"Most societies" is a meaningless term. Measuring "most" is impossible and any metric is more or less going to come out of a value judgment to begin with. Some human societies have a lot of equality and some have a lot inequality.
The only useful point is that inequality can easily arise by chance but appear as "meritocracy" after the fact, being self justifying.
Anyway, the main question is "what level of inequality or equality do we want?" That is, for some value of "we" able to make it's choice come to fruition. Maybe that "we" is the elite, that small number of people at the top already. Indeed, at points in America's history, the elite actually saw considerable value in some level of equality but that seems well in the past. Maybe that we is a larger group (the voters, "the working class", "angry people", who knows). That larger group would need to be able to do something more than be unhappy, of course.
> "Most societies" is a meaningless term. Measuring "most" is impossible and any metric is more or less going to come out of a value judgment to begin with. Some human societies have a lot of equality and some have a lot inequality.
I would bet there are true (though perhaps simple or obvious) claims which can be made in sociology and/or anthropology about "most societies." Such, as, perhaps, burying the dead.
Are you a sociologist or anthropologist? Or, do you have some other claim to expertise in this domain? If so, forgive my critique.
Fine, I should perhaps say "in this context, 'most societies' is a meaningless term." - though I would hope that contextualizing is obvious.
As far as expertise goes, I think all one needs is moderate acquaintance with statistics to learn the "most" is a slippery generalization whenever one gets to get complex phenomena in wide-ranging contexts. And human societies and their interrelations are some of the most complex and slippery of them.
I think you're reading their phrasing in an ungenerous way. Please consider the Hacker News guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
The article authors lead a paragraph by saying "most societies", but they go on to characterize what they mean with greater specificity and provide citations to further research on the topic:
> Several societies have seen as little as 1% of their population own approximately 50% of the total wealth. This was the case in many Western countries around 1900, including Britain, France, and Sweden, and some claim that at present, roughly 1% of the population owns 50% of total wealth at the global level (1, 2).
> We focus on wealth and not income distribution, which is much less unequal and—perhaps surprisingly—poorly correlated with wealth inequalities across countries (SI Appendix, section 2). As a first illustration of the similarities of patterns in nature and society, consider the wealth distribution of the world’s richest individuals compared with the abundance distribution of the Amazon’s most common trees (Fig. 1 A and B). The patterns are almost indistinguishable from one another.
> For a more systematic comparison, we also analyzed the Gini indices of a wide range of natural communities and societies (Fig. 1 C and D) [emphasis mine]. The Gini index is an indicator of inequality that ranges from 0 for entirely equal distributions to 1 for the most unequal situation. [...] Surprisingly, Gini indices for our natural communities are quite similar to the Gini indices for wealth distributions of 181 countries (data sources listed in SI Appendix, section 1).
If you want to critique their argument, please consider examining the societies that they included in the analysis described above. They appear to be examining societies that are countries, probably because economic data is available aggregated at the country level.
The authors could have chosen a much more neutral title and opener, like "Trends toward inequality in human society can occur through processes akin to evolutionary dynamics" and then they wouldn't have had to dial back anything.
The only useful point is that inequality can easily arise by chance but appear as "meritocracy" after the fact, being self justifying.
Anyway, the main question is "what level of inequality or equality do we want?" That is, for some value of "we" able to make it's choice come to fruition. Maybe that "we" is the elite, that small number of people at the top already. Indeed, at points in America's history, the elite actually saw considerable value in some level of equality but that seems well in the past. Maybe that we is a larger group (the voters, "the working class", "angry people", who knows). That larger group would need to be able to do something more than be unhappy, of course.