It is the ownership of small, resource-rich areas—and the ease of bestowing them on descendants—that fosters inequality, rather than agriculture itself.
Take the best spot when possible, protect it, and leave it to your kids :)
...It is the ownership of small, resource-rich areas—and the ease of bestowing them on descendants—that fosters inequality, rather than agriculture itself.
...When times are good—for example in a booming modern economy like China (see p. 832)—people seem more tolerant of inequality.
As agricultural societies developed, so did more elaborate hierarchies, evolving into hereditary chiefdoms and eventually kingdoms. In these complex societies, chiefs and kings came up with new strategies for amassing surpluses and concentrating wealth and power. Many chiefs created economic bottlenecks in trade routes, noted economic anthropologist Timothy Earle of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in a 2011 paper in Social Evolution & History. These leaders then collected payments from merchants for safe passage and used the surplus to finance specialized warriors to defend and extend their rule. Material culture also became ever more sophisticated, multiplying into innumerable kinds of highly concentrated and easily transmitted forms of wealth, from copper ingots to gold jewelry. All of these trends led to ever greater levels of inequality.
They found that only material forms of wealth, such as land and livestock valued by farmers, were readily handed down to children. “I can pass on my cows to my sons, but if I have some phenotypic trait that accounts for my income, like being physically strong, it is less likely that I will pass that on to my offspring,” says Bowles, whose team reported their findings in a paper in Science in 2009 and a series of papers in Current Anthropology in 2010.
By the time of the Romans, a yawning gap separated rich from poor. Historian Walter Scheidel of Stanford University in California and biblical studies scholar Steven Friesen of the University of Texas, Austin, used historical records to calculate the Gini coefficient—a standard measure of inequality in modern societies—for the Roman Empire. The coefficient ranges from 0, in which everyone shares equally, to 1, in which one wealthy person has everything and the rest have nothing. The Roman Empire's Gini for income was about 0.43, the pair reported in 2009 in The Journal of Roman Studies—close to the 0.49 for pretax income in the United States in 2010. In fact, Rome's super-rich had wealth on the scale of today's billionaires. The income of the wealthy Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus equaled about $1 billion per year today, reported economist Branko Milanovic, of the Luxembourg Income Study Center of the City University of New York in New York City, and his colleagues in a working paper in 2007; that's not quite up to Bill Gates's more than $2 billion per year.
