New study reveals wealth inequality was never inevitable

Huh, you only have to play one game of Monopoly to understand how wealth inequality becomes a thing. And even more so if you enter the game after a few rounds have already been played.

&gt; By comparing the variability in house sizes, scientists could compare the degree of inequality in each society and how it related to population size and political complexity.<p>I suspect the study is interesting but that rather undermines the conclusions as relevant in the modern era. The wealth inequality is <i>because</i> house construction isn&#x27;t a particularly important store of wealth. It is quite difficult to consume a billion dollars worth of house construction; that is skyscraper or Great Pyramid of Giza territory.<p>You&#x27;d miss most of a contemporary billionaire&#x27;s wealth if you looked mainly at their housing.

Ooglr, Gnurgh and Borrr are three cavemen, each of them setting out on their path towards success.<p>Ooglr gets himself a club, hunts down a few ratty creatures and thinks &quot;that&#x27;ll do for today, it is nice weather and I&#x27;d rather be oogling the cave girls than chasing those stupid ratty creatures so now that I have enough for tonight I&#x27;ll stop chasing and start oogling&quot;. The next day he chases down a few more ratty creatures, calls it a day once he got himself a few and continued oogling. For some reason those girls did not seem to return his longing gaze, could they not recognise him for the successful hunter-of-ratty-creatures that he was?<p>Gnurgh sees things differently. He finds himself a good-sized elk shoolder blade and starts digging a pit. When the pit is deep enough he covers it with branches and leaves and waits until his intended target - an aurochs - stumbles into the pit. You see, he scouted out aurochs trails until he found a spot where the ground looked good for digging a pit while the beasts could not avoid the spot where he intended to dig his pit. He also prepared a number of spears to dispatch whatever happened to stumble into his pit as well as some flint knives to cut his prey up into slivers. Did I mention the drying racks he made to dry the meat? Well, now I did. Knowing that meat spoils quite fast he started cutting up the oversized cow and worked through the night and the next night upon which he had himself a supply of meat enough to feed a family through the winter (it was a big aurochs). He had placed one of his drying racks next to his fire pit and found out the meat from that rack was more tasty than that from the racks further away from the fire and made a mental note to repeat that the next time with more racks. All the time Gnurgh was hard at work he was watched by some comely cave girls and before long he <i>did</i> have a family to feed through the winter.<p>Borrr did not like chasing things with clubs. He did not like digging pits either. He half-heartedly tried to catch himself a fish in the stream but the water was cold and the fish slippery so it got away and was probably laughing at him somewhere. Besides, why would he bother? He could just go to one of Gnurgh&#x27;s drying racks and pilfer some meat? Then, once sated he&#x27;d lie in wait for one of those girls.<p>Is wealth inequality really inevitable?

When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.

&gt; Instead, it seems to be a consequence of political choices and governance structures.<p>These are all human constructs and the missing variable is greed, so likely inequality is inevitable once the human condition variables are accounted for

In pre-historic times everyone was equally poor so there was no wealth inequality.<p>The tribes in the Andaman Islands also have very low wealth inequality, but all they own are bows and arrows and huts.

All those societies studied were poorer than even the least developed nations today. We know it&#x27;s possible to have wealth equality with poverty; Mao-era China showed this. The solution is simple: make it hard to accumulate wealth, so nobody has much wealth. The question is whether it&#x27;s possible to have a wealthy society with no wealth equality, and empirically there&#x27;s zero evidence this is possible.

The problem with these &quot;house size studies&quot; is that they ignore the nomadic people who lived in the surrounding areas and were (by definition), not housed.<p>How many nomadics were there, and how much wealth did they have?<p>This question would probably impact the conclusion that there was less wealth inequality back then.

All we have to do to have wealth equality is to overcome pride, greed, envy, and sloth.<p>The median wealth may be much lower as a result (since a lot of the things that have made us wealthy as the species are driven by pride, greed, and envy) but we may be happier as a people...

Wealth inequality is only as inevitable as the Pareto Principle. Does anyone know of examples where that has been successfully resisted for long? I imagine that it takes a great deal of sustained effort and invasive control.

Yeah as mentioned in the article, if governed strong enough there will be less wealth inequality.<p>Problem being that in the modern day governing power and wealth are pretty much 1:1, and wealthy people don’t have any other principles than wealth, they don’t have morals or religious beliefs that go above wealth for them. So they won’t want to make everyone more financially equal.

I don&#x27;t get how this is useful, just because it might not be inevitable doesn&#x27;t stop it being a reality now.<p>Also, house size? What a weird metric.

&quot;reveals&quot; -&gt; &quot;argues&quot;

The trick is not have &quot;wealth&quot; (ie property ownership&#x2F;rights). Societies that were nomadic with low&#x2F;no property ownership culture did not have wealth inequality since there wasn&#x27;t that much &quot;wealth&quot; to have. They had their hierarchies but those were weak, more akin to the kind of hierarchies you have in families (&quot;everyone listens to grandma&quot; kind of hierarchy). Wealth inequality is obviously synthetic (and this study is kind of silly), since you need a governing body to maintain property rights (along with creating what today are the most valuable legal ownership structures, like intellectual property). A corporation, a mortgage, a deed, equity, all the defining elements of wealth, are exclusively legal constructs created&#x2F;administered by governments. The wealth of every wealthy person you can think of is based on their rights to property, not the property itself (i.e stocks, deeds, trademarks, copyrights etc.). This requires a very elaborate infrastructure to maintain and a culture to support it. Wealth isn&#x27;t a given and actually is very easily destroyed (when governments are toppled or property rights are taken away--Communist rebellions of the twentieth century are a good example).

I think that house size is a metric of convenience because it is archeologically simple. But there are modern examples of societies where house size doesn&#x27;t correlate with wealth and wealth was stored in other kinds of assets, material or immaterial.<p>E.g. in the communist eastern block, living quarters were quite standardized, and while the very highest levels of society had special arrangements, a professor might have lived in the same quarters as a factory worker. The differences were in the &quot;job extras&quot; such as personal drivers and cars, travel permits, spots on the waiting list for goods and services and social prestige that translated to influence.<p>Certain early modern European societies, especially protestant ones, also frowned upon overt displays of wealth through bigger and more ostentatious housing. However, that might be detectable archeologically when using build quality as a metric.<p>Cities like Amsterdam also had very peculiar systems of allotting and taxing building spaces, thereby leading to the well-known equal-sized and narrow houses.

&gt; Instead, it seems to be a consequence of political choices and governance structures.<p>When was that ever controversial?<p>The nonstrawman version of the inevitability of wealth inequality is that governance structures which make everyone equal do not succeed.<p>The governance structures that make possible wealth inequality are themselves inevitable.

Too little inequality means there is nothing to strive for, the ambitious won’t have much reward to work for.<p>Too much inequality means too few participants in the economic decision making process which leads to instability (i.e. the mad king phenomenon). We are getting closer to the point of instability now, as we reach higher levels of inequality.