Re:Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality
by Mirioron on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @10:03PM
(#21709619)
What you say is true, but when people usually talk about inequality, they're talking about inequality in a specific country. In your example that would be inequality inside a single village rather than between the villages.
Also, with similarly bad faith you could say that when the first group was building their huts, the second group was sharpening their sticks. Once the huts were completed they used their sharpened sticks to coerce the richer people (those with huts) to give them huts too.
The largest village gets very rich while extracting all the resources and goods from the smaller villages around it. The largest village is able to ram through treaties, trade pacts etc that favor it's interests, it is able to interfere in politics of surrounding villages and sometimes provides backing to despots or outright overthrow leadership of smaller villages that might be doing something the largest village does not agree with.