Capitalizing on GINI

Summary

This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The CfAS’s Inequality Project focuses on economic inequality, a feature of modern society that has attracted both increasing public concern and growing historical and social research because of its critical implications for individual, national, and global well-being. The Inequality Project’s particular value is its global perspective on economic inequality and its reach into deep history. There are, however, as many forms of inequality as there are forms of capital, including social, cultural, ritual, military, and political inequality, arguably the most important inequality of all. In this presentation, I consider the degree to which economic inequality might correlate with the presence of other forms of inequality, in particular political inequality. To this end, I review the properties of different forms of capital—how easy they are to produce, their monopolizability, their capacity for transformation into other forms of capital, and their costs and benefits in coercing or inducing the behavior of others.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project   •
• Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis (CfAS)   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35639.0