When setting goals that are impossible to achieve alone or require a disproportionate amount of time and effort, a person can apply different approaches.
First, they can use various tools that save labor in solving the task, despite the fact that some labor is also required to create them. This is the capitalization of labor, that is, the replacement of labor with capital goods.
Second, they can involve more people in solving the task. Each person’s share of the work is smaller, and the task is completed faster. This is cooperation, meaning joint labor.
Third, they can involve not just anyone, but those who specialize in solving such tasks, or divide the task into parts and invite a specialist for each. This is the division of labor, meaning the concentration of people on tasks in which they are relatively more efficient, or which they simply prefer.
All these approaches are designed to increase labor productivity or, equivalently, to reduce the amount of labor required to solve a specific task, such as producing a unit of output.
In a relatively simple economy, a person can manage with the first two approaches for most tasks. They ensure subsistence farming, allow for significant landscape transformations for economic needs, and, in general, for most of history, these two approaches were quite sufficient for the majority of the earth’s population to solve large-scale tasks.
The division of labor is an inevitable requirement for solving not just large-scale, but also complex tasks. In doing so, people cease to be interchangeable, which means inevitable inequality. The ability to solve complex and large-scale tasks encourages people to take on even more complex and large-scale tasks, which require a deeper division of labor, leading to the complication of society and the economy. As a result, inequality also grows.
Inequality irritates people because it is associated with injustice. As a reminder, justice is the feeling of proportionality between cost and reward. In the case of inequality, a person notes: my labor is harder, but the reward is lower. A libertarian would shrug at this, since the deal was voluntary. However, those with different principles may consider the lower return from harder labor to be an injustice. Let’s call this feeling of injustice arising from inequality envy
.To appease envy, people have since time immemorial developed various redistributive practices: potlatch (the ritual destruction of excess wealth during festive feasts), land redistribution, debt forgiveness, taxes, and similar measures. Often, these proved to be a medicine more dangerous than the disease, leading to the stagnation of all development, leaving all members of such a society poor and languishing.
As long as most of humanity declared wealth sinful, humanity had few prospects. The situation changed when envy was declared sinful instead. The accumulation of wealth gradually became safer, leading to the growth of economic capitalization, which increased labor productivity. Subsequently, this process indirectly, through mechanisms of competition, contributed to the growth of wealth even for the relatively less successful members of society.