Appendix VI Toward a Necessity Synthesis of Political Economy

Since ancient Greece, scholars have regularly identified the idea of necessity as the key motivating force behind societal evolution. Although the terminology has changed radically over the years, ranging from terms like ananke, chreia, and necessitas in ancient times to “standard/level of living,” “relative deprivation,” “backward-sloping supply of labor,” and “population pressure” in modern times, the core concept remains the same‑-that hard times or relative poverty spurs greater efforts to make a living and plush times or relative prosperity encourages slacking off. In the twentieth century, social scientists‑-although often unaware of parallel cross-disciplinary developments‑-have pushed the idea to a level approaching a true synthesis of political economy that demands attention because it continues to explain historical and cross-cultural behavior better than competing frameworks.

Not Just Invention

Before attempting to outline a necessity synthesis, we should make clear some of the inherent problems in creating such a synthesis. First, we need to take into account the great number of forms that necessity takes. Early modern political economists tended not to think of economic, demographic, and sociopolitical factors in separate and distinct categories. The market, population pressures, and allocation of resources were not mutually exclusive elements in the analysis of political economy. Depending on one’s situation, necessity could equally arise from either lower or higher market prices, either increasing or decreasing population. Later scholars have continued to recognize the similarities in impact between long-run environmental, economic, or demographic changes and short-run natural disasters and business slumps; between population pressure due to population growth or environmental change; or economic, sociopolitical, or physical coercion. ¹ Studies of household and community responses to famine and other disasters reveal little difference between “absolute” and “relative” levels of necessity in the types and direction of responses. ² Indeed, some scholars have noted that all societies employ cultural indicators of deviations from cultural standards (for example, declining resource variety, increasing work loads, intensifying competition) to warn of impending stress well ahead of physiological standards in order to activate response strategies. ³ Similar studies concentrate on how peasants and family farmers survive in the age of capitalism and the coping strategies of the urban poor in Western and Third World cities. ⁴ Although different types of necessity may promote particular types of response, the differences are not remarkable and, in general, a concept of generalized necessity well captures the overall effect of all these different types of necessity.

But even if we consolidate types of necessity, we still face the problem of the great diversity of responses to necessity. Just as there are economic-demographic-sociopolitical problems, there are economic-demographic-sociopolitical solutions. ⁵ And, indeed, necessity has, throughout history and across cultures, shown itself to be a highly unpredictable mother. Observers of society from ancient times to the present have made much of the fact that in the same circumstances one can easily visualize radically opposing “positive” and “negative” responses to necessity. Pitirim Sorokin formalized this positive-negative dichotomy in his “law of the diversification and polarization of the effects of calamity,” which Robert Dirks has summarized quite elegantly as “disaster brings out the very best and the very worst in people.” ⁶

Clearly, in order to avoid merely cataloguing the potentially limitless combinations of types of response to necessity, we need some scheme of categorization. Unfortunately, a priori schemes in the social sciences have often been one of the major problems in inhibiting the development of a synthesis, fragmenting the analysis of particular types of response into “demographic,” “economic,” “social,” “cultural,” and “political” responses according to one’s discipline and therefore missing the interdependence among such categories. While some scholars acknowledge that such arbitrary typologies are made strictly for heuristic purposes, clearly at some point typologies approach diminishing returns. ⁷

Recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of such typologies, the following discussion divides potential responses to necessity into eleven broad, overlapping categories: production extensification; production intensification; production diversification/specialization; production innovation; migration; population control; consumption moderation; savings moderation; horizontal organization; vertical organization; and resource allocation. For heuristic purposes, production/consumption/savings responses might generally be treated as economic; migration/fertility control as demographic; and organization/allocation as sociopolitical. However, whether discussing the three broad or the ten narrow categories, the tremendous amount of overlap between these categories should preclude any notion of mutual exclusivity. Additionally, one can easily conceive of a more complex typology with alternative categories or even non-responsiveness as a category. ⁸ But for present purposes, this typology seems to strike a healthy balance between exclusivity and inclusivity.

Even if one accepts such a categorical scheme, developing a synthesis still faces other hurdles. Differences in terminology between different disciplines often inhibit simple identification of the response and its causation and, even where disciplines share the same terminology, the lack of rigorous definitions for terms like “population pressure” sometimes makes interpretation difficult. ⁹ Furthermore, although care has been taken to assure that a particular work fits a necessity model, this is an overview of particular ideas rather than particular scholars. Several scholars in one work will seemingly take a compatible approach but in another work take a distinctly different position for many different reasons. ¹⁰ Some intend their interpretation to apply only to a particular place, time, or event. Some scholars extend their model only to pre-capitalist peoples, some only to Western (or modern) peoples, and others to universal human nature. In addition, scholars from ancient times to the present have often been quite obscure on the unit of response, whether individual, family, household, community, society, population, world, or universe. Indeed, insights may (and frequently do) come from any and all of these levels.

In scanning a seemingly infinite body of literature for particular insights into a necessity synthesis, I focused on a few key points to justify inclusion: the use of particular keywords (for example, necessity, coping, deprivation, pressure, stress); key citations (for example, Boserup, Chayanov); the types of causes (for example, declining real income, diminishing per capita resources, absolute or relative poverty); and the types and direction of response. Although works may and should recognize how the pull of opportunity affects the particular response, priority should clearly be given to the push of necessity. The relationship between cause and response should be to some degree reversible; like the backward-sloping supply, a rise and a fall in real earned income should produce opposite effects. ¹¹ But what clearly stands out in reviewing this literature is the great regularity of the types of interdependent responses to relative and absolute poverty that scholars continue to identify across time, space, and culture, so regular that one might say a necessity school of thought exists even if the participants are not fully aware of the similarities between their works.

Production Extensification

The simplest solution to necessity is “production extensification,” to increase the scale of production within the existing “production system” (the total combination of production strategies). This response–most commonly conceived as areal or geographical expansion whether of a household, community, or society–depends on the relative abundance of resources of similar quality to those presently employed and relatively constant returns to factors of production (labor, land, capital). ¹² Extensification was regularly recognized as both an ideal and an actual response to necessity from the age of Protagoras through the age of Malthus. ¹³

As with all other categories of response, this category merges with other categories. For example, production extensification represents merely one end of a continuum of production intensification responses. Similarly there is an extensification-migration continuum based on the relative degree of geographical separation and sociopolitical break with the previous place of residence. Extensification is also historically closely associated with warfare when other groups stand in the way of group extensification forcing either warfare or alternative responses. ¹⁴

The response is as applicable to the earliest hominids spreading over the face of the earth as it is to later dispersals of people with more “intensive” production systems. ¹⁵ One can easily envision a series of different “production frontiers” or von Thünen rings continuously spreading outward over time and space from some metropolitan core, a framework first developed by agricultural economist Ernst Laur in the early twentieth century. ¹⁶ Empirical evidence reveals, ceteris paribus, a ubiquitous preference for extensification over other responses, reflected in perpetuation of and regression to slash-and-burn agricultural systems under conditions of relative land abundance. ¹⁷ Inherent in the notion of necessity as the mother of invention as well as classical environmentalism, this preference has frequently been labelled (often citing Boserup who did not use the term) as an example of the “law of least effort,” but such a principle like the widesweeping assumption of a “leisure preference” can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding if it leads to a failure to recognize conditions in which effort arises from necessity or competing “preferences.” ¹⁸

Production Intensification

“Necessity is the mother of industry,” a universal backward-sloping supply of labor, and a general “leisure preference” all capture the essence of this response. ¹⁹ Or as the !Kung Bushman replied when asked why they did not turn to agriculture: “Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” ²⁰ As already mentioned, intensification can be considered part of an extensification-intensification continuum, an alternative response when extensification is impossible or constrained. Intensification, according to Ester Boserup, occurs only with diminishing returns under an existing production system and comes at the expense of labor efficiency. Intensification is distinguished from innovation in implying no change in the production system, merely increased effort within the same system, although this may require shifting to more intensive technology earlier incorporated into the production system (but unemployed except in periods of necessity). However, as Boserup’s work itself shows, the distinction between intensification and innovation is rather complex and not always helpful.

Following Boserup (and to a lesser degree A. V. Chayanov), scholars have most often linked these ideas to the shift to more labor intensive agricultural systems (for example, from slash-and-burn techniques to the plow). Indeed, the Boserup thesis is supported by much archaeological, historical, and contemporary evidence on the origins and spread of agrarian systems. ²¹ But the same principles have also been applied to other production systems, for example, to explain the shift to more time- and labor-intensive prey or from individual to communal hunting among hunters. ²² This evidence also shows a strong tendency for the process to reverse under conditions of non-necessity or “population relaxation,” such as during colonization or frontier migration from more developed regions, or after catastrophes, when humans regularly revert back to less intensive production strategies. ²³

Production Diversification/Specialization

Denotatively, diversification and specialization are antonyms. One could readily develop a formula for distinguishing diversification from specialization (based, perhaps, on changes in the percentage of total production of the leading production strategy) so that any particular response to necessity could be categorized as either specialization or diversification. A tendency to see these as opposites is also heightened by polemical debates which focus on the extremes of the slippery slope between independent self-sufficiency or “moral economy” and proletarianization. ²⁴ However, they should not be treated simply as opposing responses for their similarities outweigh their differences as responses to necessity. Both diversification and specialization can involve increased effort (and thus also fall under production intensification), the adoption of new strategies (innovation), or simply a shifting of the balance among present strategies. ²⁵ Furthermore, unlike production intensification, there is no a priori reason for judging which direction necessity should take.

