ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Assessing grand narratives of economic inequality across time.
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 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- The distribution of power and inclusiveness across deep time.Science advances · 2026Article
- Institutionalised Commitment and Its Origins.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 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
- 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
- Changes in agglomeration and productivity are poor predictors of inequality across the archaeological record.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
- Kuznets' tides: An archaeological perspective on the long-term dynamics of sustainable development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Assessing neighborhoods, wealth differentials, and perceived inequality in preindustrial societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Labor, land, and the global dynamics of economic inequality.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
- 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
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Long-entrenched grand narratives have tied inequality in large human aggregations to generally linear trends, a direct outcome of domestication, then fostered by population growth and/or stepped scalar transitions in the hierarchical complexity of human institutions. This general pattern has been argued to short-circuit or reverse only in the context of cataclysmic disasters or societal breakdowns. Yet, for the most part, these universal deterministic frameworks have been constructed from historical or ethnographic snapshots in time and afford little systematic attention to human institutions or agency. Here, we leverage quantitative, temporally defined archaeological, and ethnographic data from a suite of global regions, most of which transitioned through the process of urbanism and complex hierarchy formation, to examine shifts in degrees of inequality over time. Although broad temporal patterns are evidenced, the regional trends in inequality are neither linear, uniform, nor triggered immediately or mechanically by Malthusian dynamics or scalar increases.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.