Inequality and Designated Victims

Hunter-Gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian.  Civilizations and agricultural societies generally, tend to be hierarchical.  Why so?

One possibility is that the greater productivity and fertility of agricultural societies means that they are always bumping up against the Malthusian bound, the maximum population the land and technology can support.  Peter Turchin has explored this idea in his books, including War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires. He documents how Europe has suffered a repetitive cycle of depopulating wars, followed by peace and a rapid expansion of population until individual farmers have been forced to ever smaller farms or more marginal farmland until the society has become broadly impoverished, at which point widespread wars break out as adventurers and the desperate seek more land at the expense of others. These wars depopulate both losers and winners.

Of course the other horsemen of the apocalypse who also do their part.

But I want to focus on another mechanism of destruction that works even in stable societies without catastrophic wars: having a wealthy rentier class that spend on mansions, parks, and luxuries while their tenants disproportionately starve and die of the other diseases of poverty.  Institutions like primogeniture and restriction of inheritance to males guarantee that the wealthy will not become too numerous while the poor are depleted by the consequences of their poverty.

One reason socialism has never been successful in such societies is that there is no such obvious way to control population, and Malthusian economics means that all starve equally.

Fortunately we live in a time when less draconian methods of birth control work, and many societies have managed to achieve population stability or decrease.  We can hope that all do before the next catastrophic wars become inevitable.