 The emergence of government as organized violence-cum-robberyCoen Teulings, Bas J.P. Van Bavel and Bram van Besouw No 18974, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research Abstract: The transition from tribal societies to hierarchical chiefdoms occurred several millennia after the Neolithic Revolution as a first step towards the emergence of states. The standard explanation for this transition is the stationary bandit model, where societies economize on investment in arms as the chief installs a monopoly of violence. We propose an alternative model where we show, first, that small egalitarian tribes can contain violence by everybody monitoring everybody else combined with low investments in arms and, second, that larger chiefdoms rely on a monopoly of information and monitoring by the chief. This monopoly accounts for a Hicks-Kaldor efficiency gain of chiefdoms, but also offers the chief extraction power making most of society worse off. In contrast to the stationary bandit model, our model shows that chiefdoms require more investment in arms while saving on monitoring cost compared to tribes. Our model has explanatory power beyond the transition from tribes to chiefdoms. Keywords: Emergence of hierarchy; Monopoly of violence; Neolithic revolution (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:18974 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK. |
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