ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2023
The economics of early inequality.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Multidisciplinary analyses and ancient DNA reveal social inequality and mobility in the Central Plains during the Eastern Zhou period in China.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Toward an evolutionary ecology of (in)equality.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
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
We examine three recent frameworks that attempt to explain early inequality. One explanation involves the emergence of dense and predictable resource patches in the Holocene, together with differential asset accumulation and inheritance by individuals or households. In this view, agriculture and pastoralism led to greater inequality because farmland and animal herds were readily inherited. Another explanation involves the distinction between ideal free and ideal despotic population distributions, together with factors that could trigger a transition from the former to the latter. We offer a third framework based on economic concepts. In our view, inequality initially arose across locations (
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