Private Property Evolves

For John, BLUF:  Agriculture is about private property.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

At NPR is a 13 May article by Rhitu Chatterjee on why humans transitioned from hunter/gatherers to farmers.  One result of farming was population increases.  The source of this concept is Dr Samuel Bowles,♠ from the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico.  The title of the article is "Why Humans Took Up Farming:  They Like To Own Stuff".

For decades, scientists have believed our ancestors took up farming some 12,000 years ago because it was a more efficient way of getting food.  But a growing body of research suggests that wasn't the case at all.

"We know that the first farmers were shorter, they were more prone to disease than the hunter-gatherers," says Samuel Bowles, the director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, describing recent archeological research.

Bowles' own work has found that the earliest farmers expended way more calories in growing food than they did in hunting and gathering it.  "When you add it all up, it was not a bargain," says Bowles.

So why farm?  Bowles lays out his theory in a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The reasons are complex, but they revolve around the concept of private property.

Think of these early farmers as prehistoric suburbanites of sorts.  The first farmers emerged in less than a dozen spots in Asia and South America.

Joseph Stalin and his theorists thought to reverse this evolutionary development by going with collectivist agriculture.  The result was millions of death, the worst being part of the the Holodomor in the Ukraine between 1932 and 1933.

UPDATE:  From The InstaPundit:  "I BELIEVE THE ANSWER IS THAT THE “EARLIEST FARMERS” WERE GROWING GRAIN FOR BEER.  That’s why they were willing to put more work in than the calories produced justified."

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Interestingly enough, Dr Bowles, while at MIT was see as being a Neo-Marxian economist and is identified with Post-Walrasian Economics.