Abstract
I came of age, along with the American University economist Jon Wisman, “in a period of declining inequality and rising optimism that social and economic justice would continue to expand.” Wisman spent his earliest years in the Shenandoah Valley. I spent mine in a tract home next door to Levittown, the fabled Long Island white suburb that came to symbolize the emergence, right here in the United States, of the world's first mass middle class.
Back then, in the 1950s, I could ride my bike as far as I could go—in any direction—and not see any home much different from mine. No mansions. No shacks. Just modest homes with equally modest Fords and Chevys parked outside on the driveways and streets.
In the middle of that decade, a little friend of mine and his family picked up and moved to an even more magical place. California, they called it, the home of the just-opened Disneyland. In that wondrous atmosphere, for families like mine, anything seemed possible. Daily life had a golden glow.
This glow would end up amounting to a “historical anomaly,” Wisman points out right at the outset of his magisterial dive into our stunning contemporary maldistribution of income, wealth, and power, The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality: Sex, Politics, and Ideology (2022). By the end of the 1970s, our national treasure had once again begun concentrating in the pockets of a relative few.
What has driven this concentration? Why is this concentration still continuing today? How has inequality, Wisman asks, consistently defined “our human societies since the rise of civilization”? For the answers to questions like these, this veteran scholar ranges far beyond his home academic turf of economics, drawing insights from disciplines as disparate as history and evolutionary psychology.
Wisman welcomes the explosion of interest in inequality we have seen so far in the twenty-first century—who would have thought that a data-dense 700-page tome by a little-known French economist could hit number one on the Amazon best-seller list? (Moore, 2014)—but he sees that explosion shining much too little light on inequality's beginnings and ongoing inner dynamics. In the pages of The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality, he sets out to do that shining. More specifically, he sets out to demonstrate the centrality of inequality to human history and the centrality of politics to that inequality.
Our species, The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality relates, has walked the Earth for some 200,000 years, the first 190,000 or so of those in relatively equal “nomadic forager societies.” Then agriculture began emerging—and upsetting those foraging patterns. Populations began to concentrate. Chieftains arose amid these concentrations. They claimed “special access” to celestial powers, an “ideological ruse,” Wisman points out, that opened access to privileges of various sorts. But those privileges rested on a shaky foundation. In early agricultural societies, a single “disastrous harvest” could expose “the fraudulence” of any claims to divine connections.
More lasting inequalities would only emerge with the rise of states and civilizations, a rise that Wisman ties to both technical advances in military weaponry and organization and ever-more powerful ideologies that left average families convinced that the inequalities they lived amid essentially reflected the “will of the gods.” These ideologies “portrayed egalitarian measures as destructive of economic growth, social order, and freedom, and therefore in no one's interest.”
Wisman's pages consider these economic and ideological dynamics as only part of the inequality story. The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality grounds “the ultimate force generating inequality in human biology,” most notably the drive to reproduce. And how do all these sexual and social strands come together in Wisman's analysis? “The tension between sexual competition” and “a sense of fairness,” he writes, “expresses itself through politics.” The “laws and social institutions” that politics produces to resolve that tension have consistently advantaged, in turn, society's wealthiest and most powerful.
Ruling ideologies, meanwhile, justify these “gains of the stronger at the expense of the weaker.” In centuries past, these ideologies typically depicted inequality as a reflection of either some “celestial mandate or “natural law.” In more modern times, ideologies have justified inequality as the driver of an economic dynamism that eventually benefits everyone. These justifications can, at times, lose their potency. The powerful, in those situations, can always champion ideologies that divert attention away from domestic inequalities and onto foreign foes—or at-home populations of vulnerable minorities.
Do some of these strands drive more of our recorded human history than others? Wisman emphasizes the pivotal importance of each element in the inequality mix. The “study of inequality,” he notes at the outset, “begins with the biological fact that humans are competitive because, as a sexually reproducing species, they must be.” Political power remains just as consequential. That power—“since the rise of civilization”—has enabled elites to hold the actual producers of social wealth in bondages that have ranged from serfdom and slavery to more modern forms of indebtedness.
