Getting rich and keeping your family wealthy depends on more than wise investing. Conversely, poor families face historical and poverty-induced restrictions to gaining wealth.

Such constraints are among the drivers of increasing and sustained wealth inequality today, says SFI Professor Sam Bowles, head of SFI’s Behavioral Sciences Program.

Bowles and collaborator Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, a professor of anthropology at UC Davis, recently held a workshop at SFI titled "Dynamics of Wealth Inequality." The meeting has become an annual event, held at SFI since 2008.

Human societal structures influence the heritability of wealth, and some aspects of wealth matter more than others depending on the type of economy, Bowles says. Among foragers, for example, material things are not very heritable: objects tend to be shared, and thus matter far less than an individual’s physical strength and ability to hunt.

“Types of wealth differ markedly in how they are passed from one generation to the next,” says Bowles, adding that wealth in this context is defined as anything that helps someone make a living. “Cows and land are highly correlated between generations. A dad with many cattle tends to have sons with many cattle, whereas a father who hunts well can have sons indifferent to hunting.”

Some 30 researchers – among them ethnographers, historians, economists, and statisticians – meet annually to examine inequity and how it spans generations, and share their insights from recent research.

In addition to the highly interdisciplinary group of attendees, another unusual feature of the workshop is its investigative approach. Most socioeconomic studies quantify research using big datasets that cover broad factors about a society in general, such as level of policing and percentage of food from hunting. In contrast, “we’re the first to collect large cross-cultural data, where the units are families,” says Bowles.

“We believe that, rather than studying the rise of inequality in the past, it’s better to emphasize the dynamic setting and see how things change, not just how things are, to give insight into today’s capitalism and what’s to be done with modern injustice,” he says.

This year’s workshop, funded by the National Science Foundation, considered the relationship between polygyny (a form of marriage in which a man is permitted more than one wife) and wealth inequality, and, conversely, the impact of such inequality on family structure.

More about the workshop here