OP on WhatsApp by Margeret Heath.
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Working off a summary while listening in the background, the archeological and historical evidence lines up well with Kemp’s work in Goliath’s Curse . The part I’m going to be listening to most closely is the last section summarized as “The Future of Inequality”, with focus on intangible assets like education and digital capital.
Having finally got through the whole video, the future-oriented payoff is around the 50 minute mark. But the prior sections set it up. The general shape of inequality trends over civilizational time described here is consistent with prior empirical work by Turchin, Kemp, and others. The gist of it is that neolithic hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian (even compared to great apes), but the accumulation of agriculture, property ownership, draft animals, and other fixed (Kemp calls it “lootable”) wealth fed the origin of the state as a systemic inequality machine. There is some quantitative modeling in the video for those who favor equations. The key variable is, what is most scarce? In neolithic society, labor was most scarce, which means any given person had options and leverage. With the advent of agriculture - and especially the advent of the heavy plough - land and capital become more dear. Enslaved humans became another category of capital in the form of draft labor (along with the oxen). Beyond this video, Turchin’s work (see Ultrasociety ) shows maximum inequality around the time of Assyria or the First Chinese Emperor. Social pyramids have been progressively flattening a bit since then (with lots of cyclical fluctuation as documented in the abundant literature on periodic civilizational collapse.) Before we congratulate ourselves too much on the mass expansion of living standards in the industrial era, it’s important to take note of Nate Hagens’s insight that we basically traded enslaved human labor for extracted fossil fuel labor. Everything lately has been heavily energy-subsidized in a way future centuries will not be able to count on.
OK, so now what? Bowles posits that in the current information and services economy, skilled labor is becoming the main source of “capital”, which favors more egalitarian models going forward. I would have completely agreed with that a decade ago. Software developers, for example, were themselves “the means of production”, which accounts for the golden age high salary and congenial working conditions for developers. (Anyone paying attention to recent AI trends, however, will feel the need to question if that model still holds.) Where I do still fully agree with Bowles’s analysis is in his preference for open-source intellectual property as a great leveling device. This aligns with all of Bauwens’s work (and many others) on commons and peer-to-peer models. More generally, I personally favor multicapital economic modelling, in which categories like human capital, social capital, relational capital, and intellectual capital count as “wealth”. I would argue that peer-to-peer educational models (like 2R) are in effect wealth-generating, in a manner that promotes egalitarianism and mitigates the concentration of other forms of capital. There is plenty going on in the world today, however, that smacks more of a return to Assyria or the First Chinese Emperor, so let’s not celebrate the End of History just quite yet. In any case, I’d love to have everyone read Kemp and Turchin, but if you only have an hour, this video presents the general model quiet effectively.
Reply from Margeret Heath
Excellent commentary and reflections, @Robert Bunge
The shift A.I. issue is not something Sam Bowles considered in his presentation, but it’s most definitely akin to “owning people?” And yes, Nate’s reframing of a barrel of oil as labour is a key reframe for folk.
In one extreme view, employment has turned out to be another version of this.
(serfdom/wage-slave).
It appears now we have plausible pathways towards those more Fair Futures…
The “shift AI” problem is my current existential preoccupation, and frankly my motivation for all the long historical reading - to tease out patterns for what is happening, why it is happening, and how it might happen next in the future (with or without active attempts at intervention in one direction or another). There are certainly current trends in the direction of reengineering Turchin’s “wealth pump” to get everything flowing towards an ever-narrowing cabal of tech lords. AI datacenters are the new terra cotta army, so to speak. Elon Musk, sitting like Scrooge McDuck, atop all the world’s financial capital, is end game for that trend. However, Turchin’s work suggests we won’t quite get there, but because under-employed talent (typically lawyers) find ways to foment revolution and topple the system. (I suppose Emmanuel Macron or Mark Carney might qualify at the very least as under-employed legal talent). Although the current US regime prefers killer robot swarms to anything resembling the rule of law, I’m guessing the rest of the world will not readily comply with pumping all available wealth in the general direction of the tech barons. On the ground, things get messy, and human capital can be decisive.
