Must-Read: Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson: Pre-Industrial Inequality
Must-Read: And the ‘winner’ for all time–in terms of success at extracting as much wealth from the workers as possible given resources, population, and technology–is Mughal India in 1750!
: Pre-Industrial Inequality: “Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution?…
…Or were pre-industrial incomes as unequal as they are today? This article infers inequality across individuals within each of the 28 pre-industrial societies, for which data were available, using what are known as social tables. It applies two new concepts: the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio. They compare the observed income inequality to the maximum feasible inequality that, at a given level of income, might have been ‘extracted’ by those in power. The results give new insights into the connection between inequality and economic development in the very long run.