Local Competition Amplifies the Corrosive Effects of Inequality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Inequality is widely believed to incite conflict, but the evidence is inconsistent. We argue that the spatial scale of competition-the extent to which individuals compete locally, with their interaction partners, or globally, with the entire population-can help settle the question. We built a mathematical model of the evolution of conflict under inequality and tested its predictions in an experimental game with 1,205 participants. We found that inequality increases conflict, destroys wealth, and engenders risk taking. Crucially, these effects are amplified by local competition. Thus, inequality is at its most damaging when it arises between close competitors. Indeed, at the extremes, the combined effects of inequality and the scale of competition are very large. More broadly, our findings suggest that disagreements in the literature may be the result of a mismatch between the scale at which inequality is measured and the scale at which conflict occurs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".