Are Humans Egalitarian?
A common motive for studying “egalitarian” primitive social practices is a hope of supporting something like the following narrative:
We humans evolved to see ourselves as naturally egalitarian. This is shown by the highly egalitarian practices of modern foragers, who represent our best guess of typical ancestral practices until roughly 10,000 years ago. Modern non-egalitarian social practices are thus likely an affront to natural human morality and add to our modern alienation, stress, conflict, and unhappiness. We should thus move government policy toward more financial redistribution, to make more equality.
We have good reasons to doubt this narrative. Yes, there are many social processes common in human societies that often substantially cut particular kinds of inequality. Such as sharing, risk-pooling, reputation-building, status-leveling, consensus collective decisions, and mobility. However,
the main motives for participating in such processes was not to reduce inequality,
each such process only cuts a few types of inequality, not inequality in general, &
societies have varied greatly in which processes they supported, and in their details.
This suggests that humans do not in fact have a general moral norm of egalitarianism.
Yes, cultural evolution, our best theoretical account of the origin and shaping of such processes, does suggest that such processes were once often adaptive, and that part of their adaptive benefit was often to cut inequality. However, the fact that our more recent ancestors have tended to drop such processes suggests they are no longer as adaptive.
We thus have at best only rather weak reasons to expect modern alienation, stress, conflict, or unhappiness today to result from our using such processes less. And no concrete reason to expect that reviving such practices would be adaptive on net. Given our weak data on cross-cultural happiness or meaning, we also have little evidence to suggest that such policies would help much today with such outcomes.
If we were all "naturally" egalitarian, then socialists wouldn't need to do anything, we'd already be living in their world. Whereas in fact we need to arrange society pretty damn carefully to keep a lid on inequality.
On hunter gatherer egalitarianism:
Yes, they shared food very equally, largely because it was a matter of both survival and allocating resources when a hunter got more resources than he or his family could consume before the meat became unsafe. It's a collective "hunting success" insurance pool for hunted calories that made sense from several directions.
But good hunters ALSO got more wives, which is very much less "egalitarian." Even today, good hunters in HG societies have between 1.5x - 2.5x more children:
https://imgur.com/a/TryLk7E
A full 87% of Hunter Gatherer societies *today* have between 5 and 20% of the men practicing having multiple wives, and it must have been an even bigger factor in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA).
Historically, ~80-90% of women reproduced and 30-40% of men. This was informed speculation at the time of the time of Baumeister's APA address, where this factoid first surfaced, but genetic data has since proven it over ~150k years.
Yellow line, right hand axis:
https://imgur.com/JWIsva9
Obviously this is an extremely adaptive and Lindy social practice that we would do well to consider for ourselves.
Hunting has gone out of style, but we all know the top 1% pay 40%+ of all the taxes, which is surely the closest modern allegory to hunting a big kudzu and bringing it back for the tribe.
I personally think we should do something fun here, like "for every year that you've paid more than $100k in taxes, you get an additional wife permit," and then being out and about with multiple wives is a status signal, and both genders love status symbols!