ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Labor, land, and the global dynamics of economic inequality.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. 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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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Accounting for uncertainty and bias in archaeological and historical evidence on wealth inequality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The emergence of urban scaling in Ancient Southwest Asia.PloS one · 2026Article
- Five thousand years of inequality in the Carpathian Basin.Science advances · 2025Article
- Introducing the Special Feature on housing differences and inequality over the very long term.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
- War both reduced and increased inequality over the past ten thousand years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- 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
- Assessing grand narratives of economic inequality across time.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
18 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Here, we assess the extent to which land use relating to food acquisition (farming, herding, foraging) and associated value regimes shaped past economic inequality. We consider the hypothesis that land-use systems in which production was limited by heritable material wealth (such as land) sustained higher levels of inequality than those limited by (free) human labor. We address this hypothesis using the Global Dynamics of InequalIty (GINI) project database, estimating economic inequalities based on disparities in residential unit area and storage capacity within sites in different world regions and through time. We find that inequality was significantly greater in land-limited than labor-limited regimes, whether based on residence area or storage capacity, though governance could moderate these differences. Increasing inequality with larger residence and/or site size is associated with underlying shifts from labor- to land-limited economies. Transitions from labor- to land-limited regimes also appear to underlie the development of extended political hierarchies. Increases in inequality after cultivation became common in each hemisphere similarly reflect shifts from labor- to land-limited systems. Land-limited systems in the eastern hemisphere, incorporating animal traction, exhibit an upward trend in inequality over time, while a downward trend in the western hemisphere reflects the lower persistence of land-limited regimes based solely on human labor.
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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.