Essentially, low barrier to entry. Something that free education (not necessarily limited to degree-granting colleges, and perhaps living grants for self-study) and a robust safety net could achieve today.

The idea that the inequality trap was avoided, is demonstrated in the relics left behind - and in that regard the article does indeed present data to suggest that wealth was distributed because the culture was based around the distribution - free commerce - of skilled artisans producing valuable goods derived from locally available, abundant resources.

The article does not answer the &quot;how&quot; question.

There was plenty of art being produced in medieval Italy, for example, and it was a feudal society, not free market. (The art was commissioned by wealthy lords and the church.)

Artisans, not just commoners, provide the juice for free market societies. But artisans require resources. A lot can be told about a society on the basis of its resource management; slavery is an extreme response to a lack of resources, or it could also be based on abundance&#x2F;cultural desire for decadence, based on affluence-&gt;scarcity factors - which can indeed be read from the soil and the shards.By looking at the shards and remnants of the dominant industries, we can see that humans self organise as a cultural unit according to what they have available at hand to play with. This is a fundamental key note of the way archeology contributes to our extant society.

&gt; Do you have evidence of this?Sure. Life expectancy, height, and infant survival (all markers of standard of living) rose steadily throughout the free market 19th century in America.By WW2, Americans were the tallest people in the world.

Infant mortality is lower for the bottom decile, almost certainly the bottom percentile in high and middle income countries now than for the very richest and most powerful before antibiotics. Calvin Coolidge’s son died of an infected blister he got from a racket playing tennis.In every continent bar Africa education, healthy lifespan and average wealth as proxied by GDP&#x2F;capita have improved since WWII. Even in Africa education and health have improved, despite AIDS, and it looks like economic growth might finally take off.Some of this is due to technological advances but capitalism beats the pants off all alternative models at that, as we can see from the history of the Soviet Union, which managed to almost keep up militarily with the US while spending twice to three times as much as a proportion of GDP.Slavery is absent in all OECD countries and almost all that are substantially poorer and less economically free.Yes, we have evidence of this.

&gt; Commoners live well in free market societies, and there&#x27;s no slavery.Do you have evidence of this?

Prison labor is not a significant part of the economy.&gt; I&#x27;d say there&#x27;s plenty of slavery and exploitation still going on in &quot;free&quot; market societies.Nobody is going to chase after you, whip you, and chop your foot off if you leave your job. It is nothing like slavery.

No slavery? Much of the prison population is explicitly engaged in unpaid labor. Others are engaged in &quot;modern slavery&quot; where employers don&#x27;t let employees escape. And regular working&#x2F;middle class people are coerced into &quot;voluntarily&quot; choosing which employer they&#x27;ll be exploited by, at the threat of eviction&#x2F;homelessness&#x2F;poverty if they refuse, and further exploited through land rents, health insurance companies, and all sorts of other predatory entities. So I&#x27;d say there&#x27;s plenty of slavery and exploitation still going on in &quot;free&quot; market societies.

I don&#x27;t know how much can be really inferred from digging through buried rubble. We know a lot about Rome because they had writing and people who lived then chronicling life there.Commoners live well in free market societies, and there&#x27;s no slavery. Perhaps that&#x27;s how they lived.For example, the article points out that the height difference between rich &amp; commoners was not so much. But heights improved throughout America in the 1800&#x27;s (quite dramatically, in fact).

Stylish suburbs: how ancient Mexican metropolis dodged inequality trap (2019)