This power sometimes rests on sheer brute force. But brutality carries high costs, for everything from exceptionally invasive policing to clampdowns on the insurrections that brutality almost inevitably invites. Over the long term, the alternate approach of gaining ideological hegemony—convincing these below that their lesser status reflects the “moral and functional appropriateness of the existing social order”—makes for a far more “efficient and effective” defense of privilege.
So what does the enormity of the ground that Wisman covers in The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality add to a field—inequality studies—that has grown enormously over recent years? His greatest contribution may well come with his grand, sweeping survey of the evolving ideological fortresses the privileged have constructed, maintained, and adopted to the changing nature of their privilege.
None of this privilege, Wisman helps us understand, reflects our “natural” human state. We did not come into our existence as a species divided and deeply unequal. Over the first 97 percent or so of human existence, the few did not exploit and dominate the many. Indeed, for the overwhelming majority of our years on Earth, the men and women of our species have lived lives we can accurately describe as genuinely contented.
Our foraging ancestors, Wisman quotes anthropologist Marshall Sahlins as noting, experienced humanity's “original affluent society.” These foragers “worked” no more than 20 hours a week, and this “work,” Wisman observes, never struck paleolithic peoples as “intrinsically unpleasant.” Everyone “shared more or less equally in scarcity-driven tasks.” No class of parasites, he adds, “lived off the labor of others.”
We should not, of course, romanticize this paleolithic era, and Wisman at no point does. He draws instead the striking contrast between the primitive equality of our earliest years on Earth with the growing inequality that has come with the surpluses that civilizations have created over the past ten or so millennia. Most of us humans, over those years, have experienced life as nasty, brutish, and short. Only a privileged few have enjoyed the fruits of humanity's overall labor.
How could that privileged few have sustained that domination at the expense of the many? A pattern emerged early on in our civilized times. Elites acquired the political and economic power, Wisman relates, necessary to “appropriate the surplus from producers.” The elites typically left these producers “with the mere wherewithal physically to survive” and then devoted a part of the surplus that the labor of producers had created to persuading “the dispossessed of the elite's generosity.”
The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality tracks the fascinating story of that persuasion's unfolding. In the early years of hereditary chieftains, the powerful claimed a “special access to divine forces” that could “ensure the well-being of their societies.” In the region that we know today as northern Pakistan, the Hunza people's chiefs “claimed dominion from a sacred life force that empowered them to melt glaciers” and, in the process, replenish rivers and bring rain down upon struggling crops.
Those divine forces, these early chiefs of the agricultural age sooner or later discovered, could take days off at the most inauspicious moments. The resulting crop failures left some early agricultural societies cycling “back and forth between hereditary privilege and equality.” Only later, after advances in military science, could rulers begin to extend their rule past crises that left their legitimacy discredited.
Ideological “science” would advance as well, becoming, over time, “the most effective day-to-day political weapon for maintaining the elite's ability to take the producers’ surplus.” This evolution, Wisman emphasizes, didn’t come from elites sitting around and crafting “clever doctrines to justify their privileges and pacify those they exploit, although on occasion they might do just that.” The more typical dynamic: Elites just naturally embraced “those ideas floating around in social thought” that served their interests.”
Organized religions, Wisman takes care to demonstrate, would play key roles in the ideological defense of privilege. Priests “claimed unique access to spiritual wisdom” and used that wisdom “to justify the privileges of the elite as the mandates of supernatural forces.” Religions “shifted the focus from life in this material world to a higher spiritual realm.” Keep your head down and respect your betters, religions taught the exploited, and your reward “would be everlasting bliss in heaven or higher status in a subsequent reincarnation.”
