Mattia Fochesato and Samuel Bowles

Paper #: 2017-08-032

First Paragraph.  Conjectures about trends in economic inequality are generally based on historical studies of past trends, along with models allowing predictions using expected movements in the influences on inequality such as the rise of democracy or new technologies such as those introduced during the industrial revolution. Here we broaden the range of variation of the determinants of inequality by studying inequalities in material wealth over the past 11 millennia in economies with vastly different technologies and institutions.

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