14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators at the Stanford University have determined in a new investigation that the disproportionate amount of suffering the poor experience in relationship to the rich is one of the driving factors behind the spread of class structure-based societies all over the world.
Conversely, more egalitarian societies appear more content with their place, and have a more reduced tendency to spread all over the place. But class structures are forcing many of the poor in expanding societies to try their luck elsewhere.
The new findings may also help explain why stratified societies can be found all over the world, whereas egalitarian ones are very rare. Researchers say that hard times are the final test for the two types of societies, especially when considering the actions of the poor.
What the Stanford team uncovered was that the poor segment of the population in stratified societies appeared to be a lot more capable of spreading and surviving than people in egalitarian societies were.
The main difference between the two societies is that egalitarians promote equal access to resources and opportunities, whereas stratified organizational patterns concentrate most of the wealth in the hands of a select few, while producing a class of poor people, and perhaps a middle-class as well.
“This is the first study to demonstrate a specific mechanism by which stratified societies may have taken over most of the world,” investigator Marcus Feldman explains. The researcher holds an appointment as an evolutionary biologist at the university.
Feldman is also the coauthor of a new research paper accompanying the study, which is published in this week's online issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, a magazine edited by the Public Library of Science.
The investigator and his team say that computer simulations were used for these investigations. The models took into account migration rate and demographic stability for both societal types, and how these factors changed over centuries.
By not providing equal access to resources, unequal societies promoted a destabilizing effect in the general population. Eventually, these pressures forced many to leave cities and villages, and try to establish themselves elsewhere.
“The fact that unequal societies today vastly outnumber egalitarian societies may not be due to the replacement of the ethic of equality by a more selfish ethic, as originally thought by many researchers,” Deborah Rogers explains. She is the lead author of the study, and a cultural evolution specialist.
“Instead, it appears that the stratified societies simply spread and took over, crowding out the egalitarian populations,” the expert concludes.