No early elites benefited more from these religious ideological patterns than the early pharaohs of ancient Egypt. For most of the third millennium BC, individual pharaohs went about their ruling business as the god Horus, the son of Re, the sun god. Their “legitimating ideology” would prove so effective that pharaohs over the course of this 700-year period needed little in the way of standing armies and faced no threat of popular revolts. Over these centuries, Wisman notes, Egypt would boast “one of the most extreme levels of exploitation” in ancient times.
Ancient Rome, by contrast, never developed as powerful a legitimating ideology and owed its success much more to its “comparative advantage in violence,” the sophistication of its military. The eventual loss of that comparative advantage left Rome's elites with no alternative but to raise taxes on their subjects, even confiscate their livestock and grains “to feed its armies.” These moves encouraged citizens to hoard their assets and hide them in jewels and other unproductive diversions. Rome's rich would become “increasingly rent-seeking, pursuing wealth and income by manipulating political rights and associated economic privileges rather than by creating new productive wealth.” The Roman empire's subsequent unraveling would stretch out over centuries.
Maintaining a social apparatus capable of projecting the ideological legitimacy of an elite can become, in and of itself, a terribly expensive endeavor. Temples, pyramids, and churches—not to mention the clergy that run them—can mushroom into a real burden. On the eve of the French Revolution, for instance, the Catholic Church may have consumed as much as a quarter of France's national output.
Religion “evolved to serve as the principal social institution legitimating the human world,” Wisman posits, “and generally did so with near monopoly force.” But the “character of religion” did change as economic and social conditions evolved. In Europe, the transition “from a predominantly agrarian economy commanded by landlords” to a commercial economy “increasingly dominated by a bourgeoisie” came to require “a legitimation that traditional Catholicism could not provide.” Protestantism could.
One example: Both canon and civil law in Catholic countries “condemned taking interest on loans until the eighteenth century.” Most nobles in traditional born-to-power hierarchies had no problem with these condemnations. Those of their Christian subjects “who entered the marketplace,” on the other hand, “found themselves behaving in a manner that conflicted with the religious value system they shared with their community of faith.” This rising bourgeois class “needed a modified Christianity” that would free it from both this cognitive dissonance and the disapprobation of their communities. The emerging new “Protestant ethic,” a perspective that celebrated thrift and hard work, would eventually meet this need and ease the legitimation transition to the new commercial world order.
This transition ill-served both those who benefited the most from the old aristocratic order and those who, in material terms, benefited the least. In the new Protestant world, the Catholic teachings that valued those of precious little means—“Blessed are you the poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God”—would fall into disfavor. This new Protestantism, Wisman maintains, “legitimated an especially uncharitable attitude toward the poor.” As the British socialist historian R. H. Tawney, quoted by Wisman, once so aptly put it: “A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.”
The new Protestantism, sums up Wisman, amounted to “the form of Christianity that European capitalism needed.”
But in this emerging new world order religion alone would no longer suffice as an adequate legitimizer for the inequality that abounded in commercial society's every economic and political corner. A new “free market”-worshipping secular ideology soon exploded onto the scene. Justifications for the wealth and power of the wealthy no longer had to rest on religious claims alone. If everyone pursued their own economic self-interest, this new ideology insisted, everyone would eventually benefit.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Wisman observes, “the open pursuit of self-interest was gaining wide acceptance as a vital force that must be unleashed to enable economic dynamism.” And that vital force, the new trickle-down ideology preached, benefits even the poorest among us because the investments the wealthy make create jobs and opportunity for all. Those who remained poor, this legitimation held, obviously had only their laziness to blame.
This powerful ideological offensive would sweep across the newly industrializing world—but not sweep aside all popular opposition to the concentration of income and wealth. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, daring and spirited worker movements would, Wisman relates, “successfully compete to retain a portion, even if only a small one,” of the surplus workers produced. But this sharing remained extremely unequal, thanks largely, Wisman notes, to the ongoing elite control over ideology. Elites in our modern times have proven remarkably adept at appropriating new doctrines into their ideological arsenal, everything from the racism that turns workers within the same society against each other to the protectionism that turns workers in different nations against one another.
