High Income Inequality Helped Early Societies Spread, Study Finds

As political rhetoric surrounding "class warfare" heats up, a new study indicates that class stratification may help a society spread.

The unequal access to resources that comes with class stratification ultimately pushed societies to migrate, displacing more egalitarian cultures, according to a study from Stanford University. The study’s findings would indicate the U.S. itself has some expanding left to do; the total net worth of the bottom 60 percent of U.S. households is less than that of Forbes 400 richest Americans.

"The fact that unequal societies today vastly outnumber egalitarian societies may not be due to the replacement of the ethic of equality by a more selfish ethic, as originally thought by many researchers," said Deborah Rogers, the lead author of the study. "Instead, it appears that the stratified societies simply spread and took over, crowding out the egalitarian populations."

But even if stratification helped societies spread during the early era of civilization as the study suggests, rising income inequality could now be hindering economic growth, according to an International Monetary Fund study released earlier this month. If income inequality decreased by 10 percent, the duration of an expected period of economic growth would grow by 50 percent, according to the paper.

Americans may support a narrowing in the gap between classes, according to a recent poll by Daily Kos. The poll found that nearly three-quarters of Americans favor taxing households making more than $1 million at higher rate than middle class households. But when President Barack Obama proposed a rule along those lines earlier this month, he was met with accusations that he was stoking "class warfare."

And as the top 1 percent of America's earners control 40 percent of the wealth, according to Vanity Fair, the ranks of the American poor swelled to its highest level since the Census Bureau started keeping track in the 1950s.

A society's poor absorbs resource instability allowing the ruling class and the overall social structure to stay "in tact," according to the study. The stability allowed them to spread and outmaneuver more egalitarian societies, the study found.

"This is not just an academic exercise," Rogers said. "Inequalities in socioeconomic status are increasing sharply around the world. Understanding the causes and consequences of inequality and how to reduce it is one of the central challenges of our time."

Comments

[Bryan Boru]

03:06 AM on 10/04/2011

I went to the tea party rallies, enjoyed them, cursed the bailout mentality. MARGINAL tax rates of 90% for the 2,000,000th dollar of earnings and above is fine with me.

[themodernleader]

11:42 PM on 10/03/2011

Income inequality and concentrated, centraized wealth explains why most of human history is a blank page even though our kind were born, lived and died. A few lived supremely on the backs of humanity. Humanity remained stunted with an eternal struggle to survive as if living in the wild. In fact humanity was forced into the matrix of nature by dynasties, occasional invaders and tyrants while the few owners and lords controlled the knowledge, present and future.
With computers that can centralize accurate information, there is a reasonable, dangerous chance that oligarchy can again cast its web over mankind as happened in ancient China to about 1900 and the ancient Roman Empire-dark ages from about 50 b.c. until the European Reformation. in about 1400 a.d. Such totalitarianism would place a civil service in charge through dynastic rule with a military force superior to any periodical rise of national or regional threats. Such a system of sameness and stagnation could prevail for thousands of years. The rise of science and technology would be replaced by fixed ideology, faith andi nspiration. Education would arise from one simple set of ideas and one or two sacred testaments of eternal truths.

[lvdragonlady]

11:12 PM on 10/03/2011

Well they are lagging big time now.

[DSciarrino]

06:33 PM on 10/03/2011

Interesting, but where are the poor going to go next? Finland? Denmark? Not likely. I suspect we're going to have to fix this one on our own or suffer the revolution that Marx predicted. I hope the wealthy are listening. . .

[Bryan Boru]

03:08 AM on 10/04/2011

The poor don't go anywhere. Poverty isn't conducive to travel.

[Erica]

06:24 PM on 10/03/2011

Soo.... since we are highly stratified, this means we should become even more imperialistic? Wars everywhere, everybody!!!

[Bryan Boru]

03:12 AM on 10/04/2011

It's not well known among the liberal set, but the egalitarian imperialistic Comanches used to viciously fight the egalitarian imperialistic Apaches. It's an inconvenient truth.

[GandenT]

02:42 PM on 10/03/2011

Yes, misery was the mother of invasion and looting; wonderful! Perhaps instead of jailing criminals and gangsters we should congratulate them for their "initiative" and "innovation." This study, or perhaps just its presentation herein, seems to me to be somewhat overly simplistic possibly indicating bias in it's authors' intent. Besides, didn't we already have the "theory" and its rationalizations known collectively as "Social Darwinism?"

[Erica]

06:25 PM on 10/03/2011

I guess historically, people who had too much money and time while others were starving outside their gates had to come up with fancy new ways to spend it.

[GandenT]

10:46 AM on 10/04/2011

It ws the poor looking for needed and new opportunities to survive, that was the primary driver, not so much the rich looking for new wealth although once the new opportunity was identified the rich and powerful quickly monopolized it I'm sure.

[Jim NLN]

10:58 AM on 10/03/2011

Ha, I knew Obama was a capitalist all along!

[greyhound2]

10:37 AM on 10/03/2011

The city state of Sparta in ancient Greece was renoune for its army. The primary function of its army, however, was to control the slave peasant farmers from surrounding cities they had conquored and reduced to slavery. The main function of the army was to protect the ruling elite from the pitch forks of its farmer-slaves with homeland defense a secondary afterthought.

[Subsound]

10:20 AM on 10/03/2011

It helped early societies spread, but what does it do to established societies that go from less income inequality back to high income inequality?

[Edward Wilkes]

07:56 AM on 10/03/2011

It is true that wealth helps in the spread of civilizations. The poor, were, however, made into slaves of one sort or another to help the wealthy get even more wealthy. Some of the poor were able to rise to the ranks of a so-called middle class in a few of these once newly formed societies, but not until many years after the society rose from its infancy did this occur. All of these once newly formed societies, now today, like an aged person who has grown old thru time, to only revert back to a childhood like infancy; the society itself has failed to continue to grow, but too has reverted back to it's infancy or more poignantly to the ulterior selfish motives of the super-wealthy!

[ken607]

07:22 AM on 10/03/2011

sugar coat it all you want it was called SLAVERY!

[Bryan Boru]

03:13 AM on 10/04/2011

Where do you think the word 'Slavic' comes from?

[rotorhead1871]

12:59 AM on 10/03/2011

who was in the test group??

[oilfield]

12:56 AM on 10/03/2011

how can the bottom have any net worth when we as americans typically owe more than we have? if you doubled the salaries of the bottom, the numbers would not change.

[HMDMSR]

12:51 AM on 10/03/2011

Of course, there was Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation.

In order for capitalism to claim itself a big success story that has benefited everyone involved, we have to forget about all those who gave up their lives during the processes of primitive accumulation. But not only that, we have to consider what capitalism will look like when there are no non-capitalist lands to expand into, and see the happy consequences of this, before we can accept the market model as successful.

Population growth, which capitalism is addicted to, will drive subdivision of the land, and will leave no avenues of escape for those inevitable disgruntled masses that must flee from its downturns.

[QuantProgrammer]

09:00 AM on 10/03/2011

Capitalism isn't addicted to population growth. It is addicted to growth in technology.

[HMDMSR]

07:00 PM on 10/03/2011

Yes it is, and, anyway, it could be addicted to both. Technology growth is essential to capitalism.

[Joe Neri]

12:00 AM on 10/03/2011

And just where are we supposed spread these days, with 7 billion people on the planet?

[QuantProgrammer]

08:57 AM on 10/03/2011

Bingo. We need to start paying people to get vasectomies.