Wealth inequality

Wealth inequality

Wealth inequality refers to the uneven distribution of wealth among individuals and entities. Although most research depends on written sources, archaeologists and anthropologists often view large houses as occupied by wealthy households. The distribution of contemporaneous house sizes in a society (perhaps analyzed using the Gini coefficient) then can be regarded as a measure of wealth inequality. This approach has been used at least since 2014 and has shown, for example, that ancient wealth disparities in Eurasia were greater than those in North America and in Mesoamerica following the earliest Neolithic period.