Orley Ashenfelter interviews Samuel Bowles “on his deep interest in the causes of inequality & his work to transform economics” (“The Work Goes On” podcast, posted October 7, 2024). The entire interview is worthwhile: for example, I did not know that Bowles attended school in a tent in India when he was 11 years old (his father was Ambassador to India at the time; or that he worked for the government of Nigeria as a teacher in a remote area after graduating from college; or that he offered economic advice to Martin Luther King, Jr. Bowles recounts the episode t his way:
I had the good fortune of being asked by Dr. Martin Luther King if I wouldn’t give him some advice about economics and of course, I was thrilled. I knew Dr. King through anti-Vietnam War activity that he and I had engaged in at the time. And so, he said he would send me some questions and I said, “well, I’ll definitely get back to you.” I opened the envelope and here’s a set of questions. And they’re all about economics … I looked at these questions and I said, “these are damn good questions. I don’t have a clue how to answer these.” I didn’t know where to look. They were empirical questions, but also conceptual ones. Imagine, a new successful PhD, and this could have been the high point in my life. This is why I studied economics so I could actually get into the fray and help out and make the world a better place. But that was kind of a shocker for me, and I decided that there was something wrong that I was actually teaching the grad students in micro. And I decided then and there that I was either going to leave economics, I considered that very seriously, or I would try to change it. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do since.
Here’s a different insight, from research about inequality from pre-history and today. Bowles says:
I was curious about how inequality wealth moved over time, and as I studied more and more, I came to be interested in pre-history. That is a period of time in the past in which I think there was a really big change in how humans lived. And so, let’s go back five to ten thousand years, go back to the time around when agriculture started maybe 11-thousand years ago. And before then we were hunting and gathering populations, quite egalitarian. We’ve of course since measured wealth inequality, both human wealth and material wealth among hunters and gatherers. We’ve measured the intergenerational transmission of wealth in these societies. But the first farmers were very egalitarian. They had a very equal distribution of wealth. They were, in fact not much different from the hunters and gatherers.
So, the first thing we learned is that most people think that inequality really came on when farming happened. It’s not true. We had something like four or five millennia, millennia of farming before we had this big uptick in wealth inequality. Now of course, we measure wealth inequality in fairly elementary ways like the size of houses or the size of storage areas or how much the goods that are buried with people in their burials. But there’s a very dramatic change that takes place sometime around five-thousand years ago, and that was associated with a change in technology, the introduction of plows and oxen, which basically was a labor-saving device. The ox-drawn plow was the robot of the late Neolithic early bronze age because it displaced labor and it made land scarce and it made labor abundant. And then there was also the development of political concentration of political power in the form of governments. And those two things, the concentration of power in the hands of the well to do and the technology which made labor redundant and material goods scarce, that seems to be where the thing
started.Now, obviously running forward, what’s extraordinary is that we achieved five-thousand years ago levels of inequality which are fairly much like what we have today and not much happened between five-thousand years ago and the present. There are some ups and downs but try to figure out anything that matters for wealth inequality, whether it’s modern-day Sweden, feudal Europe, the city states of Italy and so on. Wealth inequality is at a very high-level Gini coefficient of point-six or point-seven right across the board. So, we found two things really. We found a dramatic increase doubling of the Gini coefficients taking place about five-thousand years ago, and a remarkable constancy since then.
I really like the idea that “ox-drawn plow was the robot of the late Neolithic early bronze age.” Technological change is not a recent event.
