We've looked at some aspects of pre-historic inequality a few times. If interested see after the jump.
*
From the always interesting Heritage Daily:
An international team of archaeologists have discovered that a wealth gap existed in the Neolithic, around 6,600-years-ago.
At the town of Osłonki, in Poland, some people were buried with more
valuable artefacts than others—including some of the first copper
artefacts in Northern Europe. However, researchers were unsure whether
this inequality in death translated into a wealth gap in life. Whilst
such gaps have been established in other periods of history, this is not
the case for the Neolithic.
The possibility remains that wealthy graves may reflect funerary
donations to valued community members, so may not translate into an
individuals wealth in life. To investigate this, Dr Chelsea Budd, from
Umeå University in Sweden, and an international research team examined
stable isotopes from different burials at Osłonki.
Stable isotopes are chemical elements incorporated into someone’s
skeleton that vary based on their diet. “Initially, we were just
interested in studying the food they ate to understand the development
of farming in early prehistoric Europe.” said Dr Budd.
However, the results, published in the journal Antiquity, revealed
that those buried with valuable beads and elaborate copper artefacts, do
seem to have been wealthier in life as well as in death. Specifically,
the isotopes indicate they likely had greater access to cattle from
high-quality pastures....
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MORE
* To Create A "1%" In A Social Hierarchy You Don't Need An Economic Surplus, Just A Storable Form Of Wealth
This is a repost from January 2, 2017.
Original post:
So there I was, reading the abstract of "
Hazelnut economy of early Holocene hunter–gatherers: a case study from Mesolithic Duvensee, northern Germany", thinking about Nutella and Frangelico when this grabbed my eye:
...High-resolution analyses of the excellently preserved and well-dated
special task camps documented in detail at Duvensee, Northern Germany,
offer an outstanding opportunity for case studies on Mesolithic
subsistence and land use strategies. Quantification of the nut
utilisation demonstrates the great importance of hazelnuts. These
studies revealed very high return rates and allow for absolute
assessments of the development of early Holocene economy. Stockpiling of
the energy rich resource and an increased logistical capacity are
innovations characterising an intensified early Mesolithic land use...
Stockpiling, storage, commodities, well that's right in our wheelhouse
,*
and if I can combine it with the last remnants of interest in Piketty's
approach to inequality.....maybe I can synthesize something halfway
original...
Yeah, it's already been done.
Here's VoxEU, September 2015:
Cereals, appropriability, and hierarchy
The Neolithic Roots of Economic Institutions
Conventional theory suggests that hierarchy and state institutions
emerged due to increased productivity following the Neolithic transition
to farming. This column argues that these social developments were a
result of an increase in the ability of both robbers and the emergent
elite to appropriate crops. Hierarchy and state institutions developed,
therefore, only in regions where appropriable cereal crops had
sufficient productivity advantage over non-appropriable roots and
tubers.
What explains underdevelopment?
One of the most pressing problems of our age is the underdevelopment
of countries in which government malfunction seems endemic. Many of
these countries are located close to the Equator.1 Acemoglu et al.
(2001) point to extractive institutions as the root cause for
underdevelopment. Besley and Persson (2014) emphasise the persistent
effects of low fiscal capacity in underdeveloped countries. On the other
hand, Diamond (1997) argues that it is geographical factors that
explain why some regions of the world remain underdeveloped. In
particular, he argues that the east-west orientation of Eurasia resulted
in greater variety and productivity of cultivable crops, and in larger
economic surplus, which facilitated the development of state
institutions in this major landmass. Less fortunate regions, including
New Guinea and sub-Saharan Africa, were left underdeveloped due to low
land productivity.
In a recent paper (Mayshar et al. 2015), we contend that
fiscal capacity and viable state institutions are conditioned to a major
extent by geography. Thus, like Diamond, we argue that geography
matters a great deal. But in contrast to Diamond, and against
conventional opinion, we contend that it is not high farming productivity and the availability of food surplus that accounts for the economic success of Eurasia.
- We propose an alternative mechanism by which environmental
factors imply the appropriability of crops and thereby the emergence of
complex social institutions.
To understand why surplus is neither necessary nor sufficient
for the emergence of hierarchy, consider a hypothetical community of
farmers who cultivate cassava (a major source of calories in sub-Saharan
Africa, and the main crop cultivated in Nigeria), and assume that the
annual output is well above subsistence. Cassava is a perennial root
that is highly perishable upon harvest. Since this crop rots shortly
after harvest, it isn't stored and it is thus difficult to steal or
confiscate. As a result, the assumed available surplus would not
facilitate the emergence of a non-food producing elite, and may be
expected to lead to a population increase.
Consider now another hypothetical farming community that grows a
cereal grain – such as wheat, rice or maize – yet with an annual produce
that just meets each family's subsistence needs, without any surplus.
Since the grain has to be harvested within a short period and then
stored until the next harvest, a visiting robber or tax collector could
readily confiscate part of the stored produce. Such ongoing confiscation
may be expected to lead to a downward adjustment in population density,
but it will nevertheless facilitate the emergence of non-producing
elite, even though there was no surplus.
Emergence of fiscal capacity and hierarchy and the cultivation of cereals
This simple scenario shows that surplus isn't a precondition for
taxation. It also illustrates our alternative theory that the transition
to agriculture enabled hierarchy to emerge only where the cultivated
crops were vulnerable to appropriation.
- In particular, we contend that the Neolithic emergence of fiscal
capacity and hierarchy was conditioned on the cultivation of
appropriable cereals as the staple crops, in contrast to less
appropriable staples such as roots and tubers.
According to this theory, complex hierarchy did not emerge among
hunter-gatherers because hunter-gatherers essentially live from
hand-to-mouth, with little that can be expropriated from them to feed a
would-be elite.2
- Thus, rather than surplus facilitating the emergence of the
elite, we argue that the elite only emerged when and where it was
possible to expropriate crops....
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MORE
*See, for example:
The Golden Age of Commodities Market Manipulation: Corners, Storage and Squeezes
These days however, to purloin that wealth, you don't even need to be dealing with storables:
How to Manipulate Non-storable Commodities Markets
From September's "The Paradox of Profit Margins and Another Look at the Theory of Everything":
...If you're interested in the effect of hoarding on commodities prices
Janet Netz, PhD did a paper I liked, "The Effect of Futures Markets and
Corners on Storage and Spot Price Variability". I'll see if we have an
ungated copy.
Remember, the spectrum runs from storage to hoarding to market corners.
And corners in commodities refers to physical, you can't corner a commod
by simply buying futures or forwards, you also have to take up the
physical supply.
Conversely, squeezes are accomplished in the futures..
A couple decent papers on this aspect of the abundance theory are:
"Large Investors, Price Manipulation, and Limits to Arbitrage: An Anatomy of Market Corners" and
"Market Manipulation, Bubbles, Corners and Short Squeezes"
The only way to combat abundance is with artificial scarcity, i.e. manipulation....
Well we don't have an ungated copy of the Netz but we do have a snappy
little 66 page paper by Craig Pirrong who you may know by his nom de
blog The Streetwise Professor. His is one of the few blogs that posts on Gazprom more than we do though we probably have more on Enron.
Via the University of Houston's Bauer College of Business and hosted at ScienceDirect:
On the other hand, storing electricity is pretty much the ultimate dream of venture capitalists:
Storage: How to Hoard Electricity (GE; SI)
Bill Gates: "It Is Surprisingly Hard to Store Energy"
Batteries: The Venture Capitalist's Holy Grail
And quite a few more, use the search blog box if interested.
