They say time is money. Indeed it is so, particularly if you spend all your time to acquire money. But money changes hand. So there is a continual process of exchange of money. Money is spent for your subsistence, surplus money is spent to enhance your quality of living and further to contribute to your saving.

Saving is important as it is to raise your rank in the society. Even further, money is invested and it multiplies. So money is added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. The ability of multiplication takes you up the ladder.

Money is ofcourse fugitive. The amount of money earned by you tries to escape your hand and lands up in other people’s coffer. It is happening every moment. Consumers are always letting it go in lieu of procuring some goods. So the ability to hold money is crucial.

The economists will say that the money has velocity and that means it has direction too. There is voltality; the evaporation that has a role to play. Left naturally in a society, the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. The Govt. intervenes and imposes tax. Then the money gets its colour: black or white.

Inflation hits hard to the poor and middle class. It is so because they have to buy things for their subsistence with a higher price. So their saving gets compressed and the extra bit of money gets deposited in the account of the rich, the manufacturers.

More than a century ago an Italian engineer, Vilfredo Pareto observed a peculiar thing. Irrespective of any society and time, it was noticed that, the distribution in money assumes a peculiar form. The tail ends (rich people) follow a universal character (mathematically a power law) which is still largely a mystery. The interpretation turns out to be that merely a handful of minority has an access to the lion’s share of the total wealth/ money in a society or in a country. This is popularly known as 80-20 rule. A 20% of the people hold 80% of the total wealth/ money. In a capitalist country like America, it is even 90-10 or 97-03 or so on. But the overall character is same everywhere even it was just the case during communist regime in Russia as it has been claimed. So the inequality or disparity is a hard fact and there is a tendency of it to increase all the time.

Let us now consider two propositions by a sociologist (John Angle):

Proposition #1: Where people are able to produce a surplus, some of the surplus would be fugitive and would leave the possession of the people who produce it.

Proposition #2: Wealth confers on those who possess it the ability to extract from others. So netting out each person’s ability to do this in a general competition for surplus wealth, the rich tend to take surplus away from the poor.

So if you are in the competetion, time is always running out!

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