| Literature DB >> 35506231 |
Eli D Strauss1,2,3,4, Daizaburo Shizuka3.
Abstract
Individuals vary in their access to resources, social connections and phenotypic traits, and a central goal of evolutionary biology is to understand how this variation arises and influences fitness. Parallel research on humans has focused on the causes and consequences of variation in material possessions, opportunity and health. Central to both fields of study is that unequal distribution of wealth is an important component of social structure that drives variation in relevant outcomes. Here, we advance a research framework and agenda for studying wealth inequality within an ecological and evolutionary context. This ecology of inequality approach presents the opportunity to reintegrate key evolutionary concepts as different dimensions of the link between wealth and fitness by (i) developing measures of wealth and inequality as taxonomically broad features of societies, (ii) considering how feedback loops link inequality to individual and societal outcomes, (iii) exploring the ecological and evolutionary underpinnings of what makes some societies more unequal than others, and (iv) studying the long-term dynamics of inequality as a central component of social evolution. We hope that this framework will facilitate a cohesive understanding of inequality as a widespread biological phenomenon and clarify the role of social systems as central to evolutionary biology.Entities:
Keywords: intergenerational wealth transmission; niche construction; social evolution; social mobility; status-seeking behaviour; wealth inequality
Mesh:
Year: 2022 PMID: 35506231 PMCID: PMC9065979 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2022.0500
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Proc Biol Sci ISSN: 0962-8452 Impact factor: 5.530
Figure 1A schematic of the ecology of inequality. Centre circle: inequality describes the distribution of wealth among individuals, which can be measured using metrics borrowed from economics (box 1). Top left: wealth is taxonomically broad and occurs in many currencies, grouped into three aspects. Top right: inequality emerges from individual wealth through bottom-up causation and has a top-down influence on individual outcomes, both directly and via its effects on group outcomes. These effects are independent of the effects of wealth, but can feed back to influence wealth and inequality. Bottom left: multiple ecological (e.g. food/water distribution) and behavioural (e.g. wealth inheritance) processes are hypothesized to influence the amount of inequality in societies, but it is less clear at what scale this influence occurs or to what degree these processes operate across species. Bottom right: inequality is dynamic. Active and passive processes produce changes in wealth within an individual's lifetime and across generations, leading to typical wealth trajectories over the lifespan. The amount, timing and direction of wealth trajectories are expected to exert selection on individuals to optimize their experienced costs and benefits of sociality. (Online version in colour.)