My two cents!
Like nature, we - human-beings - always want shortcuts, or in other words, we want to optimize things in order to achieve a certain goal with less effort as quickly as possible. The optimization problems, in this sense, can be viewed as, for example, maximizing productivity, producing wealth. I’m not sure this is due to our biological evolution or just a social trait that is reflected in many many societies from East to West. In this note, I would argue that, in doing this optimization, imperceptibly, we are generating or allowing a hierarchy structure.
First of all, we don’t have any reasonable metrics to define happiness. Of course, this is varied case by case, community by community, and is different within different societies and cultures. On the other hand, I think we couldn’t deny the fact that the whole world is operating around the circulation of money, or basically, the flow of wealth and capital. So let make an assumption here that human-beings want to optimize their time and efforts to build wealth or make more money. Perhaps, money-related-mindset is one of the intrinsic traits of human-beings. On the other side of the equation, this may foster the competition and cooperation to produce/invent advancements and lots of useful stuff. Surely, ethical aspect is important here, but let’s rule this out of the equation for simplification.
So, how this optimization is driving or allowing a growth of a social hierarchy? I am thinking about two examples here: in the course of the development of human civilization, human-beings tend to be specialized in a variety aspects of productivity advancements that requires coordinations. To operate this coordinations between different wheels in the giant economic machine, hierarchy emerges as a results of optimizing resources by generating different managements or layers. The second example is the development of a company where hierarchy structure emerges when scaling a start up into a big corporation.
Of course, hierarchy structure would be useful in many ways. For example, in a high pressure situation (e.g., wars or disasters), timely decisions can be made very quick to adapt strategies and reduce ambiguity. At the same time, this structure may also concentrate power, wealth, as well as reduce autonomy. In my view, hierarchy in our social structure represents a tradeoff between coordination/optimization vs social equality, and that’s why leadership becomes super important to operate such system efficiently and equally.
Just my 2 cents!
References
[1] Heilbroner, R.L., 2011. The worldly philosophers: The lives, times and ideas of the great economic thinkers. Simon and Schuster.