Inequality Cycles

Discussion

Michael A. Alexander:

"Inequality cycles associated with secular cycles have been identified in pre-industrial societies (Turchin and Nefedov 2009:36, 82). A secular cycle is a “demographic-social-political oscillation of very long period (centuries long)” (Turchin and Nefedov 2009:5). They arise from population cycles (Korotayev et al. 2006). In an agrarian economy, demand for labor is ultimately limited by the maximum amount of arable land, while labor supply is proportional to population. As the fraction of arable land under cultivation approaches one, rising population means a rising labor supply relative to an increasingly fixed labor demand which leads to lower real wages and rising economic inequality. Thus, population and inequality trends are correlated, either can serve to define a secular cycle. Several models that describe how population/economic inequality affects elite number, state strength and sociopolitical instability in agrarian societies have been proposed (Turchin 2003:123; Turchin and Korotayev 2006:122; Turchin 2013:251). Some of these have been shown to give a good fit of historical data (Alexander 2016). The empirical and theoretical methods developed for agrarian societies do not apply to industrial societies."

(https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42p5m46m)