THE MATHEMATICS OF INEQUALITY: humanity is not doomed to wars

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Among the greatest minds of humanity, there have been many who were obsessed with both egalitarian and elitist ideas. The history of the struggle for human equality — encompassing racial, class, property, and gender — dates back centuries. And although people are not equal by nature, they are clearly different in willpower, determination, talent, love of freedom, intellectual and physical abilities — this has never deterred the champions of equality. However, new scientific data suggests that inequality and the social catastrophes associated with it can be avoided. To achieve this, cultural codes will have to be significantly adjusted.

«NATURAL» AND «UNNATURAL» INEQUALITY

odern people recoil at the division of humans into masters and slaves. Democracy and equal voting rights can easily be interpreted as the dictatorship of the «average majority». And it is unlikely that this majority would heed Aristotle’s words: «He who is able to foresee and provide should be master». With equal indignation, it would also reject the Gospel parable of the talents: «For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them» (Matt. 13:12). For advocates of equality, this prophecy also appears quite unacceptable.

The confrontation between two value systems — one condemning inequality and the other justifying it — has more than once in history led to bloody carnage and millions of victims. It is no wonder that the theme of inequality in many cultures was either tabooed or sanctified by religious tradition. In the modern world, we essentially have two mutually exclusive cults — Success and Justice. And finding a balance between them is far from simple.

The sustainable development of civilization and society presupposes that one person’s happiness should not necessarily mean another’s misfortune. Easy to say — but how is such a balance to be achieved? Suppose we even agree that «before God all are equal» — but that is before the invisible, almighty, and all-seeing God. Face to face with our fellow human being, who resembles us, we will always have some advantage or disadvantage.

For the «average» majority, it is not easy to accept even the idea that a person’s success is determined by talent. But what if success is determined, for example, by a violation of moral norms? Or not by personal qualities, but by the family into which a person was born? Then this certainly becomes not the «natural» inequality justified by the philosopher Aristotle and the Apostle Matthew.

INEQUALITY CONTINUES TO GROW

Oxfam, an international coalition of several dozen organizations working to counter rising economic inequality, regularly publishes research findings on this issue. According to their data, humanity will need about 230 years to eradicate poverty — and that’s under the most optimistic forecasts. Because while the level of absolute poverty may have decreased over the past couple of centuries, in the last 30 years the absolute income gap has only widened.

A comparison of figures from 2019 and 2023 shows that during this period, the well-being of more than half of the world’s population declined. At the same time, 148 of the largest corporations more than doubled their profits compared to the average of the previous three years. And in just about a decade, the world will see its first trillionaire. Today’s trend is that economic inequality is no longer growing primarily between «developed» and «developing» countries, as it did in the 19th or 20th century, but rather within individual states.

The poles of low and ultra-high incomes are diverging at breakneck speed, undermining an already fragile, almost utopian balance between Success and Justice. To anyone familiar with history, economics, and psychology, it is clear that such a divide may lead to unprecedented global upheavals.

THE MATHEMATICS OF INEQUALITY

In his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Canadian-American scholar Steven Pinker explains that once a society begins generating significant wealth, the growth of absolute inequality becomes almost mathematically inevitable. Some members of society — thanks to luck, courage, talent, or diligence — will inevitably extract greater benefits from new opportunities than others. Apparently, this applies to countries just as much as to individuals.

American economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, answering in their book of the same name the question «Why Nations Fail» — why some countries are rich and others poor — suggested that it all comes down to «good institutions». Yet it is unlikely that these alone caused the «Great Divergence» — the term economists used for the situation that emerged by 1970, when the «developed world», having won the technological race, turned out to be ten times richer than the developing one.

At the same time, capitalism — though often criticized — is only one version of a multilayered hierarchical system within which wealth is distributed unevenly. This means we are dealing not so much with someone’s deliberate malice as with a deeper, more ancient civilizational matrix.

For example, the imbalance between the «core» and the «periphery» already existed during the Bronze Age, which, as we know, ended with a grand systemic collapse. Yet modern globalization evolved with some significant distinctions. According to Pinker’s calculations, people in European countries have grown accustomed to an abnormally high quality of life, which they perceive as the norm.

Meanwhile, from the Renaissance up to the 20th century, European countries on average allocated only about 1.5% of their GDP to social needs, while today that share is around 22%. But from a global perspective, the picture is less straightforward. Since the 1980s, the incomes of Asia’s middle class have grown by 40–75% in real terms, while in the West — unlike the incomes of the wealthiest 1% of the planet — they have remained almost unchanged.

TRADED FREEDOM FOR FOOD?

The statistics already cited are enough to understand the origins of growing discontent with the results of globalization in the developed West and the gradual shift of the voting majority’s political preferences «to the right». As we can see, it is not easy for people to come to terms with inequality. But why, then, did humans ever develop such social structures and relationships that established unfair rules of the game?

Historians do not know for certain why the primitive equality of early societies was replaced by the rigid hierarchies of Mesopotamia and Egypt. A study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society claims that ancient humans may have abandoned equality voluntarily because, despite the inequality, hierarchically organized societies became wealthier «as a whole» — even considering that the elite appropriated a significant share of the surplus product.

A mathematical model developed by Swiss anthropologists showed that such collectives produced more resources than groups dominated by equality. Put simply, civilized people voluntarily traded freedom for food. But this civilizational matrix, originally focused on the material advantages of inequality and hierarchies, did not take into account the potential risks.

In particular, the egalitarian sentiments — a primitive survival that proved indestructible in some members of the group. This means that the path of development our civilization chose already carried within it the seeds of potential conflict: uprisings, revolutions, and wars.

THE EUROPEAN MODEL IS NOT UNIVERSAL!

And here it is worth asking: did humanity actually have a choice, or could it have followed another, less conflict-prone path of development? A new study by nine scholars from American, British, and Canadian institutions suggests that it did. The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the results of their thorough analysis, which shook European ideas about social inequality.

The researchers examined 50,000 houses inhabited by ancient people in various parts of the world: Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Ancient Greece, Roman Britain, South and North America. Their study covered the period from the first Sumerian cities to the late pre-Columbian states.

The key parameter of the analysis was the difference in the size and complexity of houses, and for quantitative assessment of inequality, they used the Gini coefficient — a statistical indicator of income distribution inequality commonly employed by modern economists. Unexpectedly, it turned out that the «European» model of the emergence and deepening of social inequality is by no means universal. If you recall, Steven Pinker spoke of the mathematical inevitability of inequality — but this «mathematics» varied across regions and eras!

A SOLUTION EXISTS: CHANGING CULTURAL CODES

It has traditionally been believed that Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and Europe as a whole developed along the only possible path, common to all humanity. This view had been questioned before, but the authors of the article confirmed such doubts statistically for the first time. They proved that inequality did not increase uniformly — neither with population growth, nor with state expansion, nor with societal evolution, nor with technological progress.

The key role in the distribution of resources is played by cultural norms or civilizational matrices — a kind of social contract in which collective decisions are embodied. These «codes» can either exacerbate inequality or reduce the gap between the rich and poor. This means that there is both «innate» and «acquired» inequality.

Although all people are born different, the growth of social injustice and economic inequality is by no means inevitable. Humanity can indeed be steered toward non-catastrophic, sustainable development — if it is founded on different cultural codes and values.

Original research: