As we, and before us (way before us) Ben Franklin* have pointed out, the surest way to create a permanent underclass is to keep a population from getting on even the first rung of the wealth accumulation ladder.
In most cases this means real estate, access to which is limited by zoning laws and construction regulations constricting supply. Politicians working for their political masters/funders.
Another way to keep the populace from accumulating wealth is to keep the cost of daily expenses, food, rent, transportation, equal to or a bit above income so there is no accumulation of capital and preferably a slide into debt.
A third way to make the rich richer and the poor poorer is to pump enough money into the system to inflate asset prices, benefiting those who already own the assets and combined with the other factors, keep folks in a hand-to-mouth existence.
There's more but that's just what comes to mind without thinking too hard.
And the headline story from the amazingly eclectic Inverse, December 2020:
Every society has a tipping point.
In the largest study of its kind, a team of scientists from Washington State University and 13 other institutions examined the factors leading to economic inequality throughout all of human history and noticed some worrying trends. Using a well-established score of inequality called the Gini coefficient, which gives perfect, egalitarian societies a score of 0 and high-inequality societies a 1, they showed that civilization tends to move toward inequality as some people gain the means to make others relatively poor — and employ it. Coupled with what researchers already know about inequality leading to social instability, the study does not bode well for the state of the world today.
“We could be concerned in the United States, that if Ginis get too high, we could be inviting revolution, or we could be inviting state collapse. There’s only a few things that are going to decrease our Ginis dramatically,” said Tim Kohler, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and a professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology in a statement.
Currently, the United States Gini score is around .81, one of the highest in the world, according to the 2016 Allianz Global Wealth Report.
Kohler and his team had their work cut out for them, as studying inequality before the age of global wealth reports is not a straightforward task. It’s one thing to measure modern day economic inequality using measures of individual net worth, but those kind of metrics aren’t available for, say, hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo during the Paleolithic. To surmount this obstacle, the researchers decided to use house size as a catch-all proxy for wealth, then examined the makeup of societies from prehistoric times to modern day using data from 63 archaeological digs....
....MORE
If interested see also "Archaeologists Identify Ancient Wealth Gap"
*In September 2013's "Ben Franklin on Labor Economics (or how to create an underclass)" I intro'd with:
The easiest way to create a dependent class is to price them out of the real estate markets.And June 2020:
"In countries fully settled…those who cannot get land must labor for others that have it; when laborers are plenty, their wages will be low; by low wages a family is supported with difficulty; this difficulty deters many from marriage, who therefore long continue servants and single...."In the United States The Land Ordinance of 1785 set the cost of land purchased from the government at $1.00 per acre in sections of 640 acres.
This price was raised to $2.00/acre in 1800 but purchase was paid for in four equal annual payments.
In 1820 the price of Federal lands was reduced to $1.25 per acre with payment in cash.
An alternate conveyance in the 1862 Homestead Act maintained the $1.25 price.
Compare the wages various craftsmen could command:
In 1785 a journeyman carpenter in New York City was paid $1.12 ½ per day....
Haves and Have Nots: The Real Real Estate State and Artificial Scarcity, Technology and Planning
And August 2020
"The Asset Economy" (or how to create an underclass)