The recent focus on “proto‑industrialization” or cottage industries with its accompanying impact on the division of labor within the household shows that diversification and specialization cannot be so easily separated in historical development. Scholars, following A. V. Chayanov, have explicitly linked the rise of proto-industrialization to the necessity of peasant-farmers, whether in the form of Malthusian population pressure on the land, a declining population and thus reduced demand for agricultural goods, interregional competition, and/or other market factors. ²⁶ Here diversification is merely a stepping stone to increased specialization in response to the same necessity (although the literature makes unclear whether this dual response reflects opposing responses of different households or a two-stage process in the same household). ²⁷ Whether the response tends more one direction or another depends on the associated resources, opportunities, and risks. Diversification is traditionally associated with division of labor within the household in pre-market economies while specialization rises with the division of labor within the society, the rise of manufactures and trade, rural‑urban migration, and proletarianization. Nevertheless, modern firms clearly employ both strategies. ²⁸

Numerous analyses of contemporary Third World and Western economies have identified similar patterns of diversification and specialization. For example, there are strong links between increased by-employment and changes of the division of labor within the household in response to declining real household income. ²⁹ This explains much of the ambiguous results of female labor supply elasticity mentioned above. Indeed, sociologist Robert V. Robinson, summarizing recent work in nineteenth-century American urban history, calls the “economic necessity” hypothesis “the dominant hypothesis in the social historical literature on the nineteenth-century family economy.” This hypothesis states that “income-generating strategies” were adopted by working-class families only out of “necessity” due to the stigma associated with such activities. ³⁰

At some point, however, efforts at diversification often lead to increased specialization, particularly noticeable in the shift from agricultural to non-agricultural and wage employment, but also in what sociologist Harriet Friedmann has called the shift from diversified peasant production to “simple commodity production” (specialized staple production) tied much closer to the market. ³¹ Yet such terms as simple commodity production suggest an unwarranted either/or dichotomization. For example, historian Richard Bushman shows in industrializing America that the shift to industrial labor was merely part of a continuum from diversification to specialization since the industrial laborers in many ways treated their urban home as a farm substitute. ³² If social historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have repeatedly noted the difficulty in distinguishing between “work” and “leisure” in pre-industrial societies, scholars of both pre-industrial and industrial society have equally shown that individuals and households allocate much of their day to numerous activities which cannot properly be called either production or consumption. Whether labelled “reproductive labor,” “domestic labor”, “work inside the home,” “Z-goods,” or “home goods,” households allocate their time to diverse “activities” and/or “commodities.” ³³ Changes in the mix of home and market activities and/or commodities in response to necessity tend toward increased Z-good production in the absence of suitable market opportunities (both for production and consumption). ³⁴ Similarly, a wide consensus exists on a tendency toward a widening of the food and resource niche and diversification of activities (including wage labor) under conditions of declining or increasingly unstable resource availability, a concept equally applicable in prehistoric as modern times. ³⁵

Production Innovation

Numerous nineteenth-century students of industrialization‑-like Charles Babbage, William Brassey, and Lujo Brentano–argued that necessity motivated the conservative “capitalist” classes. Indeed, Brassey and Brentano explicitly quoted “necessity” as the “mother of invention” to justify high wages which would force employers (caught in a cost-price squeeze) to search for improved technologies and organizational reforms to increase their profitability. ³⁶

This response at the heart of the notion of necessity as the mother of invention, as well as classical accounts of the rise of the arts and civilization, stresses the willingness for normally risk-aversive individuals or groups to gamble on new, risky, or unpredictable strategies in the face of necessity. If successful, these strategies become incorporated into the production system.

Production innovation typically involves either the creative act of invention itself or the adoption of pre-existing inventions of other groups. Although production innovation primarily involves improvements in technology and organization, this response overlaps in general with all innovative aspects of other economic, demographic, and sociopolitical responses. ³⁷

In particular there is a lot of overlap between production intensification and production innovation. Many of the experimental and field studies of farming insurance, and business corporation mentioned in Chapter 4 show a normal part of the process of intensification is the search for new strategies. ³⁸ Yet, since innovation involves new strategies, it differs from intensification in introducing a qualitatively greater level of risk and uncertainty. ³⁹ Among pre-classical economists, although risk and uncertainty were recognized as inherent in any entrepreneurial activity, innovation was generally treated merely as a corollary of increased effort and did not receive theoretical treatment until the twentieth century. ⁴⁰ The modern theories frequently link innovation to a “safety-first principle,” or a universal preference for risk aversion, but such widesweeping assertions sometimes ignore the degree to which “risk-seeking behavior” regularly arises from necessity. ⁴¹

Studies of responses to famine regularly show a hierarchical adoption of progressively more irreversible and thus more risky strategies in response to a growing food shortage. ⁴² The concept has even been applied to the formation of laws and government policy, both under normal and crisis conditions in modern society. ⁴³

Migration

The major difference between migration and simple extensification rests on the degree of the break with the previous residence–a function of distance, means of transportation/communication, and irreversibility. ⁴⁴ Furthermore, although migration by definition changes population density in the region of migration, the act of migration does not by itself eliminate either necessity or population pressure for either the migrating or remaining population, just as migration during a famine does not guarantee food. ⁴⁵ Rather, migration is simply part of a process combining one or more other responses in the face of necessity. For example, one household’s emigration allows production extensification by remaining households. Migrating households need to adapt old strategies or develop new strategies in their new residence and thus often seek environments highly similar to the one departed in order to preserve as much “human capital” as possible. ⁴⁶ On a continuum from temporary to permanent migration, migration might be part of a process of temporary diversification (for example, by-employment) or permanent specialization (for example, proletarianization). ⁴⁷

Population Control

Population control implies a response more general than traditional discussions of fertility control, one that includes other forms of sociocultural phenonema like mortality, adoption, enslavement, recruitment, banishment, and other efforts to control the quantity and quality of the members of some group. The broader definition fits well within the modified Chayanovian approach to household formation highlighted by several recent social scientists.

All societies have maintained some means of fertility control whether direct regulation of fertility/mortality (for example, contraception, abortion, sterilization, abstinence, infanticide) or indirect mating/nuptiality regulation (for example, age at marriage, taboos on pre‑marital sexual intercourse, celibacy, homosexuality). ⁴⁸ Students of society have recognized such forms of fertility/mortality control as a response to necessity since the time of Polybius. ⁴⁹

Such fertility/mortality control is perhaps starkest in hunter‑gatherer societies where abortion and infanticide are regularly practiced because too many children prove a hindrance to regular movement. However, the response is equally straightforward in Western society where the standard of living into the twentieth century was ubiquitously defined as “the number of other wants whose satisfaction the individual considers of more importance than that of the procreative instinct.” ⁵⁰ The gathering of accurate vital and economic statistics beginning in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries confirmed long-standing beliefs that the vital processes (birth, death, marriage, divorce) were directly affected by agricultural and business cycles with a strong positive correlation between changes in real income and nuptiality/ fertility. ⁵¹

While this evidence of a negative correlation between necessity and nuptiality/fertility is relatively clear-cut, the picture has been complicated by studies of nuptiality/ fertility control in the context of multi-response adjustments to industrialization. Lujo Brentano’s seminal thesis highlighted an initial reduction of age of marriage and increase in fertility in the early phases of industrialization (as factory work provided the opportunity for setting up a household) followed in later phases by a gradual increase in age of marriage and decrease in fertility accompanying a rise in the standard of living. ⁵² Early studies of proto-industrialization seconded Brentano’s finding that the early stages of industrialization led to younger marriages and increased fertility, but differed on whether this response represented a traditional response to rising real income or a novel response to necessity (a means to counteract declining real income by taking advantage of the new opportunity for child and adult female labor). ⁵³ Some more recent studies have shown that the increase in nuptiality/fertility occurred only under particular conditions, especially the opportunity for female employment. ⁵⁴ Regardless, all of these interpretations are perfectly consistent with the necessity synthesis outlined here. ⁵⁵ Although the strongest case has stressed responses to necessity of decreased fertility or increased mortality, there does not appear to be any a priori reason why the response cannot be in the opposite direction, taking into account the possible role of children in terms of long-run (rather than short-run) necessity, like insurance against parents’ old age. ⁵⁶

A similarly complex debate centers on whether necessity tends to promote nuclear or extended households. ⁵⁷ Most scholars agree that economic opportunity (for example, new farm areas, production innovations, market opportunities) leads to the break up of the extended family, an earlier age of first marriage, and the establishment of the nuclear family, while economic necessity leads to the opposite. ⁵⁸ Chayanov showed how households responded to changes in the ratio of the numbers of workers to consumers in the household by hiring in or hiring out workers. ⁵⁹ Other studies have demonstrated how adoption and fosterage can serve as “an alternative form of group recruitment.” ⁶⁰ Of course, there is no reason why Chayanovian logic should be restricted solely to the necessity generated at particular times during the family life cycle. Since Plato and Aristotle, scholars have noted that households turned to servants or slaves to solve the production problems of the domestic economy. ⁶¹ In turn, Aristotle, Sir William Temple, and Francis Hutcheson observed that necessity could induce individuals to join relatively wealthy extended households as servants or slaves. ⁶²

Consumption Moderation

This response is implicit in the seventeenth-century axiom “Necessity is the mother of frugality” (or “oeconomy” or “parsimony”) which implied that periods of rising real incomes will see increased consumption and periods of declining real income will lead to decreased consumption. Nevertheless, the same scholars who have sought to relegate the backward-sloping supply of labor to backward peoples, whether in seventeenth-century England or the modern Third World, have regularly presumed that this behavior arises from fixed wants, the concept known as the “target income hypothesis.” ⁶³

Indeed, the target income hypothesis has never had a theoretical basis other than in bourgeois biases against certain kinds of consumption. ⁶⁴ Because of these biases, studies of consumption in Western societies have often provided greater insights into the role of consumption moderation in the necessity synthesis than the usually reliable modern peasant studies. ⁶⁵ Although the necessity synthesis would not go so far as John Maynard Keynes in claiming a “fundamental psychological law,” it would support his introspection that

a priori from our knowledge of human nature and from the detailed facts of experience, [we know] that men are disposed, as a rule and on the average, to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as the increase in their income. ⁶⁶

