Historical Inequality

A study published in Nature by lead author Timothy Kohler, Regents professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology at Washington State University, finds "that wealth disparities generally increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale".

The study gathered data from 63 archaeological sites or groups of sites. Comparing house sizes within each site, researchers assigned Gini coefficients.

The researchers found that hunter-gatherer societies typically had low wealth disparities, with a median Gini of 0.17  Their mobility would make it hard to accumulate wealth, let alone pass it on to subsequent generations. Horticulturalists--small-scale, low-intensity farmers--had a median Gini of 0.27  Larger scale agricultural societies had a median Gini of 0.35

The researchers' models put the highest Ginis in the ancient Old World at 0.59, close to that of contemporary Greece's 0.56 and Spain's 0.58  It is well short of China's 0.73 and the United States 0.80

Conor Lynch characterizes the conclusion of the study as he argues that capitalism is not worth saving.

[W]e are currently living in one of the most unequal periods in human history (going back to the Neolithic age), and history indicates that greater levels of inequality lead to greater social instability and unrest.