Stone Centre Symposium 2024
The evolution of wealth inequality: debates on the role of culture, institutions and technology, and lessons for today
Thursday 27 June 2024 | British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace
Most quantitative studies of wealth inequality are based on tax records from the last couple of centuries in economies with little variation in institutions, culture, and technology compared to the vast differences humans have experienced over the course of prehistory and history.
The Stone Centre brought together a stellar line up from across the disciplines to spend a day working on this question:
What can we learn from the evolution of wealth inequality since prehistory, about the processes sustaining extraordinary wealth inequality today, and policies to secure a more just distribution in the future?
Presentations
Presentation slides from the speakers are available online. We were joined by:
- Sam Bowles, Professor, Santa Fe Institute on Origins of enduring wealth inequality.
- Amy Bogaard, Professor of European Archaeology, University of Oxford on Ancient technology and inequality. A global perspective.
- Simon Johnson, Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship and Professor of Global Economics and Management, MIT on Technology and inequality over the last millennium
- Walter Scheidel, Dickason Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Classics and History, Stanford University on Politics, crises and the great equalizer
- Suresh Naidu, Professor of International and Public Affairs and Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics, Columbia University, responding to Simon Johnson and Walter Scheidel
- David Wengrow, Professor of Comparative Archaeology, UCL, responding to Sam Bowles and Amy Bogaard
> Photos from the day are available online.
We're working on making speakers' recordings available online. Keep checking this page regularly.
Authors
Stone Centre
Stone Centre at UCL.