Later economists would offer more specific formulations of this basic formula including the nature of standards of living and the role of time lags, but would not refute Keynes’s basic insight into the nature of the relationship between income and consumption. ⁶⁷

Before Keynes, Chayanov and Frank H. Knight more definitively incorporated consumption moderation within a general necessity model that hypothesized a backward-sloping supply of effort while rejecting the TIH. Chayanov, challenging some of his Russian contemporaries who indeed postulated an “existence minimum,” explicitly argued against the TIH on both theoretical and empirical grounds. ⁶⁸ Knight’s argument rested on the belief that a higher wage rate naturally leads individuals to increase expenditures equally “in all fields” including leisure and material goods.” ⁶⁹

Other scholars, while making no contribution to the question of elasticity of demand, have implied that there is nothing inherent in the lack of a market, money, or capitalism that dictates fixed wants. Since classical times, observers have highlighted the ubiquitous desire of men for distinction. ⁷⁰ Most commonly associated today with Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, this desire has also been linked to other forms of prestige-seeking including conspicuous leisure, production, giving, saving, or destruction. Most societies possess ceremonies for conspicuous giving, often in the form of public redistribution through charities, feasts, and potlatches. ⁷¹ In more recent years, the study of Third World consumption has been significantly improved by the recognition of the great overlap between domestic production and consumption, although so far this approach has added little to the target income debate. ⁷²

The case against the TIH is impressive. The same evidence (see Chapter 4) that shows a cross-national elasticity of short-run labor supply in the range ‑.10 to ‑.30 shows this elasticity to be far above the ‑1.0 implied by the TIH. Furthermore, this finding has been confirmed by numerous studies of Western and non-Western household budgets alike from the late eighteenth century to the present. ⁷³ Chayanovian cross-cultural analyses of farm and peasant households have demonstrated the positive income elasticity for market goods. Even with limited money requirements, increased productivity and higher agricultural prices lead to increased consumption and savings of farm-produced goods by these households. ⁷⁴ Anthropologist Max Gluckman reports that in most tribal societies the goods flowing into the prestige economy increase with the level of surplus. ⁷⁵ Studies of responses to the threat of famine or immediate famine have regularly highlighted the shifting from preferred foods to less-liked foods normally ignored, rationing of current food consumption, and reduction in the quantity and quality of resource-intensive ceremonies. ⁷⁶ Studies of the urban poor have shown similar responsiveness. ⁷⁷

Savings Moderation

Necessity as the mother of frugality, besides reduced consumption, also implies increased savings, since then as now frugality means “every man’s spending less than he has coming in, be that what it will.” ⁷⁸ But clearly this presents a paradox in view of much of the consumption literature cited above. When savings is defined simply as the residual out of income after consumption (Savings = Income – Consumption) then savings naturally tends to increase with rising real income (or non-necessity) according to Keynes’s “fundamental psychological law.” ⁷⁹ Or, as Sir William Petty suggested, the poor had to “lay up” in good times “against the time of their impotency and want of work.” ⁸⁰ Similarly, Chayanov noted the growth of capital formation with a rise in gross income and studies of Third World agrarian households have shown that increased farm productivity leads to increased savings of farm-produced goods. ⁸¹ Since much of the abundant evidence on consumption cited above also supports the savings half of Keynes’s law and so far we have seen no reason to doubt either pre-classical or the Keynesian view, obviously we need a more complex understanding of the relationship between necessity, frugality, and savings. This will require dissecting the arithmetic formula which links savings and consumption as antitheses.

The critique of the bourgeois analysis of consumption behavior applies equally well to the bourgeois analysis of savings behavior, both resting on the same belief in the limited horizons of traditional peoples, whether due to target consumption goals or the lack of foresight required for savings. ⁸² Modern observers regularly fail to recognize diverse forms of potential savings and investment or the difficulties of physically saving or storing under many environmental conditions. ⁸³ Modern views are further complicated by the love-hate relationship that Western societies themselves have had with the “virtue of thrift,” reflected in classical images of the miser, eighteenth-century luxury debates, and the late twentieth-century obsession with “consumer confidence.” ⁸⁴

While the shift to modern savings behavior has often been linked to development of foresight and an appreciation of delayed gratification, we would do better to examine the complex way in which savings behavior simply represents a variation on the risk aversion principle, or, in short, savings as self-insurance. ⁸⁵ As well shown in numerous famine studies, one needs to distinguish between long-run efforts to prepare against necessity (based on historical expectations) and short-run efforts to cope with present necessity. ⁸⁶ Periods of non-necessity produce a shift toward risk aversion that tends to promote increased savings against long-run risk and uncertainty, with the amount of savings constrained by simultaneous increases in leisure and consumption. Furthermore, increased long-run uncertainty or risk tends to promote increasing saving, taken out of reduced leisure and consumption. In periods of immediate necessity, on the other hand, risk-seeking becomes dominant along with dissaving or borrowing, increased effort and reduced consumption. ⁸⁷

Evidence for such an interpretation of savings behavior is admittedly not as impressive as for the other responses. Scholars from Jacob Vanderlint to Milton Friedman have long recognized a correlation between high levels of frugality and occupations subject to cyclical downturns (like merchants and farmers), although the empirical evidence for such a claim is not great. ⁸⁸ In a Chayanovian vein, empirical studies have shown that pressure from increases in population growth and fertility leads to increased consumption by newborns but also increased work and reduced consumption by other family members, with savings held relatively constant. That savings do not increase with this particular form of necessity seems less important than the overall support these studies provide for the necessity synthesis. ⁸⁹ Lastly, famine studies, providing the most balanced view on this particular response, have highlighted many different strategies employed against short-run and long-run necessity, including physical storage of normal foodstuffs and “famine foods” and the conversion of surplus food into multifarious forms of investment (for example, livestock to be slaughtered during food shortages, durable valuables and assets to be stored and traded for food in emergencies, fattening up humans, and investment in the education of one’s kin). ⁹⁰

Sociopolitical Responses

If economic and demographic responses to necessity are easily identifiable, the same can hardly be said for sociopolitical responses where the degree of overlap and complexity makes categorization quite difficult. Instead, what follows is a fairly loose discussion of three broad types of response: horizontal (or homogeneous) organization, vertical (or heterogeneous) organization, and resource allocation. Horizontal organization consists of the organization of essentially equal units into a network for the purposes of greater output or efficiency. Vertical organization involves inherently unequal units in a hierarchical network for the same purposes. Resource allocation includes the shifting of resources (or access to resources) either within a network or between networks with no necessary increase in output or efficiency.

Such labels perhaps do not capture the true importance of these responses which lie at the heart of fundamental questions about the nature of society. All of these responses can involve degrees of cooperation, coercion, violence, and institutionalization. Thus sociopolitical responses can range broadly from the market to war, from a tribal band to the state, from a household to a modern corporation, from an occasional frontier house raising to a closed corporate peasant community. Furthermore, the intricate interdependence of these responses often makes difficult to separate horizontal and vertical organization, while organizational responses often involve changes in allocation and vice versa. For example, warfare‑-regularly noted as having arisen from population pressure and relative poverty‑-has also been identified as a source of necessity which stimulates and requires organizational responses, and as a category of response can range from the inevitable outcome of simple extensification to the out-and-out reallocation of resources from one group to another. ⁹¹

Every analysis of sociopolitical responses to necessity basically rehashes the ancient debate on the origins of civil society and the state between the Sophists and the Socratics, well captured in the dialogue between Glaucon and Socrates in Plato’s Republic. Much of this debate revolves around suppositions of man’s inherent social or anti‑social nature. Like the debate over the dominance of man’s indolence or avarice, necessity has played a role in this sociopolitical debate but a far more ambiguous role than the relatively straight-forward economic debate. When emphasis is on the anti-social part of man’s nature, necessity tends to promote social behavior; when emphasis is on the social part of man’s nature, necessity tends to promote anti‑social behavior. ⁹²

The Sophist argument first laid out by Protagoras stressed the inherent anti‑social nature of man who combines with his fellow men only out of necessity, whether due to the threat of wild beasts, stronger men or groups, anarchy, or to provide for his material needs. ⁹³ The Socratic rebuttal, most fully developed by Aristotle, countered that man is rather a social animal and has a “natural necessity of association”–that man, since he has always been dependent on other men for his very survival, has been social from the very beginning. ⁹⁴ The Socratic argument did not reject the role of necessity in the formation of civil society but employed a more Democritean notion of necessity, downplaying the type of threat stressed by the Sophists and instead highlighting the role of the division of labor which man’s reason reveals as essential for meeting man’s needs (chreia). ⁹⁵ Indeed, necessity in terms of relative poverty was far more likely to lead to the fragmentation of society and anti‑social behavior, turning men against each other.

A case could be made that both sides of this debate–the Sophists and later proponents of man’s anti‑social nature like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Mandeville, and Spencer along with the Socratics and neo-Aristotelians–were really attacking straw men, opposing sides of the same coin. ⁹⁶ All are primarily concerned not with some original nature but rather with the intrinsic nature of civilized man, which neo-Aristotelians define in terms of the values of civilized society under the state and Hobbesians in terms of how they believe civilized man would behave without the state. If at one extreme lies the Hobbesian case of pure anti‑social behavior and at the other extreme lies the Aristotelian case of pure social behavior, every scholar from ancient times to present would line up somewhere in between, including Aristotle and Hobbes themselves. ⁹⁷ The similarity between the two views is reflected in the universal early modern belief about the necessity of government regardless of assumptions about man’s social nature, a belief reflected in the dual meaning of “anarchy” as both the complete absence of government and chaos. ⁹⁸ Finally, both sides share the ubiquitous belief that only necessity (in one form or another) make men willing to accept dependence upon another as a servant or slave. ⁹⁹

Modern anthropologists, without much reference to these earlier debates, have thoroughly refined our understanding of the impact of necessity on sociopolitical organization. These scholars have shown that the direction of the organizational response, far more than economic and demographic responses, is heavily dependent on the type and remoteness of necessity and the “opportunity set”–the total of available perceived opportunities for reducing necessity affected by many factors or constraints (personal, cultural, economic, institutional, environmental). Furthermore, they have highlighted the reversible nature of the organizational response to necessity. ¹⁰⁰ The most obvious example of this reversibility is the coalescing of individuals or groups for mutual defense against an external threat, followed by a fragmenting when the threat is removed. ¹⁰¹ A similar response pattern marks the shift from dispersed to grouped communities under population pressure. ¹⁰²

Organizational responses to long-run necessity reflect a “social” form of savings, storage, insurance, and/or investment behavior which acts as a hedge against risk and uncertainty, akin to the earliest forms of more modern institutional forms of insurance as a “consolidation” or “grouping” to spread out the risks and uncertainties of ventures among several entrepreneurs. ¹⁰³ In response to predictable recurrences of famine, people have always sought to cultivate social relationships to allow the tapping of food resources of other regions, to store up debts and obligations by gifts, and to establish trading and sharing contracts. ¹⁰⁴ Among hunter-gatherers worldwide, long-run necessity arising from an uneven distribution of resources over space and/or time has favored larger groups to share knowledge and pool yields, leading to a fairly universal group size of 25-50 persons (with phases of concentration and dispersion). ¹⁰⁵ More complex network creation appeared with the rise of sedentary agriculture. ¹⁰⁶ Social scientists have also identified the importance of such networks for the urban poor. ¹⁰⁷

The evolution of centripetal responses to population pressure and other crises like war has given rise to increasingly complex systems of kinship, rank, class stratification, political structure, redistribution, territoriality, restrictions on access to resources, and property rights–organizational and allocative changes typically associated with the origins of the state. ¹⁰⁸ Anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley, in a recent analysis of 94 hunter-gather groups across time and space, finds an extremely high correlation between population pressure on available resources and “socioeconomic complexity” as measured by such variables as storage-dependence, sedentism, social inequality, and the use of a medium of exchange. Keeley concludes that “population pressure is a necessary and sufficient condition for and the efficient cause of socioeconomic complexity.” ¹⁰⁹ Many of the institutional changes most strongly associated with the modern West such as private property, the impersonal market, and the shift from status to contract have also been linked to necessity. ¹¹⁰

Individuals with common interests often combine to restrict access to some scarce resource or opportunity whether in the form of restricted entry into certain occupations, constraints on migration, tariffs, and subsidies. ¹¹¹ Historian Samuel P. Hays’s famous dictum “Organize or Perish” well captures the situation faced by Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when they turned to farmer co-operatives, trade unions, business alliances, and other organizations in order to increase their competitive advantage in the face of cost-price squeezes. ¹¹²

However, such organizational responses can only go so far toward reducing individual or group necessity. Scholars have found much evidence of what anthropologists Charles D. Laughlin and Ivan A. Brady have called the “accordion” effect–the reversal in sociopolitical response beyond some threshold of necessity. ¹¹³ Thus, with increasing necessity, centripetal responses eventually give way to centrifugal responses. If the emergence of immediate necessity promotes a shift from saving to dissaving/borrowing, the like conditions encourage a change from social insurance to calls for redistribution which can strain societal relations. Just as early observers noted that necessity promoted begging and stealing, modern observers find that necessity regularly leads to efforts to secure voluntary or involuntary redistribution of wealth through legislation, crime, charity, and other transfers of wealth. ¹¹⁴ Both seasonally and in times of stress, hunter-gatherers tend to break up into nuclear households as a more efficient unit for gathering. ¹¹⁵ A similar phenomenon of fragmentation in response to food shortage has been noted among agriculturalists and other peoples. ¹¹⁶ Increasing necessity further promotes social disorganization, a breakdown of normal standards of conduct, an increase in violence and criminal activity, a shift from cooperative to competitive strategies, and a halting or diminution of traditional ceremonies that tie the society together. ¹¹⁷ In the modern industrial era, rises in the cost of living have been a major spur to strike activity for American and European labor unions. ¹¹⁸

And just as necessity promotes state formation, poverty (whether absolute or relative, whether of the leaders or the masses) can also invert the process and lead to riots, rebellions, and revolutions. ¹¹⁹ Inherent in this view is the belief that as long as men are able to make a living they care little about the particular form of government, but when leaders threaten that competency then conditions are ripe for riot and revolution. ¹²⁰ Although in the long-run such responses may lead to new organizational and allocative solutions, in the short-run they simply reverse many of the same organizational and allocative responses associated with earlier state formation. ¹²¹

The lesson from this overview of the sociopolitical analysis of the nature of civil society and the state must be that any necessity synthesis must acknowledge both the cooperative and competitive aspects of man’s nature. In any organization, necessity increases both the probability of cooperation and the probability of conflict, which of course leaves the nature of the sociopolitical response to necessity inherently complex and contextually dependent. ¹²²

Solution Set

Necessity theory is not deterministic. While necessity is necessary, it is not sufficient. Different individuals, families, households, communities, and societies will employ different strategies. ¹²³ The “solution set” of responses to necessity will inevitably combine demographic, economic, and sociopolitical responses. Even beyond the obvious overlap between the response categories, a single type of response is generally either undesirable or insufficient. For example, scholars have shown that no single response (for example, extensification, population control, migration) is usually effective as a homeostatic governor against population pressure rising from natural population increase. ¹²⁴ However, there is no a priori way to predict the solution set either for a household or an aggregate outside of its particular historical context. ¹²⁵

In general one may second Arnold Toynbee’s assessment that the solution set will follow the path of least resistance. ¹²⁶ Based on this assumption, one could predict that, ceteris paribus, the solution set, whatever it was, would tend to remain the same as long as it continued to work in checking necessity, or, at the very least, that earlier responses would tend to mediate later responses. ¹²⁷ All of these factors would support the widespread consensus of a universal preference for extensification as the path of least resistance.

To further determine the path of least resistance requires understanding the opportunity set. ¹²⁸ Both the persistence of traditional responses and the shift to new responses reflects a complex of sociocultural as well as economic factors. Long-distance migration, like frontier migration in early America, was constrained by “nonpecuniary advantages” like family attachments, ties to a community, uncertainty and risk, loss of human capital, imperfect information, initial hardships, and financial barriers that often led households in older communities turned to alternative responses. ¹²⁹ Similarly, the inelastic elements in household labor supply have been attributed to family responsibility, individual habits, social customs, and the institutional environment. ¹³⁰ Marxist critics of the Chayanovian approach and political anthropologists have well stressed institutional constraints on possible responses. ¹³¹ Famine studies show “typical patterns,” but also that responses vary by gender and stage in the life cycle, and over time and place due to the exact sequence of events, local conditions, and individual resources. ¹³² Major environmental changes like colonialism constrain earlier solution sets and force radical changes in responses to famine. ¹³³ The type of necessity may also affect the type of response. For example, administrative or political pressure like taxation may lead to evasion or sociopolitical responses, while gradual population pressure may result in evolving economic-demographic responses. ¹³⁴ Lastly, as noted with regards to saving/dissaving and cooperation/ competition, responses to lower levels, slowly evolving, or future necessity can be the exact opposite of responses to higher levels and immediate necessity. ¹³⁵

Beyond extensification, one would be hard pressed to suggest any pattern of preference. Chayanov found among Russian peasants a preference for extensification over diversification over intensification with no evidence for fertilty control or other responses. ¹³⁶ An extensive cross-cultural study shows a preference for production intensification over rural-urban migration but also notes the “pull” of higher wages can overcome this preference. ¹³⁷ Archaeologist Richard Redding has identified an historic sequence of extensification and migration followed by resource diversification, storage, and finally fertility control. ¹³⁸ Anthropologist Robert L. Carneiro believes that war was preferred to intensification. ¹³⁹ Many scholars have stressed resistance to proletarianization until the disappearance of all other alternative responses. ¹⁴⁰

Furthermore, responses are interdependent. The selection of any particular response makes possible, facilitates, obviates, or makes unnecessary other responses. Numerous scholars have noted that extensification and migration opportunities inhibit more permanent settlements, the rise of the state, the development of fertility control, and proletarianization. ¹⁴¹ Without knowledge of the entire solution set, one would be hard pressed to know whether necessity would lead to an increase, decrease, or no change in complex behaviors like fertility control or migration. ¹⁴²

Such interdependence among responses seems obvious, but it has often been absent from theoretical discussions of necessity. Although all of the types of responses discussed above can be found in pre-classical political economy, nowhere are they treated coherently in any single treatise. For theoretical or political reasons, scholars have often stressed one particular response to the exclusion of the others. For example, pre-classical economists highlighted the intensification and innovation responses while classical economists stressed fertility control. Modern scholars working in balkanized disciplines failed to develop fully the theoretical ramifications of this interdependence until the 1960s and indeed interdependence is still regularly ignored. Yet despite almost no appreciation of the historical roots of such a synthesis and the problems of disciplinary divisions and even divisions within the disciplines, a small band of social scientists have moved far since the 1960s toward realizing the behavioral synthesis that eluded seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political economists.

