I think the answer to the author's question "So how did inequality establish and grow without the cloak of law and the shield of organised state power?" is, one group at a time, either by agreement or at the pointy end of a weapon.<p>Humans got to live in low density, low complexity [1], high equality societies - until their neighbours came and conquered them. Because they had grain and soldiers. Or <i>more</i> grain and soldiers. That's how you get "elites".<p>[Of course, I am being reductive and silly, accuracy would be much more complex, there are lots of different stories and it has been happening all through history, but I believe the above is directionally accurate].<p>Centralisation and control are, historically speaking, pre-requisites for scaling your society in terms of population, production and civilisational complexity. The groups of people that did this mostly acquired, conquered or eliminated groups that didn't.<p>The author is proposing that, now that we have these giant, complex, specialised societies, somehow millions of people could co-ordinate to eliminate the current "elites". I don't think we have the social technology at the moment for people to organise that (and keep society running) without leaders. But the minute you start appointing leaders in your revolution... you are starting down the path of just replacing one set of elites with another.<p>[1] I don't mean this pejoratively, I just mean relatively low degree of occupational specialisation.
> Our particular species of humans has been around for about 300,000 years and, best as we can tell, for about 290,000 of those years we lived materially poorer but much more equal lives.<p>Part of why inequality thrives is that it is tolerated, in turn because it has been the outcome of systems that produce far greater material wealth.<p>But also, I'm not accustomed to hearing the term "human history" applied to times before the agricultural revolution. That's "prehistory".
Nothing shocking in here, but a nice anthropological summary.<p>I also like the concept that there were always ambitious humans, but forager cultures had measures to restrain them, whereas modern culture empowers them.
I guess the idea is that due to the lack of wealth we were more equal?<p>That just seems like lack of opportunity rather than anything particularly noteworthy about the situation.<p>>after 290,000 years of living without anyone having the power to tell us what to do<p>This seems unlikely, humans love their structure / religion and etc. 290k years is a long time to point to any convincing evidence of absence..