When efficiency increases, so does inequality?!

The quest for ever more effiency (by means of increasing productivity) often leads to scale-up strategies. But a recent study has detected that scaling up in societal systems leads to increase of inequality, the same way scaling up in natural systems leads to increasing inequality. It is known that increasing inequality may benefit the few (elite) over the many, or in other words: maximization is not evenly distributed. It is also known that increasing inequality may lead to increasing social unrest.

Could we break this self-reinforcing cycle by evaluating strategies that harm the ecology or humanity, and transitioning these to smaller, more locally optimized strategies, scaling-down instead of scaling-up? Exchanging less efficiency for more stability? Optimizing what we can oversee (localization) instead of maximizing what we cannot control anymore (globalization)?