Clyde G. Reed

The Origins of Inequality: Insiders, Outsiders, Elites, and Commoners

Hereditary economic inequality is unknown among mobile foragers, but hereditary class distinctions between elites and commoners exist in some sedentary foraging societies. With agriculture, such stratification tends to become more pronounced. We develop a model to explain the associations among productivity, population, property rights, and inequality. Using Malthusian dynamics, we show that regional productivity growth leads to enclosure of the best sites first, creating inequality between insiders and outsiders. Hereditary elite and commoner classes subsequently arise at the best sites. Food consumption becomes more unequal and commoners become poorer. These predictions are consistent with a wide range of archaeological evidence.

Open fields, risk, and land divisibility

Abstract Why were open fields pervasive in the middle ages? Our findings support the general contention that behavior towards risk explains the persistence of open fields, but we reject the mechanism of diversification via scattered landholdings. Simulation analysis is used to estimate the relative efficiency of alternative forms of insurance available to peasant households. We find that, for the vast majority of peasants, self-insurance through land accumulation was a superior risk management/wealth accumulation strategy, but only if land could be transacted in small parcels. Scattering existed because it transformed land into a divisible savings instrument.

Tariffs and growth: The dales hypothesis

Abstract The impact of Canadian tariff policy on economic growth has been a source of conjecture among economic historians for decades. The dominant model of this interaction has been devised by John Dales (1966) . Dales has argued that although the tariff reduced real per capita income in Canada, it stimulated extensive economic growth. This follows directly from three assertions: (1) The tariff caused the aggregate demand for labor in Canada to rise. (2) Per capita income was not an argument in the Canadian immigration function, and therefore, the tariff did not cause the supply of foreign labor (immigrants) to decrease. (3) Immigration was instead determined by the policies of Canadian immigration authorities who regulated the flow of immigrants in an effort to maintain a constant money wage level. This paper examines these assertions. We conclude that the effect of the tariff on aggregate labor demand depends upon untested assumptions about the nature of production technology, and that, on the basis of regression results, we fail to reject per capita income as a significant determinant of Canadian immigration. We find only limited statistical evidence to support the proposition that the Canadian authorities allocated immigration on the basis of a wage rule.

The Transition to Agriculture: Climate Reversals, Population Density, and Technical Change

Until about 13,000 years ago all humans obtained their food through hunting and gathering, but thereafter people in some parts of the world began a transition to agriculture. Recent data strongly implicate climate change as the driving force behind the transition in southwest Asia. We propose a model of this process in which population and technology respond endogenously to climate. After a period of favorable environmental conditions during which regional population grew, an abrupt climate reversal forced people to take refuge at a few favored sites. The resulting spike in local population density reduced the marginal product of labor in foraging and made agriculture attractive. Once agriculture was initiated, rapid technological progress through artificial selection led to domesticated plants. Farming became a permanent part of the regional economy when this productivity growth was combined with climate recovery. The available data on cases of transition and non-transition are consistent with this model but are often inconsistent with rival explanations.

THE ECONOMICS OF EXOGAMOUS MARRIAGE IN SMALL-SCALE SOCIETIES

Marriage is a core institution in almost every human society, including small‐scale societies based on foraging or subsistence agriculture. A crucial dimension of the marriage systems in such societies involves endogamy and exogamy, that is, the choice of a marriage partner from within ones own community or from an outside community. We develop a model in which the exogamy rate is higher when good local matches are scarce due to small community sizes, and when productivity differs across communities due to environmental shocks. These theoretical predictions are supported by econometric analysis of data from the standard cross‐cultural sample.