The Marginal Utility of Inequality

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The emergence of hereditary social inequality resulted in enormous impacts on human history, yet its causes remain heavily debated and unexplained. Here we propose and evaluate an environmentally informed model explaining the emergence of social inequality based on the interaction between circumscription and environmental inequality. We demonstrate how the combination of the two conditions results in situations where social inequality, as the best of bad options, may represent the optimal decision. Crucially, we demonstrate how inequality affects the payoffs for both dominants and subordinates, suggesting an explanation for its persistence. We then test this model ethnographically, using generalized linear mixed models on data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Our initial results support the model hypothesis that increasing circumscription and environmental inequality correlate with increasing social inequality among documented societies. The model results also suggest articulations with current archaeological inequality ideas, connecting with elite self-interest and collective good arguments. Overall, our research suggests social inequality may emerge as a result of dynamic ecological conditions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23420