• Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 days ago

    I remember reading many years ago that we had passed the level of wealth stratification in ancient Egypt when the pharaoh owned all of the land by the Nile and leased it to peasants to grow food, so uhh I’m guessing “no”.

      • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        6 days ago

        It’s a complex topic that I’ve only scratched the surface of, and of course with thousands of years of history there were multiple systems with multiple levels of stratification at different times, but during the time of building the pyramids at least we know from written records that the Pharoh in theory had extremely strong, centralized control of the country through a system of ownership of the land and its resources, which allowed them to marshal all of that labor into megaprojects like the pyramids. Later dynasties weren’t able to do this, not because they lacked the technology or desire, but because economic control had decentralized to a degree where they simply couldn’t control labor the way their predecessors did.

        From there there’s a lot of extrapolation, assumptions, and estimates, and it’s totally valid to say that those estimates are too unreliable or that comparing an ancient economy to the modern one is an apples to oranges comparison and therefore not applicable. If we limit ourselves to just industrial economies the answer to the original question is still “no” but the data is much more concrete.