So right now it’s trend versus counter-trend, or in Turchin’s terms, elite versus counter-elite. Anyone investing time and talent in peer-to-peer educational models is working assiduously to underthrow the tech barons and to syphon off wealth away from the main channels of fiscal enshitification. Peer-to-peer is basically asymmetric warfare against the AI overlords. To get peer-to-peer to literally pay the rent, however, (and to keep peer-to-peer players in the game), it strikes me that models like food, housing, and medical co-ops will be quite necessary. (I.e. Mondragon and similar models). The paradox of AI is a certain sort of human talent - extremely cross-disciplinary, both visionary and pragmatic, and most of all relentless - is needed to get anything truly valuable out of the AI. That type of human will become a new labor elite - or a form of capital in their own right. The great mass of humanity is likely to feel more of a financial squeeze, which again, something like the Mondragon model might help to mitigate. In the US, a lot of formerly privileged people are going to be losing quite a bit of that privilege very shortly (the process, indeed, is well underway), so just open the pages of any number of history books and check out how dispossessed lesser nobility tend to pass the time. My guess is the next couple of decades in the US will be some version of that.
I rate Bowles pretty highly. i’d imagine you’d want to do some correction for society size in that you just can’t have so much inequality in a tiny society (at least with an outside option).
Also interesting to have some error bars e.g. wealth inequality was much harder to measure 10k years ago.
To save me a bunch of time, and to further the discussion here is what I hope is a constructive way, I asked Gemini to summarize the evidence presented in the video. As a generalization, the longer back we go, the more “inequality” is an inference from paleological or archeological methods. Thinks like digging up skeletons and measuring bone length. That’s a far cry from examining the tax returns of recent billionaires! Still, it’s pretty hard to mistake the sort of inequality represented in the Great Pyramid of Giza or other artifacts including the mass burials of slaves with their emperors.
In any case, I’d say the theoretical point about the state (from basic to current times) being a wealth-concentration mechanism is pretty hard to dislodge. Granted, David and Solomon had nothing on Jeff Bezos when it came to sheer material consumption, but vis-a-vis their subjects, they may as well have been Bezos.
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In the video on this link, what specific measures of inequality were used for different historical time periods? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLEfT7q9ecA&t=2s
Gemini said
In the video Inequality and the History of Capitalism, the speakers discuss how different measures of inequality are applied to various historical periods based on the available data and the social structures of the time.
Measures by Historical Period
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Pre-Modern and Early Modern Periods:
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Wealth and Land Ownership: For eras where formal income records don’t exist, researchers often look at the concentration of land ownership or the value of estates at death.
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Height and Biological Standards: In some cases, anthropometric data (stature/height) is used as a proxy for nutritional inequality and living standards between social classes.
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The 19th and Early 20th Century:
- Tax Records: With the introduction of formalized tax systems (like the British income tax in the 19th century), researchers begin to use tax returns to measure the share of total income held by the top 1% or 10%.
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Modern Era (Post-WWII to Present):
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The Gini Coefficient: This is used as a standard statistical measure to represent the income or wealth distribution of a nation’s residents.
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The Kuznets Curve: A specific framework used to track the hypothesis that as a country develops, market forces first increase and then decrease economic inequality.
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Capital/Income Ratio: A primary measure used to track the “weight” of inherited wealth versus earned income in a society.
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Key Takeaways
The video emphasizes that “inequality” is not a singular metric; rather, it is a historical reconstruction. Because data becomes “thinner” the further back you go, historians must switch from income-based measures to wealth-based or even biological indicators to get a full picture of the human experience.
Would you like me to summarize the specific arguments made regarding the “Kuznets Curve” mentioned in the video?