There’s a common thread tying together the
most disruptive revolutions of human history, and it has some scientists
worried about the United States. In those revolutions,
conflict largely boiled down to pervasive economic inequality. On Wednesday, a study in
Nature,
showing how and when those first divisions between rich and poor began,
suggests not only that history has always repeated itself but also that
it’s bound to do so again — and perhaps sooner than we think.
In the largest
study
of its kind, a team of scientists from Washington State University and
13 other institutions examined the factors leading to economic
inequality throughout all of human history and noticed some worrying
trends. Using a well-established score of inequality called the
Gini coefficient,
which gives perfect, egalitarian societies a score of 0 and
high-inequality societies a 1, they showed that civilization tends to
move toward inequality as some people gain the means to make others
relatively poor — and employ it. Coupled with what researchers already
know about inequality leading to social instability, the study does not
bode well for the state of the world today.
“We
could be concerned in the United States, that if Ginis get too high, we
could be inviting revolution, or we could be inviting state collapse.
There’s only a few things that are going to decrease our Ginis
dramatically,” said
Tim Kohler, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and a professor of
archaeology and evolutionary anthropology in a
statement.
Kohler and his team had their work cut out for them, as studying
inequality before the age of global wealth reports is not a
straightforward task. It’s one thing to measure modern day economic
inequality using measures of individual net worth, but those kind of
metrics aren’t available for, say, hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo
during the Paleolithic. To surmount this obstacle, the researchers
decided to use house size as a catch-all proxy for wealth, then examined
the makeup of societies from prehistoric times to modern day using data
from 63 archaeological digs
Overall, they found that human societies started off fairly equal, with
the hunter-gatherer societies consistently getting Gini scores around
.17. The divide between rich and poor really began once humans started
to domesticate plants and
animals
and switch to farming-based societies. Learning to till the land meant
introducing the concept of land ownership, and inevitably, some people
ended up as landless peasants. Furthermore, because these societies no
longer lived as nomads, it became easier to accumulate wealth (like
land) and pass it down from generation to generation.
The Gini scores got higher as farming societies got bigger. The small
scale “horticultural” farmers had a median Gini of .27, and larger-scale
“agricultural” societies moved up to .35. This pattern continued until,
oddly, humans moved into the New World — the Americas. Then, over time,
the researchers saw that Gini scores kept rising in Old World Eurasia
but actually hit a plateau in the Americas. The researchers think this
plateau happened because there were fewer draft animals, like horse and
water buffalo, in the New World, making it harder for new agricultural
societies to expand and cultivate more land.
Overall, the highest-ever historical Gini the researchers found was that
of the ancient Old World (think Patrician Rome), which got a score of
.59. While the degrees of inequality experienced by historical societies
are quite high, the researchers note, they’re nowhere near as high as
the Gini scores we’re seeing now.
A global report from Credit Suisse showed that modern humans are
continuing the trends set by our predecessors: Now, the report showed,
half of the world’s wealth really does belong to a
super-rich one percent,
and the gap is only growing. Historically, Kohler says in his
statement, there’s only so much inequality a society can sustain before
it reaches a tipping point. Among the many known effects of inequality
on a society are social unrest, a decrease in
health,
increased violence, and decreased solidarity. Unfortunately, Kohler
points out, humans have never been especially good at decreasing
inequality peacefully — historically, the only effective methods for
doing so are plague, massive warfare, or revolution.
Read more: Societies Are Headed Toward Revolution, Suggests Inequality Study | Inver
![Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic appeared in court the receive the verdict [Peter Dejong/Reuters]](http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2017/11/22/3446c4a006884f8a96fcebf2639408a4_18.jpg "Ratko Mladic sentenced to life in prison for genocide")
