The origins of enduring economic equality
What is this research about and why did you do it?
We survey archaeological evidence suggesting that among hunter-gatherers and farmers in Neolithic western Eurasia (11,700 to5,300 years ago) elevated levels of wealth inequality occurred but were ephemeral and rare compared to the substantial enduring inequalities of the past five millennia. In response, we seek to understand not the de novo“ creation of inequality” but instead the processes by which substantial wealth differences could persist over long periods and why this occurred only at the end of the Neolithic, at least four millennia after the agricultural revolution.
How did you answer this question?
We created a data set of 185 estimates of inequality in material wealth for western Eurasia from the end of the Paleolithic almost twelve millennia ago to the end of the Roman Empire a millennium and a half ago (Figure1). The estimates are based on the size of dwellings, the size of storage areas (where these can be identified), landownership, and the value of goods buried with the dead. We studied cases in which early wealth inequality proved to be ephemeral rather than enduring, and to better understand both transient and persistent wealth inequality we developed a model of intergenerational wealth transmission and equilibrium long run inequality.
What did you find?
Archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that a culture of aggressive egalitarianism may have thwarted the emergence of enduring wealth inequality until the Late Neolithic, The new farming technologies raised the value of material wealth relative to labor converting previously labor-limited economies to land limited. And a concentration of elite power in early proto-states (and eventually the exploitation of enslaved labor) provided the political and economic conditions for the resulting heightened wealth inequalities to endure (Figure 2).
Figure 1. Inequality in material wealth in western Eurasia from the end of the Paleolithic to the Roman Empire. The upper dashed line is mean wealth inequality in a large set of modern economies in the year 2000. The lower dashed line is the mean of observations before 4000 BCE.
Figure 2. The origins of enduring economic inequality: Distribution of estimated wealth inequality in four technology/institution configurations before 525 CE. The pink bars, for example, give the frequency distribution of Gini coefficients for the economies classified as labor limited that were not governed by states with the mean Gini coefficient for that set of observations indicated by the vertical arrow above the bars.
What are the next steps in your agenda?
We have two further papers in process, one extending our data set to the year 2000 including an analysis of the “little divergence in Europe” and the second presenting methods for assessing the degree of uncertainty associated with each of the Gini coefficients, and their representation as probability distributions over likely values rather than point estimates.
Citation and related resources
Bowles,S. and M. Fochesato. 2024. "The origins of enduring economic inequality." Journal of Economic Literature, 62(4), 1475-1537.
