ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Kuznets' tides: An archaeological perspective on the long-term dynamics of sustainable development.
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 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed.
- The emergence of urban scaling in Ancient Southwest Asia.PloS one · 2026Article
- 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
- 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
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9 authors.
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Abstract
Understanding the relationship between inequality and economic growth is a critical science problem that hinders sustainable development. In 1955, Simon Kuznets hypothesized that rising economic growth raises inequality, which levels off as that growth continues. Kuznets' "curve," which is a cornerstone of development economics, was based on data from a small sample of rich capitalist economies. Here, we draw on the GINI database, which includes area measurements of 53,464 residences from 1,176 settlements dating from 21,000 BC to the present, and published data from the Spatial Analysis in Maya Studies (SAMS) group, to radically reevaluate Kuznets' curve. We use Gini coefficients of residential disparity, a proxy of inequality, and mean residence area, a proxy of productivity, to investigate past sustainable development in the Bronze Age Interaction Zone (BAIZ), the Mundo Maya, and Britain prior to, over the course of, and after the Roman conquest. We interpolate spatial patterns across each zone to statistically evaluate changes in inequality and economic growth. We find a recurring pattern in which phases of sustainable development, a rise in productivity without a rise in inequality, gave way to increasing inequality. These patterns resemble those Branko Milanovic termed "Kuznets' waves," albeit at timescales better described as "tides," which began after the introduction of weight metrology, an early form of economic governance associated with long-distance exchange. We posit that past sustainable development was predicated on balancing reciprocity from the bottom-up with mechanisms like early weight metrology but was repeatedly forestalled as inchoate elites co-opted these mechanisms.
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