| This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not…
Enduring inequality didn’t “just happen”—we built our societies-of-domination, quite late in human history, with very specific technological & societal-organization tools. The Neolithic coming of agriculture supplied the raw materials for inequality—storable surplus, ownable productive assets—but egalitarian norms & institutions (“aggressive egalitarianism”) actively sit on them for millennia: public eating, communal storage, burial practices that block dynastic display, even deliberate destruction of productive capital to prevent bequests. Inequality shows up, but as short‑lived “aggrandizer” episodes, not as durable structure. Then about the year -3000 come the technological shifts to land‑limited production (ox‑drawn plow, etc.) that makes land the binding factor and raises the payoff to holding material capital; the rise of an archaic protostate to tax, conscript, and reliably back property claims, stabilizing elite positions; & slavery, which turns labor itself into heritable material capital & allows even labor‑intensive technologies to behave like capital‑limited regimes.In this very long run view, modern capitalism is just another material‑capital‑intensive regime. & doubling down on enclosure via intellectual property is the slavery move all over again: trying to transform a non‑excludable human capacity into tradable, dynastic material wealth. Democracy, social insurance, unions, & redistributive fiscal policy could keep a knowledge‑ & care‑intensive economy from reproducing Bronze‑Age inequality levels with digital means…Share
In Bowles’s Vision of the Cosmic All, enduring economic inequality is not a timeless feature of human societies but the result of specific technologies, institutions, and political failures. Inequality is historically contingent. Wealth inequality stayed low for millennia—even after agriculture—because of “aggressive egalitarianism”. Early farmers were no more unequal than hunter‑gatherers because strong egalitarian norms and deliberate institutional designs (public storage, anti‑dynastic burial practices, even destroying productive assets) actively suppressed inequality. Humans spent most of prehistory as a relatively egalitarian ape. Neolithic societies invested in norms and practices—public eating, communal storage, egalitarian burial regimes, deliberate destruction of capital—to prevent wealth from becoming dynastic. Aggressive egalitarianism was real and costly. Average wealth Gini coefficients stay low from about 10,000 BCE until the Bronze Age. Then wealth inequality exploded in a relatively brief Bronze-Age window in western Eurasia—that was when land‑limited technologies (ox‑plow), proto‑states, and slavery jointly made inequality durable. Agriculture alone didn’t cause enduring inequality. Since then, wealth inequality has not done much. then jump to roughly 0.7 and remain at that high level—with no clear long‑run trend—from the Bronze Age to today. The action is in the early Bronze Age. Bowles models persistent inequality as arising from the strength of intergenerational wealth transmission interacting with the sizes of random shocks, with material wealth much more heritable than skills or social ties. Material wealth transmits and polarizes more than skills or networks. Stationary inequality in log wealth is proportional to the variance of shocks divided by 1 − β², with β the hereditary transmission coefficient. Land‑limited societies, societies with archaic states, and societies with both archaic states and slavery each shifted progressively toward higher wealth Ginis, relative to labor‑limited, stateless societies. Stronger transmission (higher β) nonlinearly amplifies inequality from shocks. Bowles sees the Engels‑style “surplus did it” story is inadequate: what matters is how plows, private land, political power, and slavery turned surplus into entrenched class structures. Proto‑states enable elites to tax, conscript, and defend wealth. Slavery converts labor into inheritable material capital. State power and slavery “lock in” inequality. : Bowles suspects today’s knowledge‑ and care‑intensive economy could, politically, push us back toward more egalitarian arrangements, if we resist enclosing information as private property.
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OK. Now what do I think? Four things come to mind immediately with respect to why inequality is a problem for human societies: utility amount distribution, the negative-sum dynamic of spite and envy in addition being bossed around either directly or by a system that sees you only if you control, wealthy profit, enforced by violence.
Give a gift subscription Plus I have some (perhaps considerable?) worried that the stylized facts are not what Bowles thinks they are, or should be presented in a different way than Bowles does. Three things come to the forefront, I think: I have a hard time crediting the stability of inequality post the year -3000. Yes, the coming of bronze and writing and the consequent technological gulf—the bronze hoe, plough, and sword on the one hand and the written record on the other—was a YUGE deal. But there have been a huge number of very big changes since in technologies of nature-manipulation and societal-organization. And not just technologies of production narrowly specified. Technologies of distribution, communication, information, and domination as well. If all of those changes did not have effects we can see on a set of inequality measures, perhaps those inequality measures are not what we really should be looking for—not good ways of summarizing the human experience. Suppose we have two societies-of-domination, with the same amount of inequality in each. How much violence is needed to maintain that inequality can and does vary very widely—both in extractive élite-poor interactions, and within the élite’s dealings with itself and with neighboring or potentially competing candidates to be top dog among the élite. This matters. I see faily large distinction between land-focused and seaborne empires, between societies that take at the point of a spear and those that structure terms of bilateral exchange—Helden und Händler—between empires and confederations. By contrast, I do not see big differences between lowland countries and highlands: the risks of being dominated seem about equal in Britain in 1740 with respect to living under the aegis of King George II Hanover or under the aegis of Angus, Chief of the MacLeods at Glenfinnan. With respect to Gini Coefficients: the underlying motivation is that the Gini Coefficient tells you, if you interact with other members of society at random, how much inequality is present at and potentially structuring that interaction. But people do not interact with other members of society at random. Network patterns matter—a lot. A star-network society with the rich at the center of the star will make the experience of being bossed and being under constraint much more salient, as a much larger share of interactions are between rich and poor than in a society in which people interact at random.
Leave a comment And, of course, Sam Bowles knows all of this better than I do.
Sam Bowles (Nov 19, 2025): The Origin & Future of Economic Inequality. University of Chicago. Harris School. Stone Center <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV-9-qoSX2o>:  Get 75% off a group subscription MAMLM-cleaned transcript! Check against original at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV-9-qoSX2o>>:  | 2025 11 19 Bowles Inequality Mamlm Clean... 210KB ∙ PDF file | |
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