Intergenerational Wealth Transmission among Agriculturalists

Abstract

This paper uses data from eight past and present societies practicing intensive agriculture to measure the transmission of wealth across generations in preindustrial agricultural societies. Focusing on embodied, material, and relational forms of wealth, we compare levels of wealth between parents and children to estimate how effectively wealth is transmitted from one generation to the next and how inequality in one generation impacts inequality in the next generation. We find that material wealth is by far the most important, unequally distributed, and highly transmitted form of wealth in these societies, while embodied and relational forms of wealth show much weaker importance and transmission. We conclude that the unique characteristics of material wealth, and especially wealth in land, are key to the high and persistent levels of inequality seen in societies practicing intensive agriculture. We explore the implications of our findings for the evolution of inequality in the course of human history and suggest that it is the intensification of agriculture and the accompanying transformation of land into a form of heritable wealth that may allow for the social complexity long associated with agricultural societies.

Domestication Alone Does Not Lead to Inequality

“…r p 0.38 P p .217 The nontrivial b's and measured inequality are remarkable, given the roughly egalitarian nature of these four horticultural societies. Overall wealth transmission (mean b weighted by a) for horticulturalists is low (0.18), very close to that calculated for hunter-gatherers (0.19), and about half of that reported for pastoralists and intensive farmers (see Borgerhoff Mulder et al 2010, in this issue; Shenk et al 2010, in this issue; Smith et al 2010). The importance of such low b's, however, should not be underestimated: a b of 0.2 implies that a child born into the top wealth decile of the population is 3.6 times more likely to remain in the top decile than is a child whose parents were in the bottom decile (as discussed in Bowles, Smith, and Borgerhoff Mulder 2010).…”

Specialization and social inequality in Bronze Age SE Arabia: analyzing the development of production strategies and economic networks using agent-based modeling

“…Interestingly, the observations generated by this model support recent findings that transmittable wealth is closely associated with persistent inequality Shenk et al, 2010) and more complex social organization (Gurven et al, 2010). Our model can account for Smith et al's (2010b) notions of both material wealth (livestock, land, tools, goods) and embodied wealth Table 4 Average number of each type of specialist agent at various time steps, broken down by run type.…”

Determinants of epidemiologic transition in rural Africa: the role of socioeconomic status and drinking water source

“…Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene than embodied or relational kinds of wealth, as is true for agricultural societies such as in this research area. [26][27][28][29] In our study population, socioeconomic status has been primarily determined by material household property that is passed from parents to children, such as cattle, vehicles and iron roofing. 9,11,12 Migration has been related to rapid changes in socioeconomic status, 30 but annual migration in this research area was low.…”