The seminal works most regularly cited in the necessity literature are those of sociologist Kingsley Davis, economist Ester Boserup, and the rediscovered work of Alexander Chayanov. Although none of the three really broke down the division between economic and demographic responses or even considered sociopolitical responses‑-and each tended to deny, downplay, or ignore any potential for an economic-demographic let alone a political economy approach‑-nevertheless the work of these three has provided the cornerstone upon which many of the works cited here have built. ¹⁴³

Later scholars have synthesized their ideas and pushed on toward a necessity synthesis which recognizes the tremendous range of demographic, economic, and sociopolitical responses. These social scientists, although from wide-ranging disciplines, share most strongly a common interest in historical approaches to economic-demographic development and political economy or, more broadly, societal evolution. Economists Reuven Brenner, Richard A. Easterlin, Douglass C. North, and Julian L. Simon; sociologists Dov Friedlander, Judah Matras and Alfred Sauvy; geographers Wilbur Zelinsky, David R. Harris, and David B. Grigg; political scientist James C. Scott; and anthropologists Robert L. Carneiro, Mark N. Cohen, Donald E. Dumond, Michael Jochim, Robert M. Netting, Joel S. Migdal, Richard G. Wilkinson, and Eric Wolf are just a few of the more important scholars contributing to this synthesis. ¹⁴⁴

Such scholars regularly bridge or even overstep disciplinary boundaries in their search for solutions to problems. In this world, economics, demography, and political science along with anthropology, sociology, history, and geography. They all locate the central dynamic of their narrative in the myriad economic, demographic, and sociopolitical responses that individuals and groups have made to necessity and reversed when conditions improved.

In conclusion, we should again acknowledge that the necessity synthesis as outlined here can describe only broad tendencies and that particular solution sets will always be heavily dependent on historical context. Yet the necessity synthesis pushes far beyond historical relativism, making rather clear-cut theoretical predictions about the direction of effort, risk-taking, and consumption in response to changing levels of real earned income. With additional contextual information, additional predictions can be made about the direction and type of many other responses.

Cite this article as: Baird, Bruce C. "Appendix VI Toward a Necessity Synthesis of Political Economy." Dr. Baird Online. July 10, 2017. Web. May 7, 2024. <https://www.drbairdonline.com/necessity-the-perpetual-mother/appendices/appendix-vi-toward-a-necessity-synthesis-of-political-economy/>.

Notes:

