Lecture: The Nature of Wealth and the Dynamics of Inequality from Pre-history to the Knowledge-based Economy

November 20, 2009

11:00am

Location:	SOM 112 (wheelchair accessible)
Contact:	Professor Anna Nagurney, (413) 545-5635, nagurney@gbfin.umass.edu
	Event Website

Professor Sam Bowles of the Sante Fe Institute will deliver this lecture as part of the Fall 2009 Operations Research / Management Science Seminar series. All are invited to attend.

 

Topic: The Nature of Wealth and the Dynamics of Inequality from Pre-history to the Knowledge-based Economy

 

Abstract: The continuum of inequality in human societies ranges from foraging bands with a strong egalitarian ethos to more highly stratified agrarian and industrial economies. No empirically-tested model of the stability of these differences over long periods of time or of the transitions among them exists. I address this puzzle with a dynamic model in which a population's long-run steady-state inequality depends on the extent to which its most important forms of wealth are transmitted within families across generations. A new data set allows comparable estimates of the intergenerational transmission of different types of embodied, material, and relational wealth as well as the degree of wealth inequality for 21 historical and contemporary populations. I show that intergenerational transmission and wealth inequality is substantial among pastoral and small-scale agricultural societies (on a par with the most unequal modern industrial economies) and quite limited among horticultural and foraging peoples (equivalent to the most egalitarian of modern industrial populations). These findings and the model thus may help explain why permanent and substantial inequalities in wealth are characteristic of agricultural and pastoral economies and not of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists. They also suggest a possible dramatic transformation of the dynamics of inequality in the knowledge-based economy.

 

More information about this guest speaker.

 

This series is organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Support for this series is provided by the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of Finance and Operations Management, and the John F. Smith Memorial Fund.