Sam Bowles (Santa Fe Institute)
Abstract. Among the influences on the degree of wealth inequality in society, two broad classes have been proposed: technology and institutions. Technology — the manner in which people interact with their natural environment to produce their livelihoods — highlights the importance of the nature of the goods and services on which a population lives and how these are acquired in the physical environment of a society. Institutions, the second class, focuses on how people relate to one another in producing and distributing their livelihoods (including reproduction) and highlights the importance of political influences on wealth and income inequality. A model of the dynamics of inequality over time and a new data set on wealth inequality over the past 9 millennia, along with inferences based on data from recent small-scale simple-technology economies poses a set of questions (and provides a few provisional answers).