The so-called "silver spoon" effect -- in which wealth is passeddown from one generation to another -- is well established in someof the world's most ancient economies, according to an internationalstudy coordinated by a UC Davis anthropologist.
The study, to be reported in the Oct. 30 issue of Science, expandseconomists' conventional focus on material riches, and looks atvarious kinds of wealth, such as hunting success, food sharingpartners, and kinship networks.
The team found that some kinds of wealth, like material possessions,are much more easily passed on than social networks or foragingabilities. Societies where material wealth is most valued aretherefore the most unequal, said Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, the UCDavis anthropology professor who coordinated the study with economistSamuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute.
The researchers also showed that levels of inequality are influencedboth by the types of wealth important to a society and the governingrules and regulations.
The study may offer some insight into the not-too-distant future.
"An interesting implication of this is that the Internet Age will notnecessarily assure equality, despite the fact that itsknowledge-based capital is quite difficult to restrict and lessreadily transmitted only from parents to offspring," BorgerhoffMulder said.
"Whether the greater importance of networks and knowledge, togetherwith the lesser importance of material wealth, will weaken the linkbetween parental and next-generation wealth, and thus provideopportunities for a more egalitarian society, will depend on theinstitutions and norms prevailing in a society," she said.
For years, studies of economic inequality have been limited by a lackof data on all but contemporary, market-based societies. To broadenthe scope of that knowledge, Borgerhoff Mulder, Bowles and 24 otheranthropologists, economists and statisticians from more than a dozeninstitutions analyzed patterns of inherited wealth and economicinequality around the world.
The team included three others from UC Davis - economics professorGregory Clark, anthropology professor Richard McElreath and AdrianBell, a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Group in Ecology.
They focused not on nations, but on types of societies - huntergatherers such as those found in Africa and South America;horticulturalists, or small, low-tech slash-and-burn farmingcommunities typical of South America, Africa and Asia; pastoralists,the herders of East Africa and Central Asia; and land-owning farmersand peasants who use ploughs and were studied in India, pre-modernEurope and parts of Africa.
Source: University of California - Davis