Thomas Piketty
Economic inequality is not an inevitable product of nature or technology, but a political construct sustained by the historical narratives societies invent to justify who owns wealth and who does not.
Throughout history, human societies have organized wealth and power through distinct inequality regimes, such as premodern trifunctional orders and modern proprietarian systems, which rely on ideological narratives to justify social stratification.
The shift from premodern ternary societies to modern ownership societies substituted the functional duties of the clergy and nobility with a sacralization of absolute private property rights.
Comparative historical evidence shows that similar levels of technological development produce vastly different distributional outcomes, indicating that market forces do not naturally dictate inequality levels.