Bruce M. Boghosian - Is Inequality Inevitable?

 Wealth naturally trickles up in free-market economies, model suggests

But poor people already start out with a big disadvantage as it's expensive to be poor: The oligarchs can borrow money at extremely low interest rates, and the poor often pay more for things because they can only buy in small amounts. 

The Right always go on any 'hard work' and people getting what they deserve, and I have countered this argument in many ways, but this research paper could be the most powerful counter argument yet. 

Wealth inequality is escalating in many countries at an alarming rate, with the U.S. arguably having the highest inequality in the developed world.

A remarkably simple model of wealth distribution developed by physicists and mathematicians can reproduce inequality in a range of countries with unprecedented accuracy.

Surprisingly, several mathematical models of free-market economies display features of complex macroscopic physical systems such as ferromagnets, including phase transitions, symmetry breaking and duality.

Does this mean that poorer agents never win or that richer agents never lose? Certainly not. Once again, the setup resembles a casino—you win some and you lose some, but the longer you stay in the casino, the more likely you are to lose. The free market is essentially a casino that you can never leave. When the trickle of wealth described earlier, flowing from poor to rich in each transaction, is multiplied by 7.7 billion people in the world conducting countless transactions every year, the trickle becomes a torrent. Inequality inevitably grows more pronounced because of the collective effects of enormous numbers of seemingly innocuous but subtly biased transactions.

Scientific American 

Is Inequality Inevitable?