Economic inequality is not a recent thing. Far from being a fatality of human history, it emerges and is reinforced in particular socioeconomic contexts, as Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute) and Mattia Fochesato (Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University) show in their recent study The Origins of Enduring Economic Inequality, published in the Journal of Economic Literature. This research offers us a lens for reading the past, but more importantly for understanding the present: the structural causes at the roots of the concentration of wealth in pre-modern societies are still at play today, albeit in different forms.

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