Wilbert E. Moore, Industrialization and Labor: Social Aspects of Economic Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951) 48-69; Albert O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958) 176-7; Wolf, Peasants 9-17, 77; M. B. Gleave and H. P. White, “Population Density and Agricultural Systems in West Africa,” Environment and Land Use in Africa, eds. M. F. Thomas and G. W. Whittington (London: Methuen, 1969) 273‑300; Philip E. L. Smith, “Land-Use, Settlement Patterns and Subsistence Agriculture: A Demographic Perspective,” Man, Settlement and Urbanism, eds. Peter J. Ucko et al. (London: Duckworth, 1972) 411; David R. Harris, “Alternative Pathways Toward Agriculture,” Origins of Agriculture, ed. Charles A. Reed (The Hague: Mouton, 1977) 181-9; David R. Harris, “Settling Down: An Evolutionary Model for the Transformation of Mobile Bands into Sedentary Communities,” The Evolution of Social Systems, eds. J. Friedman and M. J. Rowlands (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978) 408-10; Michael A. Jochim, Strategies for Survival: Cultural Behavior in an Ecological Context (New York: Academic Press, 1981) 135-6. On sociopolitical coercion in particular, see Robert L. Carneiro, “Slash-and-Burn Cultivation among the Kuikuru and Its Implications for Cultural Development in the Amazon Basin,” Man in Adaptation: The Cultural Present, Y. A. Cohen, ed. (Chicago: Aldine, 1968) 142; Edward J. Nell, “The Technology of Intimidation,” Peasant Studies Newsletter 1 (1972): 43-4; Jan de Vries, “Labor/Leisure Trade-off,” Peasant Studies Newsletter 1 (1972): 53; David Grigg, “Ester Boserup’s Theory of Agrarian Change: A Critical Review,” Progress in Human Geography 3 (1979): 74. The explicit recognition of sociopolitical coercion as a source of necessity, often linked to the work of Marx, dates back to classical thinkers and was certainly a key to the work of the pre-classical political economists in their ideas about wages, taxes, import duties, etc. ↩
Pitirim Sorokin, Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs, ed. Elena P. Sorokin (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1975). Cf. Frank H. Hankins, “Pressure of Population as a Cause of War,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 198 (1938): 103; Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, IL: Row, 1957) 4, 18; James C. Davies, “The J‑Curve of Rising and Declining Satisfactions as a Cause of Some Great Revolutions and a Contained Rebellion,” The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Praeger, 1969) 728. Studies of “absolute” necessity show similar “coping strategies” (for both famine prevention and responses to immediate famine) as studies focusing on responses to “relative poverty”; thus the two types of necessity should not be dichotomized. However, one should not lose sight of the fundamental difference that “people anywhere seem to become more passive and seemingly apathetic once severely weakened by hunger and malnutrition.” See Parker Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security: Anthropological Perspectives,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 353-94, esp. 363. See also Elizabeth Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad: Food Strategies of Self-Reliant Societies,” Journal of Anthropological Research 35 (1979): 18-29; Robert Dirks, “Social Responses during Severe Food Shortages and Famine,” Current Anthropology 21 (1980): 21-44; Adel P. Den Hartog, “Adjustment of Food Behaviour during Famine,” Famine: Its Causes, Effects and Management, ed. John R. K. Robson (New York: Gordon, 1981) 155-61; Ronald Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies (New York: Greenwood, 1986); Paul E. Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress: A Prehistoric Southwestern Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); David Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) 47-95; Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 43-68; Jane Corbett, “Famine and Household Coping Strategies,” World Development 16 (1988): 1099-112; Thomas W. Gallant, “Crisis and Response: Risk-Buffering Behavior in Hellinistic Greek Communities,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19 (1989): 393-413; Dessalegn Rahmato, Famine and Survival Strategies: A Case Study from Northeast Ethiopia (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1991); Hans G. Bohle et al., eds., Famine and Food Security in Africa and Asia: Indigenous Response and External Intervention to Avoid Hunger (Bayreuth: Naturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft Bayreuth, 1991) 37-148; Thomas W. Gallant, Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece: Reconstructing the Rural Domestic Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). In particular, the historical archaeologists Minnis, Garnsey, and Gallant draw explicitly on the work of Boserup and Chayanov and provide an important bridge between these famine studies and the more “relative” necessity studies mentioned above. On environmental disasters in general, see Ian Burton, Robert W. Kates, and Gilbert F, White, The Environment as Hazard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); William I. Torry, “Anthropological Studies in Hazardous Environments: Past Trends and New Horizons,” Current Anthropology 20 (1979): 519-20; William I. Torry, “Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change,” Social Science Research and Climate Change: An Interdisciplinary Appraisal, eds. Robert S. Chen, et al. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983) 208-29. In some of this literature, one needs to be careful, however, with terms like “adaptation,” “adaptive strategies,” “maximizing” the chances of survival, and other concepts inspired by the literature of sociobiology and evolutionary ecology; although they share a common basis with necessity studies in an emphasis on self-preservation (the original necessity), often the two approaches hypothesize very different behavioral dispositions, e.g., maximizing rather than satisficing. ↩
See, e.g., D. E. Dumond, “Population Growth and Cultural Change,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21 (1965): 302-3, 310; Brian Hayden, “Population Control among Hunter/Gatherers,” World Archaeology 4 (1972): 205-21; Jochim, Strategies for Survival 182; Paul E. Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress: A Prehistoric Southwestern Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 6; Lawrence H. Keeley, “Hunter-Gatherer Economic Complexity and ‘Population Pressure’: A Cross-Cultural Analysis,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 7 (1988): 401. ↩
On peasant and family farmers, see Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1966) 78-80; Frank Cancian, Change and Uncertainty in a Peasant Economy: The Maya Corn Farmers of Zinacantan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); Peggy F. Barlett, “The Structure of Decision Making in Paso,” American Ethnologist 4 (1977): 285-307; Peggy F. Barlett, “Adaptive Strategies in Peasant Agricultural Production,” Annual Review of Anthropology 9 (1980): 545-73; Gregor Dallas, The Imperfect Peasant Economy: The Loire Country, 1800-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Peggy F. Barlett, “The Crisis in Family Farming: Who Will Survive?,” Farm Work and Fieldwork: American Agriculture in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Michael Chibnik (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987) 29-57; Morgan D. Maclachlan, ed. Household Economies and the Transformations (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987); Richard R. Wilk, ed., The Household Economy: Reconsidering the Domestic Mode of Production (Boulder: Westview, 1989. On the urban poor, see E. Wight Bakke, The Unemployed Man: A Social Study (London: Nisbet, 1933); Robert Cooley Angell, The Family Encounters the Depression (1936; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965); E. Wight Bakke, The Unemployed Worker: A Study of the Task of Making a Living Without a Job (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940); E. Wight Bakke, Citizens Without Work: A Study of the Effects of Unemployment upon the Workers’ Social Relations and Practices (1940; [Hamden, CT]: Archon Books, 1969); Stephen Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Edwin Eames and Judith Granch Goode, Urban Poverty in a Cross-Cultural Context (New York: Free, 1973) 157-216; Stanley Engerman, “Economic Perspectives on the Life Course,” Transitions: The Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective, ed. Tamara K. Hareven (New York: Academic, 1978) 271-86; T. G. McGee, “The Poverty Syndrome: Making out in the Southeast Asian City,” Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities, eds. Ray Bromley and Chris Gerry (Chichester: Wiley, 1979) 45-68; Michael R. Haines, “Poverty, Economic Stress, and the Family in a Late Nineteenth-Century American City: Whites in Philadelphia, 1880,” Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 240-76; Claudia Goldin, “Family Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Role of Secondary Workers,” Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 277-310; Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Robert V. Robinson, “Economic Necessity and the Life Cycle in the Family Economy of Nineteenth-Century Indianapolis,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1993): 49-74. ↩
Unfortunately many of the examples examined here usually focus on a single type of response without acknowledging the possibility of alternative responses or the inherent interdependence of the “solution set.” See below section on “Solution Set.” ↩
Pitirim A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity: The Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization and Cultural Life (New York: Dutton, 1943) 14-5; Robert Dirks, “Social Responses during Severe Food Shortages and Famine,” Current Anthropology 21 (1980): 22-3. See also Chap. 3, n. 116-117. ↩
For recognition of the problems with such typologies, see Judah Matras, Populations and Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice, 1973) 462; E. A. Hammel and Nancy Howell, “Research in Population and Culture: An Evolutionary Framework,” Current Anthropology 28 (1987): 144. ↩
For a discussion of non-responsiveness, see below. One alternative category might include changes in attitudes toward and practices of religion, magic, and witchcraft. See Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity 161-240; Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Chicago: Aldine, 1965) 59; David F. Aberle, The Peyote Religion among the Navaho (New York: Wenner, 1966) 325; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971) 520-2; Gerald F. Murray, “Population Pressure, Land Tenure, and Voodoo: The Economics of Haitian Peasant Ritual,” Beyond the Myths of Culture: Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Eric B. Ross (New York: Academic, 1980) 295-321; Paul E. Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress: A Prehistoric Southwestern Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 41; Marvin Harris and Eric B. Ross, Death, Sex, and Fertility: Population Regulation in Preindustrial and Developing Societies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) 94-7. ↩
Benjamin S. Orlove, “Ecological Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 9 (1980): 242. ↩
Cf., e.g., Michael J. Harner, “Population Pressure and the Social Evolution of Agriculturalists,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26 (1970):; Michael J. Harner, “Scarcity, the Factors of Production, and Social Evolution,” Population, Ecology, and Social Evolution, ed. Steven Polgar (The Hague: Mouton, 1975) 123-38. ↩
Many social scientists accept the notion that necessity can force individuals or communities to adopt some practice, but fail to conceptualize that a reduction of that same necessity could lead to abandonment of the practice, if in the scholars’ opinion that practice seemed in line with “progress.” Although a case can be made for some “stickiness” in a particular direction or an imperfect “ratchet,” often rejection of reversibility represents nothing more than a bourgeois bias. On emphasis on reversibility, see Dumond, “Population Growth and Cultural Change” 319-20; Hammel and Howell, “Research in Population and Culture” 144. ↩
Matras, Populations and Societies 79, 464-5. Anthropologists alternatively label this response “fission” which involves changes in organizational response as well as production response. See, e.g., Hammel and Howell, “Research in Population and Culture” 143-8. ↩
Thomas Robert Malthus, The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, eds. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1986) 1: 21-2, 41; 2: 15-6; 3: 351-3; James Bonar, Theories of Population from Raleigh to Arthur Young (New York: Greenberg, 1931) 16-7; Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1935) 1: 24-5; Warren B. Catlin, The Progress of Economics: A History of Economic Thought (New York: Bookman Associates, 1962) 261; Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) 296-7; Matras, Populations and Societies 68; Annemarie De Waal Malefijt, Images of Man: A History of Anthropological Thought (New York: Knopf, 1974) 9; Robert C. North, “Integrating the Perspectives: From Population to Conflict and War,” Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Population and Conflict, ed. Nazli Choucri (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984) 198-9. ↩
Edward Alsworth Ross, Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed. (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938) 44-5; Pitirim Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York: Harper Brothers, 1928) 382-6, 423-4; Emile Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: Macmillan, 1933) 266-7; Warren S. Thompson and P. K. Whelpton, “Levels of Living and Population Pressure,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 198 (1938): 96; Frank H. Hankins, “Pressure of Population as a Cause of War,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 198 (1938): 103-4; Carneiro, “Slash-and-Burn Cultivation” 142; Robert L. Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science 169 (1970): 733-8; Jochim, Strategies for Survival 194-201; Reuven Brenner, History‑‑The Human Gamble (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 83; Nazli Choucri, “Perspectives on Population and Conflict,” Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Population and Conflict, ed. Nazli Choucri (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984) 3-5, 18; R. North, “Integrating the Perspectives” 195-215; Robert M. Netting, Cultural Ecology, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1986) 76. For an opposing tradition akin to classical avarice model which assumes that poverty begets peace, see G. N. Clark, The Cycle of War and Peace in Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949). ↩
