New Research Challenges Idea that Economic Inequality is Inevitable

A study analyzing tens of thousands of houses within over 1,000 archaeological sites spanning six continents and 10,000 years, found that economic inequality is a choice.

Hiya!

We humans are a confounding species. On the one hand, we’re social animals that thrive most when in diverse, cooperative communities. On the other hand, we continually segregate ourselves into smaller, more distinct categories — economic class, education, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc. — and invent hierarchies within each one that further separate us.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed just how entrenched and widespread these contrasts are worldwide. Now, economic insecurity, staggering inequality, social fragmentation, and plummeting social trust are destabilizing societies everywhere. According to the 2025 World Social Report, 65 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income inequality is growing.

But has it always been this way? Is inequality a hard-wired social structure we cannot change and inevitably fall back on? Well, according to researchers, the answer to both questions is no. Instead, scientists say that while evidence of inequality is widespread throughout history, it is not constant, inevitable, or expressed in the same way or to the same degree.

Economic Inequality

We love a reductive approach to learning, when we break something down to the sum of its parts and see how they work together. We do this with everything from school subjects and social structures to language and engineering.

We also apply it to inequality by creating many flavors that come and go across time and space. However, today, we’ll focus on economic inequality.

We often view economic inequality through a moral lens, focusing on possible threats to our personal or social environments based on the distribution of resources.

However, more precisely, economic inequality refers to the differences in wealth (a person’s total assets) and income (the money they receive from things like work or investments) between people. The wider the gap, the greater the inequality.

For instance, the economic inequality, also known as the wealth gap, between American CEOs and their average employees grew by a jaw-dropping amount between 1978 and 2021. During that period, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,460 percent, while the average worker’s pay rose by only 18 percent.

In 1965, the wage gap between American CEOs and their average employees was 20-to-1. By 1989, the gap had widened to 59-to-1. By 2020, it was 366-to-1, and just a year later, it reached 399-to-1. The gap narrowed briefly in 2022 to 344-to-1 before bloating again.

While economic inequality is exploding, it’s not a new social structure. Extravagant burials, lavish structures, artwork portraying rulers and their enslaved, and historical documentation provide us with evidence showing economic inequalities going back thousands of years.

The traditional narrative suggests that such inequality became ingrained into human society once we began farming, which is when it was thought that more complex social hierarchies were created. Theoretically, this would have allowed elites to hoard surpluses of food and profits produced by their workers.

As Gary Feinman, a professor of archaeology and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, explains,

“There are a lot of things that have been presumed for centuries — for example, that inequality rises inevitably. The traditional thinking expects that once you get larger societies with formal leaders, or once you have farming, inequality is going to go way up. These ideas have been held for hundreds of years.”

However, Feinman led a study, which I’ll tell you about next, that suggests such a scenario is misleadingly simplistic, as he hinted to Ben Turner of Live Science,

"Regarding economic inequality, the old saying that history tends to be written by the winners, the wealthy and powerful, is likely applicable here.”

The Study