Introduction

Politics is about who gets to make decisions. And our society is made up of various hierarchies where some people have more decision making power than others. The tension between hierarchy and equality has been at the heart of human politics since before we were even anatomically modern human beings. We saw that until about 12 thousand years ago, it was usually equality that came out on top. On to day's episode, we're going to apply what we learned about hierarchy, equality and bargaining power to understand why there are so few agalitarian societies left in the world today.