Who Has the Money, and Why?

With all this talk of the 99% and so for, I've been telling my students that the 1% that has the money doesn't deserve it.

Here I'll try to come to terms with this notion.

Who deserves what, and why?

I got a little inheritance from my mother. She got it from hers, who after becoming a widow married an older man of comfortable means.

In what sense do I "deserve" the money?

I was given a good hand, compared to most Mexicans.

I even got a scholarship, with  Mexican tax money, to work on my Ph.D. degree, at the Physics Department of UCSB.

I have a better education level than most Mexicans. Do I deserve that?

Somehow these questions are sounding hollower, and hollower; at least coming from me.

I just saw Paul Krugman in a Q&A session with NYT readers, together with Joe Nocera, Carmen Reinhart, and Tom Friedman. Paul is smart, but nothing he said will take us out, right now, from the mess we inherited.

Does Carlos Slim Helú deserves to be the richest man on Earth?

I guess I am not going very far with this line of questioning. Say; I prove a Theorem that Carlos Slim money should come to me on the basis of me having a graduate degree from UCSB, and he only a Civil Engineering one from UNAM.

Who will give me that money after I prove the Theorem?

Hogwash, Stuff and Nonsense.  If Paul Krugman, and me are smart. We each have to change the world, more than we have so far.

I am in a nasty mood right now. My family doesn't have the money we need. Even worse, no Nobel Prize quality work coming from this head, and this keyboard, anytime soon. At least Paul already has his!

Oh well.

Carlos Slim has the money, for no good reason I can understand. I have my hypothesis ... here we go again.