The Origins of Inequality

[alanjjohnstone]

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/15/564376795/from-cattle-to-capital-how-agriculture-bred-ancient-inequality

Increasing inequality arrived with agriculture. When people started growing more crops, settling down and building cities, the rich usually got much richer, compared to the poor. That's what most anthropologists expected. But Kohler's data revealed something else as well. "After that period, for some reason, wealth gets much more unequally distributed in the Old World, Europe and Asia, than it does in the New World," he says. "This was a total surprise."

 "Think about it," he says. "You know that animals like cows, oxen, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, all are Old World domesticates." Through an accident of geography and evolution, they simply didn't exist in the Americas before Columbus arrived. So it was only in the Old World that ancient farmers could use oxen to plow more fields, expand production, and get richer, compared to poorer farmers who could not afford those animals. They were accumulating wealth, what economists call capital — a term that Kohler says is no accident. "Our word 'capital' comes from the same proto- Indo-European root as our word for 'cattle' does," he says.

Also here

http://gearsofbiz.com/how-taming-cows-and-horses-sparked-inequality-across-the-ancient-world/201609

[ALB]

The report in today's Times highlights another aspect of this study:

Quote:

The researchers used the sizes of houses. Working out the economics of past civilisations, particularly prehistorical ones, is extremely difficult, but houses are something we do know about. "You look at a big mansion, it's probably someone pretty wealthy," Professor Smith said. "You look at a little shack, it's probably not."Using the ratio of the smallest homes to the largest, he and his colleagues pro­duced estimates of inequality which they published in the journal Nature.(…) The paper converted the house size ratios into the gini coefficient, a meas­ure used today in which "0" means no inequality and "1" means the highest possible inequality.Hunter-gatherer societies had a gini coefficient of about 0.17, an egalitarianism not now matched by any country. When people shifted to growing crops, it grew, to 0.35. When Rome was at its height it was 0.48. In Britain today, it stands an about 0.7.

By coincidence this is exactly the same example that Marx famously used in Wage Labour and Capital to make the point that increasing wages did not make workers consider themselves better off if the profits of capitalists increased even more:

Quote:

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.

Having said that, it appears that most people are not that worried about increased inequality as long as their own consumption increases. Could that be one reason why, contrary to Marx's expectation, capitalism has survived so long? 

[rodshaw]

The I'm-all-right-jack attude of a large section of workers is a real problem for the socialist movement. Despite what we say about the basic division between worker and capitalist, many members of the working class consider themselves to have done pretty well out of the system and see no need to change it. In fact some regard the better-off socialists as two-faced, as if they aren't entitled to want a better world just because they have done ok.

[Author]

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