Evolution, accumulation, and corruption

Looking at modern society and economics from a systems evolutionary perspective I wonder if the status quo in terms of inequality is not actually beneficial from a systems perspective.

A person uses several critical capacities to ride the storm of exogenous events through life: knowledge, skills and experience, values and behaviors, imagination and decision-making. There will be some component of those achieving life success (healthy, wealthy and wise leading to survival and propagation) who are simply lucky. The greater majority of those achieving success though, owing to the simple volume of exogenous events, will have achieved success via superior knowledge, skills and experience, values and behaviors, imagination and decision-making.

Continued success depends specifically on some form of useful forecasting, i.e. recognizing empirical patterns and cause-and-effect relationships that can be used to accurately forecast future events/scenarios. Successful forecasting permits better preparation and therefore greater probability of continued or increased success. Small capital accumulation permits small, tactical near-term forecasting and risk taking. Large amounts of capital permit larger, strategic, longer-term forecasting (with greater returns if accurate and well prepared for.)

Assuming that life success is not simply random but is purposefully achievable, then you definitely want more capital distributed to those with the greater display of repeated and continuing life success. The challenge of course is that there is a great deal of noise in the system with effective forecasters statistically likely to have bad patches.

What you don't want to have happen is for all capital to be equally divided. Those that have poor knowledge, skills and experience, values and behaviors, imagination and decision-making and/or are unable to make useful forecasts that can be productively acted upon will simply dissipate the scarce capital.

All that seems logical but it then raises the issue of how to ensure that capital accumulation occurs on true merit/effectiveness and not through corruption, collusion, rent-seeking or regulatory capture. An efficient economy (rewards going to those that are effective) has to be corralled by structures that preclude corruption, collusion, rent-seeking or regulatory capture. Ay, there's the rub. Too many people mistakenly wish to reduce the accumulation rather than prevent the corruption.