Mechanization, Productivity and Inequality: It Was Ever Thus

From United Press International (also on blogroll at right):

Ox-drawn plows to blame for increased inequality in Eurasia beginning in 4,000 BC

The adoption of the ox-drawn plows, not the advent of agriculture, triggered an accelerating increase in inequality among Eurasian societies beginning around 4000 B.C.

"Ox-drawn plows were the robots of the late Neolithic," Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute, said in a news release.

Scientists likened the effects of the ox-drawn plow to the impact of modern mechanization.

"The effect was the same as today: growing economic disparities between those who owned the robots and those whose work the robots displaced," Bowles said.

Bowles and his research partners developed new methods for analyzing architectural data and comparing wealth inequality across different societies, in different places, at different times in history. Researchers used their statistical methods to survey 150 archeological sites, revealing a stark increase in inequality beginning around 4000 B.C. -- several thousand years after the spread of agriculture among Eurasian societies.

Researchers were surprised by how long inequality remained relatively low after the advent of agriculture. The new research, detailed in two papers published this week in the journal Antiquity, undermines the traditional explanation for Neolithic inequality....

....MUCH MORE

Related:
Intensification of agriculture and social hierarchies evolve together, study finds

And:
To Create A "1%" In A Social Hierarchy You Don't Need An Economic Surplus, Just A Storable Form Of Wealth 

So there I was, reading the abstract of "Hazelnut economy of early Holocene hunter–gatherers: a case study from Mesolithic Duvensee, northern Germany", thinking about Nutella and Frangelico when this grabbed my eye:

...High-resolution analyses of the excellently preserved and well-dated special task camps documented in detail at Duvensee, Northern Germany, offer an outstanding opportunity for case studies on Mesolithic subsistence and land use strategies. Quantification of the nut utilisation demonstrates the great importance of hazelnuts. These studies revealed very high return rates and allow for absolute assessments of the development of early Holocene economy. Stockpiling of the energy rich resource and an increased logistical capacity are innovations characterising an intensified early Mesolithic land use...

Stockpiling, storage, commodities, well that's right in our wheelhouse,* and if I can combine it with the last remnants of interest in Piketty's approach to inequality.....maybe I can synthesize something halfway original...

Yeah, it's already been done—Cereals, appropriability, and hierarchy... —....MORE

And:
Following Up On "Commodity traders superior to chimpanzees": The Importance of Pockets

We left Thursday's "Commodity traders superior to chimpanzees, research shows" with the observation that any advantage commodity traders had over their simian cousins could probably be ascribed to pockets or other forms of storage:

...The report becomes particularly readable when it speculates on the reasons why [chimps are lousy traders]: because of their lack of property ownership norms...

...or, for that matter, pockets.... ...chimpanzees in nature do not store property and thus would have little opportunity to trade commodities...

And more dryly:
Move Over Industrial: On the Economics of the NEOLITHIC Revolution