excess energy and political stability

So does someone have wealth today? That's nice. Is the structure of how they got it a fair one? Is it right that someone who has capital today should continue to direct the use of that capital? Is it fair that a founder gets 80% of the shares but the first engineer gets 1%? I know it was a trade but capitalism is structured like the above empires were structured - to benefit the capital city.

Is that the only way to structure the allocation of resources in the planet?

The use of coal and oil has seen an outrageous chnage in human wealth. Fantastic. And the conditions for that industrial revolution are so weird that tinkering with it seems so risky. but the two world wars showed that it is a fairly robust revolution- and if we want to get out from the oil / CO2 trap and into a sustainable future we need to overcome bad resource allocation - it's time to try new options. Private Companies are undemocratic and control about 50% of western wealth, is a hierarchy like that the best way to allocate and motivate resources? Most western nations are highly centralised - does that make for th best local
decisions?

There are options