ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.)2020
The Marginal Utility of Inequality : A Global Examination across Ethnographic Societies.
Article in Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Modeling the rise and demise of Classic Maya cities: Climate, conflict, and economies of scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- 100 generations of wealth equality after the Neolithic transitions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Wealth inequality in the prehispanic northern US Southwest: from Malthus to Tyche.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The interdependence of relational and material wealth inequality in Pemba, Zanzibar.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Modelling the role of environmental circumscription in the evolution of inequality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Identifying key socioecological factors influencing the expression of egalitarianism and inequality among foragers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Validating the dual evolutionary foundations of political values in a US sample.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Ecological variation and institutionalized inequality in hunter-gatherer societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite decades of research, we still lack a clear explanation for the emergence and persistence of inequality. Here we propose and evaluate a marginal utility of inequality hypothesis that nominates circumscription and environmental heterogeneity as independent, necessary conditions for the emergence of intragroup material inequality. After coupling the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) with newly generated data from remote sensing, we test predictions derived from this hypothesis using a multivariate generalized additive model that accounts for spatial and historical dependence as well as subsistence mode. Our analyses show that the probability a society will be stratified increases significantly as a function of proxies of environmental heterogeneity and environmental circumscription. This supports the hypothesis that increasing environmental heterogeneity and circumscription drives the emergence and persistence of inequality among documented societies across the globe. We demonstrate how environmental heterogeneity and circumscription produce situations that limit individuals' options so that some may find it in their best interest to give up some autonomy for material gain, while others may find it in their best interest to give up some material resources for another individual's time or deference. These results support the marginal utility of inequality framework and enable future explorations of the ecological conditions that facilitate the emergence of intragroup inequality through time and across the globe.
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Registered trials
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