Walter Scheidel

Framed as a response to Robert Allen's contribution, this commentary explores the impact of technological change on economic inequality over the very long run of history and emphasizes the role of power relations as another key driver of the distribution of income and resources.

Textual evidence from pre-modern societies supports the prediction that status differences among men translate to variance in reproductive success. In recent years, analysis of genetic data has opened up new ways of studying this relationship. By investigating cases that range over several millennia, these analyses repeatedly document the replacement of local men by newcomers and reveal instances of exceptional reproductive success of specific male lineages. These findings suggest that violent population transfers and conquests could generate considerable reproductive advantages for male dominants. At the same time, this does not always seem to have been the case. Moreover, it is difficult to link such outcomes to particular historical characters or events, or to identify status-biased reproductive inequalities within dominant groups. The proximate factors that mediated implied imbalances in reproductive success often remain unclear. A better understanding of the complex interplay between social power and genetic fitness will only arise from sustained transdisciplinary engagement.

In 2013, Barack Obama called rising inequality “the defining challenge of our time”. Since the Financial Crisis and Great Recession of 2007-9, the gap between the haves and have-nots has attracted unprecedented attention in politics, the media and academia.¹ Students of the more distant past have also begun to embrace this trend. Economists are once again looking back in time, inspired in no small measure by the broad impact of the work of Thomas Piketty.² Historians are laboring hard to unearth and publish relevant data. Thanks to their efforts, we are now able to glimpse the contours of changes in the concentration of income and wealth over the very long run, at least in some parts of the world.³ Archaeologists have been joining the fray, gathering and analyzing plausible proxies of inequality such as house sizes.⁴