Extreme Wealth Inequality Is a Choice, Not Our Destiny

But we might be running out of time to change it

Image via the Everett Collection, licensed from Shutterstock

Imagine a world where everyone has a safe, decent home, and no one hides away in grotesquely oversized mansions; a world where any surplus is shared equally among all, or transformed into a communal feast; and where anyone who tries to grab more than their share is quickly checked.

This isn’t just some utopian vision of our future, hundreds of years down the line. This is a description of much of our past, across various continents and time periods. Though it might be hard for many of us today — living in an era where the richest 1% own nearly half the world’s wealth while billions struggle to make ends meet — to picture a different arrangement, a growing body of research into early human history shows that longstanding assumptions about wealth inequality don’t really hold up.

Yes, inequality, including in its most extreme forms, is nothing new.

But it’s neither natural nor an inevitable consequence of population growth, formal governance, or technological progress. Instead, it’s something we choose, even if we allow the choice to be made on our behalf.

In ancient human settlements, the size and distribution of households, as well as the presence (or absence) of…