Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, and the Evolution of Social Stratification

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. (1) greater surplus production, (2) more equitable divisions of the surplus among specialists, Terms of use: Documents in EconStor maygreater cultural isolation among subpopulations within a society, and (4) more weight given to economic success by cultural learners. We also analyze how competition among societies, both egalitarian societies and those with differing degrees of stratification, influences the long-run evolution of the institutional forms that support social stratification. In our discussion, we illustrate the model using two ethnographic cases, explore the relationships between our model and other existing approaches to social stratification within anthropology, and compare our model to the emergence of heritable divisions of labor in other species. 1993, Durkheim 1933, Fried 1967, Gilman 1981, Lenski, Lenski, and Nolan 1991, Ruyle 1973, Service 1975. Here, we focus on understanding "stratification," as the emergence and persistence of institutionalized economic differences between social groups.Inequality is ubiquitous. Within every human society, individuals of different ages, genders or abilities receive different shares of the overall economic output. In some societies these differences are glorified and exaggerated, while in others they are more subtle and often go unacknowledged, yet they are always there (Fried 1967). Our puzzle, however, is not this ubiquitous inequality among individuals, but persistent inequality among social groups, like classes, castes, ethnic groups, and guilds. Because such groups include a wide sampling of people, it is not plausible that inequality results from innate differences in size, skill, or the like among the individuals who make them up (Richerson and Boyd 2005a). Instead, these differences must result from something that individuals acquire as a consequence of group membership. This leads to the obvious question: why don't people on the wrong side of such inequalities adopt the skills, practices, behaviors, or strategies of the people in the group or groups who are getting a disproportionately large share of the economic benefits produced by a society?Scholars have given at least three kinds of answers to this question (Durkheim 1933 1979). While each of these solutions to the puzzle has its partisans, the longevity of the debate suggests that none are completely satisfactory.Here we present a novel model for the emergence of social stratification, without coercion, deception or exogenous source...

The Economics of Social Stratification in Premodern Societies

“…In addition, upper-class propaganda could deceive the lower classes into believing that economic inequalities are in their best interest (Cronk 1994;DeMarrais et al 1996). If people tend to be in ‡uenced by members of their own social classes, lower-class people could just learn to play their disadvantaged role in society without questioning (Henrich and Boyd 2008). Yet another possibility is that the network structure of a society may impede the formation of lower-class coalitions that could force a redistribution of wealth (Kets et al 2011).…”

Human Cumulative Cultural Evolution as a Form of Distributed Computation

“…Stories, myths, and moral doctrines play an important role in the cultural transmission of norms of social behavior as well as useful information about survival (Chudek and Henrich 2011). Moreover, the spread of organizational norms through narratives, religions, and other social institutions have enabled the creation and transmission of emergent group-level traits that rely on social organization and division of labor (Henrich and Boyd 2008;Smaldino, in press). The capacities of human populations for the storage and transmission of collective information constitute a feat of evolutionary computing unmatched in the natural world.…”

The social diversification of fashion

“…Finally, our work enlarges the number of studies that make use of the evolutionary paradigm outside biology, to study, just to mention a few, social [Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981, Mesoudi, 2009, Shennan, 2001], 14 economic [Henrich and Boyd, 2008], technological [Dercole et al, 2008[Dercole et al, , 2010b, cultural [Boyd and Richerson, 1988, Efferson et al, 2008a, Foley and Mirazón Lahr, 2011, Henrich and McElreath, 2003], linguistic 16 [Nowak and Krakauer, 1999], and religious [Atran andHenrich, 2010, Doebeli andIspolatov, 2010] evolution and diversification through human history [Mesoudi, 2011, Richerson andChristiansen, 2013], with mutual 18 benefits of the various social science disciplines.…”