How a 5000 -year -old technology, policy and culture have led to modern wealth inequalities

There are five millennia, inequalities of wealth – which had been roughly constant for thousands of years – explored. He has remained constant, although much higher, since.

“It’s really incredible,” said Professor Sfi Samuel Bowles. “There was a thousand years when the inequalities of wealth have doubled on a wide range of societies.”

A factor, the economic historian of Bowles and Bocconi University, Mattia RochiSato, write in a Recently published document in the Journal of Economic Literaturewas the plow driven by the beef. But while this led to the increase in inequality of wealth, according to the couple, it took major political and cultural changes to maintain higher inequalities in the face of egalitarian pressures, including the threat of armed revolt.

For years, many researchers have estimated that agriculture itself has led to inequalities of wealth: agriculture allows people to store food for the future and to abandon the sharing of the community as a form of insurance, thus accumulating a kind of wealth. The puzzle is that the inequalities of wealth have taken off at least at least 5,000 years after the dawn of agriculture.

Before this time, people occasionally accumulated material wealth, but the new study presents proof that these cases have often been welcomed by “aggressive egalitarianism”, in particular in certain cases the use of violence to counter the inequality of wealth.

What has changed is the plow driven by oxen, an overview suggested for the first time in the work of Roysato, Bowles, and SFI external professor and archaeologist of Oxford Amy Bogaard.

This technology “converted the economy of that which was limited by the quantity of labor you could make to an element that was motivated by the quantity of land or material wealth that you could order,” says Bowles. “Consider the beef and plows like a Neolithic robot, moving the work and enriching their owners.”

In other words, the determining key factor family income displaced with relatively also distributed lines – length and competence – for material possessions which could be accumulated and transmitted to Future generationsthus supporting vast inequalities.

This economic transformation was accompanied by a cultural displacement of aggressive egalitarianism towards individualism and the emergence of the first proto states. These proto-states provided public property But also claimed a monopoly on the use of violence, helping to concentrate power and strengthen the new status quo.

“The origin of endurance inequality of wealth demanded both the change in technology and the state, “with cultural changesSaid Bowles.

The new study is the result of nearly two decades of work by SFI researchers and their colleagues who have gathered ideas for economics, archeology, archaeobotanic, etc.

The ideas of the study resonate today. AI and other work device technologies have the potential to increase inequalities again. But if that happens, said Bowles, is a political question: it depends on whether the economic elites can focus their political power and their property and their control of new working economy technologies.