Nicholas Wade

Most of them have iPhones.

So why does inequality matter?

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

So why do we want status?

status is important to people because it gives you a bigger claim on societal resources, especially in early days when people were living on the edge of starvation.

So if you were a big cheese in a small society, you were more likely to survive than if you had very low status.

So this, I think, is the reason why

inequality is sort of jarring to us.

There isn't really a good logical reason in a country that has a decent welfare system why we should be bothered about inequality.

It's our inherent yearning for status and feeling that we're diminishing our chances of survival if we don't have it.

Another aspect of inequality, I think, which I have a chapter on in the book, is that

it's much harder to get rid of than you might think for purely genetic reasons.

And that is that human societies, I think, are much more mobile, have been much more mobile in the past than we imagine.

So even in aristocratic societies, the aristocrats, half of them would die in battle every generation.

So how did they fulfill their ranks?

Well, it was sort of rich commoners could buy a title or marry a duke's daughter.

And so there was new blood constantly infusing into the aristocracy.

So there's a fascinating series of papers by an economist called Gregory Clark in which he measures mobility in English societies over the centuries.

And it's very slow.

The people at the top do gradually descend in the social scale, presumably because their sort of merit, whatever merit got them to the top is sort of diluted genetically.