On early hominid extensification, see Kent V. Flannery, “The Origins of Agriculture,” Annual Review of Anthropology 2 (1973): 283. ↩
August Lösch, The Economics of Location, trans. William H. Woglom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954) 380-1; John T. Schlebecker, “The World Metropolis and the History of American Agriculture,” Journal of Economic History 20 (1960): 187-208; Joosep Nõu, Studies in the Development of Agricultural Economics in Europe (Uppsala: Almqvist, 1967) 413; Michael Chisholm, Rural Settlement and Land Use: An Essay in Location (Chicago: Aldine, 1968) 96-8, 166-7; J. Richard Peet, “The Spatial Expansion of Commercial Agriculture in the Nineteenth Century: A Von Thunen Interpretation,” Economic Geography 45 (1969): 283-301; Richard G. Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Model of Economic Development (London: Methuen, 1973) 148; John Fraser Hart, “The Spread of the Frontier and the Growth of Population,” Geoscience and Man 5 (1974): 73-4; John Solomon Otto, The Southern Frontier, 1607-1860: The Agricultural Evolution of the Colonial and Antebellum South (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989) 2-5. ↩
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1897) 1: 25, 466-7; R. Mansell Prothero, “Some Observations on Desiccation in North-western Nigeria,” Erdkunde 16 (1962): 111-9; Kingsley Davis, “The Theory of Change and Response in Modern Demographic History,” Population Index 29 (1963): 353; Dumond, “Population Growth and Cultural Change” 311, 318; M. J. Mortimore, “Land and Population Pressure in the Kano Close‑Settled Zone, Northern Nigeria,” People and Land in Africa South of the Sahara, ed. R. Mansell Prothero (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) 60-70; Philip E. L. Smith and T. Cuyler Young, Jr., “The Evolution of Early Agriculture and Culture in Greater Mesopotamia: A Trial Model,” Population Growth: Anthropological Implications, ed. Brian Spooner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972) 17; Matras, Populations and Societies 457-9, 468-9; Jochim, Strategies for Survival 74, 135; John W. Adams and Alice Bee Kasakoff, “Ecosystems over Time: The Study of Migration in ‘Long Run’ Perspective,” The Ecosystem Concept in Anthropology, ed. Emilio Moran (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984) 215; Mark N. Cohen, “Population Growth, Interpersonal Conflict, and Organizational Response in Human History,” Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Population and Conflict, ed. Nazli Choucri (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984) 45; Hammel and Howell, “Research in Population and Culture” 143-8; Richard W. Redding, “A General Explanation of Subsistence Change: From Hunting and Gathering to Food Production,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 7 (1988) 72; Michael Rosenberg, “The Mother of Invention: Evolutionary Theory, Territoriality, and the Origins of Agriculture,” American Anthropologist 92 (1990): 408; Robert Bates Graber, “Population Pressure, Agricultural Origins, and Cultural Evolution: Constrained Mobility or Inhibited Expansion?,” American Anthropologist 93 (1991): 693; Thomas W. Gallant, Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece: Reconstructing the Rural Domestic Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) 46-57. ↩
On the law of least effort, see Brian Spooner, ed., Population Growth: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972) xvi, 16, 199-202, 288. See also Brian Spooner and Robert Netting, “Humanized Economics,” Peasant Studies Newsletter 1 (1972): 55; R. B. Lee, “Work Effort, Group Structure and Land-Use in Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers,” Man, Settlement and Urbanism, eds. Peter J. Ucko, et al. (London: Duckworth, 1972) 181-4; John W. Bennett, The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Human Adaptation (New York: Pergamon Press, 1976) 73, 119, 230, 257, 263; Jochim, Strategies for Survival 72; Timothy K. Earle and Andrew L. Christenson, eds., Modeling Change in Prehistoric Economies (New York: Academic Press, 1980); Barlett, “Adaptive Strategies” 554; Stephen B. Brush and B. L. Turner II, “The Nature of Farming Systems and Views of Their Change,” Comparative Farming Systems, eds. B. L. Turner II and Stephen B. Brush (New York: Guilford, 1987) 19; W. Peter Archibald, Marx and the Missing Link: ‘Human Nature’ (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989) 235. This notion of a least effort principle, with its implicit assumption of fixed needs, suffers from all the problems of target income models (critiqued below) and tends to distort the concept of necessity as much as ideas about economic man and other one-sided assumptions. ↩
Grigg, “Boserup’s Theory of Agrarian Change” 69, 76. For intensification in response to famine, see Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 26; Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 40; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 364-6. The evidence on the universality of the backward-sloping supply of labor is summarized in Chapter 4. ↩
Richard B. Lee, “What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources,” Man the Hunter, eds. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore (Chicago: Aldine, 1968) 33. ↩
Malthus, Works 1: 14-5; A. V. Chayanov, A. V. Chayanov on The Theory of Peasant Economy, eds. Daniel Thorner et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) 6-7, 115; Robert Carneiro, “Agriculture and the Beginning of Civilization,” Ethnographisch-archäologishe Forshungen 4 (1958): 22-7; Leslie A. White, The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome (New York: McGraw, 1959) 285; Carneiro, “Slash-and-Burn Cultivation” 141; Michael Chisholm, Rural Settlement and Land Use: An Essay in Location (Chicago: Aldine, 1968) 149; B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe A.D. 500-1850 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963) 7-25; Dumond, “Population Growth and Cultural Change” 311-3; Nõu, Studies 470-1,476; Wolf, Peasants 15-6; J. D. Gould, Economic Growth in History: Survey and Analysis (London: Methuen, 1972) 84-7; Brian Spooner, ed., Population Growth: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972); Philip E. L. Smith, “Land-Use, Settlement Patterns and Subsistence Agriculture: A Demographic Perspective,” Man, Settlement and Urbanism, eds. Peter J. Ucko et al. (London: Duckworth, 1972) 411; T. Cuyler Young, “Population Densities and Early Mesopotamian Urbanism,” Man, Settlement and Urbanism, eds. Peter J. Ucko et al. (London: Duckworth, 1972) 829; Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress 92-6; Robert McC. Netting, “Agrarian Ecology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 3 (1974): 36-9; Peggy F. Barlett, “Labor Efficiency and the Mechanism of Agricultural Evolution,” Journal of Anthropological Research 32 (1976): 124-40; Mark Harrison, “Chayanov and the Economics of the Russian Peasantry,” Journal of Peasant Studies 2 (1975): 404-7; Harris, “Alternative Pathways Toward Agriculture” 189-97; Julian L. Simon, The Economics of Population Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) 158-82; Colin Clark, Population Growth and Land Use, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1977) 133-8; J. N. Sinha, “Population and Agriculture,” Population Growth and Economic Development in the Third World, ed. Léon Tabah (Dolhain: Ordina, n.d.) 251-305; B. L. Turner II, Robert Q. Hanham, and Anthony V. Portararo, “Population Pressure and Agricultural Intensity,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (1977): 384-96; Harriet Friedmann, “World Market, State, and Family Farm: Social Bases of Household Production in the Era of Wage Labor,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978): 563; Grigg, “Boserup’s Theory of Agrarian Change”; Benjamin S. Orlove, “Ecological Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 9 (1980): 249-50; Jochim, Strategies for Survival 135-6; Robert M. Netting, Cultural Ecology, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1986) 69; Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 18-20; Frederic L. Pryor, “The Adoption of Agriculture: Some Theoretical and Empirical Evidence,” American Anthropologist 88 (1986): 879‑97; Morgan D. Maclachlan, “From Intensification to Proletarianization,” Household Economies and the Transformations, ed. Morgan D. Maclachlan (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987) 1-27; Allen W. Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) 12-6; Hammel and Howell, “Research in Population and Culture” 144-5; Barlett, “Crisis in Family Farming” 47-50; Robert L. Carneiro, “The Circumscription Theory: Challenge and Response,” American Behavioral Scientist 31 (1988): 506; Rosenberg, “Mother of Invention” 399-415. Many of these works address the prehistoric origins of agriculture which involves innovation more than intensification, but inclusion here is warranted by the Boserupian cast of all these works. ↩
On hunters, see Brian Hayden, “Subsistence and Ecological Adaptations of Modern Hunter/Gatherers,” Omnivorous Primates: Gathering and Hunting in Human Evolution, eds. Robert S. O. Harding and Geza Teleki (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) 368-9. ↩
Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (London: Allen, 1965) 62-3; David R. Harris, “Swidden Systems and Settlement,” Man, Settlement and Urbanism, eds. Peter J. Ucko et al. (London: Duckworth, 1972) 249; P. Smith, “Land-Use” 412; J. Simon, Economics of Population Growth 172; Jochim, Strategies for Survival 119-20; Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 19; Netting, Cultural Ecology 71-3. ↩
See, e.g., Lujo Brentano, Hours and Wages in Relation to Production, trans. Mrs. William Arnold (London, 1894) 39-47; Wilbert E. Moore, Industrialization and Labor: Social Aspects of Economic Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951) 35-77; Eric Wolf, “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13 (1957): 1-18; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1963) 199-204; E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 56-97; Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1790-1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); Ester Boserup, “The Impact of Population Growth on Agricultural Output,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 89 (1975): 266; Hans Medick, “The Proto-Industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,” Social History 3 (1976): 297-8; Friedmann, “World Market” 563; Netting, Cultural Ecology 75-6; Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 32-3, 106-7; Gavin Kitching, “Proto-industrialization and Demographic Change: A Thesis and Some Possible African Implications,” Journal of African History 24 (1983): 221; Frank Cancian, “Economic Behavior in Peasant Communities,” Economic Anthropology, ed. Stuart Plattner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) 134-7; Gallant, Risk and Survival 98-9. In the competition between Marxist-Leninist and Chayanovian models of peasant survival even Marxians would agree that the “truth” lies somewhere in between. See Wolf, Peasants 92-5; Carmen Diana Deere and Alain de Janvry, “A Conceptual Framework for the Empirical Analysis of Peasants,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 61 (1979): 601-11; Alain de Janvry and Ann Vandeman, “Patterns of Proletarianization in Agriculture: An International Comparison,” Household Economies and their Transformations, ed. Morgan D. Maclachlan (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987) 28-73; Cancian, “Economic Behavior in Peasant Communities” 156-64. For an overview of this debate, see Basile Kerblay, “A. V. Chayanov: Life, Career, Works,” A. V. Chayanov on The Theory of Peasant Economy, eds. Daniel Thorner et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) lxv; David Lehmann, “After Chayanov and Lenin: New Paths of Agrarian Capitalism,” Journal of Development Economics 11 (1982): 133-61; John Harriss, ed., Rural Development: Theories of Peasant Economy and Agrarian Change (London: Hutchinson, 1982; Michael D. Schulman, Patricia M. Garrett, and Barbara A. Newman, “Differentiation and Survival Among North Carolina Smallholders: An Empirical Perspective on the Lenin-Chayanov Debate,” Journal of Peasant Studies 16 (1989): 523-41; Nola Reinhardt and Peggy Barlett, “The Persistence of Family Farms in United States Agriculture,” Sociologia Ruralis 29 (1989): 203-25. ↩
Michael A. Jochim believes that intensification often leads to specialization, while Netting believes occupational diversification functionally equivalent to agricultural intensification. See Jochim, Strategies for Survival 136; Netting, “Agrarian Ecology” 40. ↩
Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy 107-9, 112; Joan Thirsk, “Industries in the Countryside,” Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) 70-88; E. L. Jones, “Agricultural Origins of Industry,” Past & Present 40 (1968): 58-71; Franklin F. Mendels, “Industrialization and Population Pressure in Eighteenth-Century Flanders,” Journal of Economic History 31 (1971) 269-71; Franklin F. Mendels, “Proto-industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 241-61; Matras, Populations and Societies 457; Netting, “Agrarian Ecology” 39-40; Dov Friedlander, “Demographic Responses and Socioeconomic Structure: Population Processes in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century,” Demography 20 (1983) 250-1; Kitching, “Proto-industrialization” 225. On the link between proto-industrialization, Chayanov, and the backward-sloping supply of labor, see Medick, “Proto-industrial Family Economy” 296-301; Kitching, “Proto-industrialization” 225-6; Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson, and Michael Sonenscher, Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 29; Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain 1700-1820 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985) 129-34. ↩
See, e.g., Medick, “Proto-industrial Family Economy” 297, 306. Parker Shipton notes that during African famines, farmers become part-time laborers for richer neighbors and part-time laborers become full-timers. See Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 372. ↩
The assumption is that full-time specialization, whether reliance on single crop or craft, is too risky a strategy for most undeveloped economies. See Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 22-3; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 366. Paul E. Minnis, however, notes a possible response to famine of economic specialization within a regional economy. See Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 40. ↩