The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality devotes considerable attention to these adaptations throughout the history of the United States, the world's most unequal contemporary wealthy nation. Extreme inequality, Wisman reminds us, has existed from our nation's earliest days. The brutality against the enslaved “that prevailed on Southern plantations,” he points out, “represented the cruelest and most extreme form of inequality” that any modern nation has ever known. Still, by the decades right after World War II, working people in the United States had to a remarkable extent turned the tables. For the first time in the history of human civilization, a majority of a nation's people had disposable income after they paid off the most basic of their living expenses. This stunning success would soon stall.
By the mid-1970s, “a widely shared sense of material insecurity” had enveloped the nation and cleared the political path for a Reaganism that ended the mid-twentieth-century's ambitious bid to promote the general welfare and establish real justice for all. The wealthy would take full advantage. They solidified, Wisman shows, their “control over think tanks, educational institutions, media, politicians, and the courts,” pivotal steps to improving “the likelihood that their self-serving ideology would be well crafted and broadly circulated.” Out of this “greater control” would come an explosive new theme in the deep-pocket ideological arsenal: the government as the enemy of average people.
In earlier generations, Wisman relates, state power did indeed disadvantage average Americans and mainly serve to protect the property of elites and their “ability to appropriate workers’ surplus.” In the twentieth century, in the United States and other nations, people's movements significantly altered that state of affairs and adeptly used state power, on assorted fronts, to advance worker interests.
“Progressive government policies,” as Wisman writes, “gnawed away at upper-class wealth, income, and privilege.”
The elite response: an ideological offensive to convince average Americans that the government had become their enemy, a strategy that “reached takeoff velocity” with Ronald Reagan's 1980 election. Republican rule in the decades ever since has not reduced the overall size of government. It has reduced, as Wisman points out, the “tax revenues available to fund progressive policies.”
“For inequality to be sustainable,” sums up Wisman, the weaker must come to believe that top-heavy distributions of income and wealth somehow fairly serve their interests. This manipulating of working people's sense of fairness to benefit the interests of the wealthy, in effect, amounts to “the essence of ideology,” and, throughout The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality, Wisman makes a compelling case for ideology's importance. But his pages cover so much more, with wide-ranging and eclectic insights that cross over both epochs and disciplines.
Slavery, for instance, figures prominently in Wisman's narrative. The widely esteemed civilization of ancient Athens, he notes, rested on the labors of a population only half “free.” Down through the centuries city and nation states regularly went to war to replenish their enslaved populations. Selling the enslaved could often be even more lucrative “than working them and capturing their surplus.” European elites, for example, “had little of value other than precious metals and slaves to exchange for the luxury goods they desired from the East.” Venice early on became the center for a “thriving slave trade.” Some one million Western Europeans would find themselves sold to Arab merchants.
Over 12 times that number of men, women, and children, Wisman adds, would “be shipped as slaves from Africa,” with about 1.8 million of these enslaved perishing in the unspeakably rancid conditions of their transfer to the Americas.
Wisman also takes pains to remind us how enduring slave status has been. Slavery—the “most debased condition possible for workers”—remained legal until 1848 in France and 1865 in the United States as a whole. Brazil didn’t abolish slavery until 1880, Saudi Arabia until 1962. In 2016, estimates the International Labour Organization, over 40 million men, women, and children were still laboring in slave-like situations.
Amid his grand storylines, Wisman's sprawling text also abounds in engaging forays into distant and exotic places and times. By the year 1500, for instance, China had become “the most technologically advanced country in the world,” leading the way in everything from gunpowder to printing and paper. But a powerful bourgeoisie never evolved in China, where ideological trends going back to Confucius had “depicted the accumulation of private wealth from private trade or manufacturing as profoundly immoral.” China's ruling aristocrats found these Confucian perspectives eminently useful. Any major concentrations of wealth “gained through markets,” after all, “could threaten their status and privilege.” The end result? China, after 1500, “virtually stagnated for the next five centuries as extensive population growth swallowed productivity gains and held living standards near or at subsistence.”
