ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2021
Pathways to social inequality.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
5 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
- Assessing neighborhoods, wealth differentials, and perceived inequality in preindustrial societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Inequalities between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians seen through the lens of oral health: time to change focus.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Toward an evolutionary ecology of (in)equality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The ecology of wealth inequality in animal societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social inequality is ubiquitous in contemporary human societies, and has deleterious social and ecological impacts. However, the factors that shape the emergence and maintenance of inequality remain widely debated. Here we conduct a global analysis of pathways to inequality by comparing 408 non-industrial societies in the anthropological record (described largely between 1860 and 1960) that vary in degree of inequality. We apply structural equation modelling to open-access environmental and ethnographic data and explore two alternative models varying in the links among factors proposed by prior literature, including environmental conditions, resource intensification, wealth transmission, population size and a well-documented form of inequality: social class hierarchies. We found support for a model in which the probability of social class hierarchies is associated directly with increases in population size, the propensity to use intensive agriculture and domesticated large mammals, unigeniture inheritance of real property and hereditary political succession. We suggest that influence of environmental variables on inequality is mediated by measures of resource intensification, which, in turn, may influence inequality directly or indirectly via effects on wealth transmission variables. Overall, we conclude that in our analysis a complex network of effects are associated with social class hierarchies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.