From the Institute for New Economic Thinking, January 18:
Can we live by values of mutual aid and the sharing of resources, or are we destined for heavily stratified inequality? As long as there have been economies – and one-percenters benefiting from their design — there have been arguments about the “naturalness” of unequal conditions. We’re selfish creatures, so the argument goes, and some of us will just naturally be better off. Suck it up.
A flurry of articles concerning a December 2021 study in the journal Behavioral Ecology featuring new insights into intergenerational wealth and inequality in the animal world has ignited a new round of debate on this ancient topic.
Researchers found that among beasts, it pays to be born into privilege. Certain squirrel mothers who hoard nuts and pine cones, for example, will end up bequeathing food stores to a few of their offspring, thus upping their chances of survival. “Red squirrels are born with a silver spoon in their mouths,” quips the New York Times. High-ranking hyenas are able to pass on status to daughters (they’re matriarchal, those clever hyenas), who inherit the right to the best meat, while some monkeys obtain tools to crack nuts from their parents, giving them extra advantage.
The Times article is quick to state that the researchers were prompted to study the topic out of concern about increasing inequality during the pandemic and simply wanted to see what humans could learn about the topic from nature rather than justify intergenerational wealth.
But it is kind of interesting that this particular bit of research has proven popular with the World Economic Forum (WEF), that august group of global elites which gathers annually in the tony ski resort of Davos (the physical gathering has been postponed this year due to Covid) to tell the world what’s what with the economy. An article sponsored by that body asks readers to consider the clownfish. The clownfish, it turns out, can inherit the right to hiding places from its parents, thus enabling it to avoid predators that snack on less privileged fellows...
....MUCH MORE
...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.
...MORE*****....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.
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
- 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.
- 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....
