Were We Expelled from Egalitarian Eden Not by the Pomegranate, But by the Plough and the Ox? Perhaps...

Portable tools, farmstead implements, domesticated animals, serfdom, & slavery—with increased civilizational complexity the dimension of the space of potential inequalities increases, & do we need more than that to account for our expulsion from Gatherer-Hunter Age egalitarian Eden?…

A very nice brand-new paper from Sam Bowles and Mattia Fochesato tracing oru expulsion from Gatherer-Hunter Age egalitarian Eden to—no surprise—the state and slave-raiding war and also—here is the innovation—plausibly to the ox and the plough:

Bowles, Samuel, & Mattia Fochesato. Forthcoming 2024. “The Origins of Enduring Economic Inequality”. Journal of Economic Literature. <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20241718>.

(But where is their coäuthor Amy Bogaard?)

What do I say? I say perhaps.

Perhaps there is some complicated story about the ox and the plough leading to a great reduction in the extent to which land is subject to decreasing returns, and hence to the the erosion of the “culture of aggressive egalitarianism [that] may have thwarted the emergence of enduring wealth inequality until the Late Neolithic when new farming technologies raised the value of material wealth relative to labor…”

But, as always in these literatures, we run headlong into the first-order problem of prehistoric sociobiology and biosociology: claims are almost always just-so stories by which people project what they think of the present onto a distant past, of which we know very, very little, and assert much more strongly than they should that things must have been that way long ago.

I would seize the high ground of the null hypothesis, and ask Bowles and Fochesato to work harder to push me off of it. I would say that we have, here, five dimensions of acquisition and accumulation: tools you can carry, tools and implements at your farmstead, animals, the serfdom that is coërcion of farmers within reach, and slavery.

Is there much more going on here than simply an expansion of the dimensionality of the space of possible wealth inequality, and so we get more of it?

And may I say that whenever I have to think of Gini coefficients, I get hives?