In Europe, meanwhile, a new bourgeois class most certainly did flourish and reshape the European social and economic order. But the benefits from that reshaping left European societies more unequal than ever. Before the outbreak of World War I, Wisman points out, “real wages remained lower than they had been around 1400.”
Within Wisman's expansive narrative, of course, not every element will strike readers as compelling and convincing. For this reader, the most unsatisfying part of Wisman's book would be his first chapter after the introduction, a discussion he devotes to the impact of sexual selection on inequality.
This “Blame It on Sex” chapter certainly does at points make for fascinating reading. The chapter highlights, for instance, what researchers have come to call the “lipstick effect.” In economic hard times, with fewer men having adequate financial resources, “women must compete more vigorously to locate a financially stable mate, and, to do so, they increase their purchases of beauty products.”
Wisman's take on sex and inequality, unfortunately, reaches far beyond reflections like this. Why do we humans, Wisman asks at one point, “strive to outdo others in wealth, privilege, fame, or other markers of high status”? Attaining any of these status markers, he acknowledges, “promises to make life more secure, comfortable, and interesting.” But Wisman sees a still “deeper reason lying within our biology,” a sexual competition “that has driven our evolution.” Elites from time immemorial, he posits, have been “in competition with the each other for the pinnacle of status—a rivalry ultimately driven by sexual competition.” That competition makes sexual selection “the root biological force generating inequality.” Wisman sees this force as driving all sorts of male decisions. Why do men, for instance, join political coalitions? That membership, he posits, “improves the probability of political success and the correspondingly high status that enhances reproductive success.”
Are men angling to rise up in the world actually basing the choice of their political home, as Wisman suggests here, on improving their odds of becoming reproductively successful? We need not see conscious choice at work here, Wisman argues, since humans—and other species in the animal kingdom—“generally act on proximate cues and are unaware of the ultimate reproductive motivation during their desires and actions.”
“High status is sexually attractive,” Wisman further contends. “Over history, the sources of status have varied. Individuals have achieved high status by being the best hunters and gatherers, the best warriors, the most cooperative, the most generous, and, since the rise of the state, the wealthiest and most politically powerful.”
A sensible observation, for the most part. But doesn’t this observation amount to another way of saying that women feel attracted to men who exhibit traits they find attractive? The more unequal the society, the more that economic security matters, the more attractive a “man of means” becomes. The more equal a society, the more prized a cooperative and generous outlook on life will come to feel. The driver to our human sexual behavior seems to reflect our levels of inequality as much as drive them.
Wisman's “claim that sexual selection” constitutes “the ultimate cause of competitiveness and thus the ultimate cause of inequality,” he himself understands, “may run counter to many readers’ self-understanding.” His response to this reader hesitation to accept his contentions? Sex, he argues, “pervades Western cultural practices, both blatantly and covertly.” Sexuality certainly does do that pervading, in everything from soap operas to advertising. But that sexuality has been around for all the millennia of our human existence, and for over 97 percent of that existence, as Wisman reminds us repeatedly in his pages, we have lived “with little political and economic inequality.”
To root our inequality in our sexuality, given this historical lens, seems a reach too far. Other factors must surely be in play. Indeed, as Wisman himself notes, only the “slow adoption of agriculture beginning about 10,000 years ago created the material condition on which a limited degree of social hierarchy could develop.” This agriculture and the civilizations it enabled “set the preconditions for metallurgy and sophisticated military organization, facilitating the rise of the state and civilization.” Social hierarchies would become, over time, “hereditary and increasingly rigid.” Inequality would start becoming, as Wisman details, “extreme.”
But the overreach on sex in The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality in no way erases Wisman's achievement. He has promised “a reinterpretation of human history” that makes the struggle over inequality “the principal defining issue.” He has delivered.
