Wealthy contemporary societies exhibit varying extents of economic inequality, with the Nordic countries being relatively egalitarian, whereas there is a much larger gap between top and bottom in the United States. Borgerhoff Mulder et al. (p. 682; see the Perspective by Acemoglu and Robinson) build a bare-bones model describing the intergenerational transmission of three different types of wealth-based on social networks, land and livestock, and physical and cognitive capacity-in four types of small-scale societies in which livelihoods depended primarily on hunting, herding, farming, or horticulture.
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