Great wealth doesn't need lead to great inequality

[cally]

I am glad I read this. Nic break from doom and gloom of current events


https://medium.com/the-no%C3%B6sphere/great-wealth-doesnt-need-to-lead-to-great-inequality-127202fffb5c

The dominant historical narrative is that full social equality and individual freedom are traits exclusive to the so-called ‘primitive’ societies — or at least some of them. But once a community grows and becomes more advanced, leading to an increase in wealth production, hierarchy, inequality and exploitation inevitably follow by virtue of supposedly innate aspects of human nature like competition and self-interest.
This is just how civilisations are formed, the logic goes.
And this is what demographic and economic development lead to: someone has to control the accumulated surplus, and someone else has to be exploited to keep producing it.
However, increasing archaeological evidence on prehistoric societies challenges this binary thinking of our past — and of human nature — including a recent study by a team of archaeologists at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) published in the Journal of World Prehistory that analysed data on the Copper Age society of southern Iberia.