The wishful, romantic, naive, but false and often repeated narrative of socialists/marxists: Long ago society lived in harmony and egalitarian before the introduction of private property!
It is the usual demagoguery to paint in black and white (here poor v. rich)!
This article claims that wealth inequality stayed constant for long periods of time in the distant past and in more recent times, but at at a higher level. Nice hypothesis!
What about the widening of the middle class and how their lives improved?
This nutty professor even claims a "culture of aggressive egalitarianism" prevailed among hunter and gatherers into the Neolithicum!
I bet even as long ago as the stone age, stone tools may not have been shared equally among the members of a clan. Maybe food or clothing or sleeping accommodations etc. were also not shared equally and so on. There were always some individuals more greedy and/or more capable than others.
"Five millennia ago, wealth inequality — which had stayed roughly constant for thousands of years — exploded. It has stayed constant, albeit much higher, ever since.
“It’s really amazing,” says SFI Professor Samuel Bowles. “There was a period of a thousand years where wealth inequality doubled across a wide range of societies.”
One factor, Bowles and Bocconi University economic historian Mattia Fochesato write in a paper recently published in the Journal of Economic Literature, was the ox-drawn plow. But while that drove the rise in wealth inequality, the pair argue, it took major political and cultural shifts to sustain higher inequality in the face of egalitarian pressures — including the threat of armed revolt. ..."
From the abstract:
"We survey archaeological evidence suggesting that among hunter-gatherers and farmers in Neolithic western Eurasia (11,700 to 5,300 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. Archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that a culture of aggressive egalitarianism may have thwarted the emergence of enduring wealth inequality until the Late Neolithic when new farming technologies raised the value of material wealth relative to labor and a concentration of elite power in early proto-states (and eventually the exploitation of enslaved labor) provided the political and economic conditions for heightened wealth inequalities to endure. "
The Origins of Enduring Economic Inequality (no public access)
The origins of enduring economic inequality (82 pages, preprint?, open access)
Don't blame the ox you fool!