On by-employments, see Mortimore, “Land and Population Pressure” 68; Wilbur Zelinsky, “The Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition,” Geographical Review 61 (1971): 236; Keith Hart, “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana,” Journal of Modern African Studies 11 (1973): 61-89; McGee, “Poverty Syndrome” 52-6; Friedmann, “World Market” 563. On female and child labor, see W. S. Woytinsky, Three Aspects of Labor Dynamics (Washington: Social Science Research Council, 1942) 105-13; John D. Durand, The Labor Force in the United States 1890-1960 (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1948) 86-9; Robert W. Smuts, Women and Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) 38-68; Jacob Mincer, “Labor Force Participation of Married Women: A Study of Labor Supply,” Aspects of Labor Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962) 63-97; Jacob Mincer, “Labor Force: Participation,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 8, ed. David L. Sill (New York: Macmillan, 1968) 478-80; Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972) 51-6; Valerie Kincade Oppenheimer, “The Life-Cycle Squeeze: The Interaction of Men’s Occupational and Family Life Cycles,” Demography 16 (1974): 227-45; McGee, “Poverty Syndrome” 52-3; Richard A. Easterlin, Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 1980) 60-78; Haines, “Poverty” 240-76; Goldin, “Family Strategies” 277-310; Maclachlan, “From Intensification to Proletarianization” 9; Michael K. Burton and Douglas R. White, “Sexual Division of Labor in Agriculture,” Household Economies and the Transformations, ed. Morgan D. Maclachlan (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987) 107-30; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 373; Patrick M. Horan and Peggy G. Hargis, “Children’s Work and Schooling in the Late Nineteenth-Century Family Economy,” American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 583-96; Robinson, “Economic Necessity” 49-74. ↩
Robinson, “Economic Necessity” 50. ↩
Friedmann has simply highlighted the non-proletarian path well laid out by Lenin. See Friedmann, “World Market” 545-86; Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 31-3. Although Friedmann is highly ambiguous in her analysis of the causes of the shift to simple commodity production, her analysis is certainly consistent with a necessity interpretation. For example see the section on “Production Innovation” on the shift to specialized production as an example of “gambling” behavior of farmers in response to necessity. ↩
Richard L. Bushman, “Family Security in the Transition from Farm to City, 1750-1850,” Journal of Family History 6 (1981): 246-52. ↩
Margaret G. Reid, Economics of Household Production (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1934); Peter T. Bauer and Basil S. Yamey, The Economics of Under-developed Countries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) 83-4; Mincer, “Labor Force Participation of Married Women” 67-70; Keith Thomas, “Work and Leisure,” Past & Present 29 (1964): 51-7; E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” 56-97; Wolf, Peasants 13-4; Stephen Hymer and Stephen Resnick, “A Model of an Agrarian Economy with Nonagricultural Activities,” American Economic Review 59 (1969): 493-506; Staffan Burenstam Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Sahlins, Stone Age Economics 64-5; J. de Vries, “Labor/Leisure Trade-off” 47-8; Joffre Dumazedier, Sociology of Leisure, trans. Marea A. McKenzie (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1974) 9-16; Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1976) 89-149; Stephen B. Brush, “The Myth of the Idle Peasant: Employment in a Subsistence Economy,” Peasant Livelihood: Studies in Economic Anthropology and Cultural Ecology, eds. Rhoda Halperin and James Dow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977) 60‑78; Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (New York: Basic Books, 1979) 53-5; McGee, “Poverty Syndrome” 53; Wanda Minge-Klevana, “Does Labor Time Decrease with Industrialization?: A Survey of Time-Allocation Studies,” Current Anthropology 21 (1980): 279-98; Daniel R. Gross, “Time Allocation: A Tool for the Study of Cultural Behavior,” Annual Review of Anthropology 13 (1984): 519-58; Reuben Gronau, “Home Production–A Survey,” Handbook of Labor Economics, 2 vols., eds. Orley Ashenfelter and Richard Layard (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986) 1: 273-304; Gordon C. Winston, “Leisure,” The New Palgrave: Social Economics, eds. John Eatwell et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989) 196-9. ↩
Observers also note more intensive food preparation to get the most of raw food during famines. See Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 25; Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 39; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 364; Gallant, Risk and Survival 57-8. ↩
Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 20-4; Earle and Christenson, Modeling Change xi-xiv, 1-72; Mark N. Cohen, “The Significance of Long‑Term Changes in Human Diet and Food Economy,” Food and Evolution: Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits, eds. Marvin Harris and Eric B. Ross (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987) 261‑83; Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 33-4; Redding, “General Explanation of Subsistence Change” 71-3; Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply 48-53; Gallant, “Crisis and Response” 398-400; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 363-4; Gallant, Risk and Survival 36-46, 115-21, 139. ↩
Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London, 1835) 231-41; Thomas Brassey, On Work and Wages (London, 1873) 13, 70, 123-42; Brentano, Hours and Wages 49-51. See also John R. Commons, Labor and Administration (1913; New York: Kelley, 1964) 120. ↩
See, e.g., Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 388-95; Alfred Sauvy, General Theory of Population, trans. Christophe Campos (New York: Basic, 1969) 283-302; Brenner, History 28-41. ↩
See Chapter 4, n. 5. ↩
A distinction may perhaps also be drawn between extensification/intensification as “economic growth” and innovation as “economic development.” See Robert A. Flammang, “Economic Growth and Economic Development: Counterparts or Competitors?,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 28 (1979): 47-61. Clifford Geertz defines “agricultural involution” as intensification with no innovation. See Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963) 32-3. ↩
Although Chayanov recognized the probabilistic nature of decision-making outcome, he did not really emphasize the role of risk and uncertainty. See Michael M. Calavan, “Prospects for a Probabilistic Reinterpretation of Chayanovian Theory: An Exploratory Discussion,” Chayanov, Peasants, and Economic Anthropology, ed. E. Paul Durrenberger (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984) 51-69. ↩
Gavin Wright and Howard Kunreuther, “Cotton, Corn and Risk in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 35 (1975): 529-34; James A. Roumasset, “Introduction and State of the Arts,” Risk, Uncertainty and Agricultural Development, eds. James A. Roumasset, et al. (New York: Agricultural Development Council, 1979) 7-11; Howard Kunreuther and Gavin Wright, “Safety-first, Gambling, and the Subsistence Farmer,” Risk, Uncertainty and Agricultural Development, eds. James A. Roumasset, et al. (College, Laguna, Philippines: Southeast Asia Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture, 1979) 213-9; Lola L. Lopes, “Between Hope and Fear: The Psychology of Risk,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 20 (1987): 287. Note this “necessity” synthesis is thus a more general theory than traditional “safety-first” theories which associate innovation solely with greater wealth (read as greater resources, leisure, etc. available for innovation as well as reduced risk from failure). See, e.g., Frank Ellis, Peasant Economics: Farm Households and Agrarian Development: Farm Households and Agrarian Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 80-101. ↩
Dirks, “Social Responses” 26-32; Corbett, “Famine and Household Coping Strategies” 1099-1112; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 363-5; Gallant, Risk and Survival 113-42. Robert Dirks suggest a neurophysiological basis for such a hierarchy. ↩
Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) 195-8; Matras, Populations and Societies 79-80, 449-50, 456-7; Paul Mosley, “Towards a ‘Satisficing’ Theory of Economic Policy,” Economic Journal 86 (1976): 59-72; Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply 69-86. ↩
Matras, Populations and Societies 464-5. For a popular typology of migration, see William Petersen, “A General Typology of Migration,” American Sociological Review 23 (1958): 256-66. ↩
On famine migration, see Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 26; Dirks, “Social Responses” 27; Corbett, “Famine and Household Coping Strategies” 1099, 1107; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 364, 370. ↩
See citations and evidence in Archer Butler Hulbert, Soil: Its Influence on the History of the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930) 20-2, 77-9; Frank L. Owsley, “The Pattern of Migration and Settlement on the Southern Frontier,” Journal of Southern History 11 (1945): 164-71; Richard H. Steckel, “The Economic Foundations of East-West Migration during the Nineteenth Century,” Explorations in Economic History 20 (1983): 14-36. ↩
Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 380-1; Durkheim, Division of Labor 276; Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Social and Economic Aspects of Swedish Population Movements 1750-1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1941) 88-92; Catlin, Progress of Economics 150; White, Evolution of Culture 285; Carneiro, “Slash-and-Burn Cultivation” 141-2; Elliott J. Berg, “Backward-Sloping Labor Supply Functions in Dual Economies–The Africa Case,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 75 (1961): 468-92; K. Davis, “Theory of Change and Response” 345-66; Dumond, “Population Growth and Cultural Change” 310; Dov Friedlander, “Demographic Responses and Population Change,” Demography 6 (1969): 359-81; Russell Blair Adams, “Migration Geography: A Methodological Inquiry and United States Case Study,” 2 vols., diss., University of Minnesota, 1969, 36, 435, 440; Wolf, Peasants 67; Zelinsky, “Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition” 219-49; John Michael Quigley, “An Economic Model of Swedish Emigration,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 86 (1972): 111-26; Smith and Young, “Evolution of Early Agriculture” 17; Matras, Populations and Societies 464-9; D. B. Grigg, “Migration and Overpopulation,” The Geographical Impact of Migration, eds. Paul White and Robert Woods (London: Longman, 1980) 60-83; Charles H. Wood, “Structural Changes and Household Strategies: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Rural Migration,” Human Organization 40 (1981): 338-44; Charles H. Wood, “Equilibrium and Historical-Structural Perspectives on Migration,” International Migration Review 16 (1982): 298-319; Friedlander, “Demographic Responses and Socioeconomic Structure” 249-72. ↩
Charles Emil Stangeland, Pre‑Malthusian Doctrines of Population: A Study in the History of Economic Theory (1904; New York: Kelley, 1966); E. T. Hiller, “A Culture Theory of Population Trends,” Journal of Political Economy 38 (1930): 523-50; Clellan S. Ford, “Control of Conception in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Annals of the New York Academy of Science 54 (1952): 763-8; Population Division, Dept. of Social Affairs, United Nations, The Determinants and Consequence of Population Trends (New York: United Nations, 1953) 22; Moni Nag, Factors Affecting Human Fertility in Nonindustrial Societies: A Cross-Cultural Study (New Haven: Yale University Publications in Anthropology, 1962); Stephen Polgar, “Culture, History and Population Dynamics,” Culture and Population: A Collection of Current Studies, ed. Stephen Polgar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971) 3-5; Nathan Keyfitz, “Population Theory and Doctrine: A Historical Survey,” Readings in Population, ed. William Petersen (New York: Macmillan, 1972) 49-50; Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress 27-40; Maurice Godelier, “Malthus and Ethnography,” Malthus Past and Present, eds. J. Dupaquier et al. (New York: Academic Press, 1983) 125-50; Harris and Ross, Death, Sex, and Fertility. ↩
Malthus, Works 1: 21-2, 25; Rudolf Heberle, “Social Factors in Birth Control,” American Sociological Review 6 (1941): 800; J. A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning among the Victorian Middle Classes (London: Routledge, 1954) 13, 20; K. Davis, “Theory of Change and Response” 345-66; Dumond, “Population Growth and Cultural Change” 315-8; J. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, eds. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (Chicago: Aldine, 1965) 101-43; E. A. Wrigley, “Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England,” Economic Historical Review 2nd ser. 19 (1966): 82-109; E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969) 108-43; Friedlander, “Demographic Responses and Population Change” 359-81; Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress 37‑9; Matras, Populations and Societies 80-1, 470-2; Julian L. Simon, The Effects of Income on Fertility (Chapel Hill: Carolina Population Center, 1974); Ronald Demos Lee, ed., Population Patterns in the Past (New York: Academic Press, 1977); Virginia Abernethy, Population Pressure and Cultural Adjustment (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1978); Charles Tilly, ed., Historical Studies of Changing Fertility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Jochim, Strategies for Survival 181-4; Friedlander, “Demographic Responses and Socioeconomic Structure”; E. A. Wrigley, “Malthus’s Model of a Pre-Industrial Economy,” Malthus Past and Present, eds. J. Dupaquier et al. (New York: Academic Press, 1983) 111-24; Brenner, History 83; E. A. Wrigley, “The Fall of Marital Fertility in Nineteenth-Century France: Exemplar or Exception?,” European Journal of Population 1 (1985): 31-60, 141-77; Hammel and Howell, “Research in Population and Culture” 144; Harris and Ross, Death, Sex, and Fertility; Redding, “General Explanation of Subsistence Change” 66-7. On similar responses to famine, see Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 40-1; Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply 63-8; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 364. On ancient Greeks, see D. E. C. Eversley, Social Theories of Fertility and the Malthusian Debate (1959; Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975) 15, 27, 66-7. For the contrast between earlier emphasis in standard of living theories on a “fear of falling” in a static society versus later emphasis on the “hope of rising” in advancing societies, see Eversley, Social Theories of Fertility 54-121. ↩
Brian Hayden believes the sexual division of labor originally developed among hunter-gathers primarily as a population control mechanism. See Hayden, “Population Control” 205-21. On the standard of living, see Malthus, Works 1: 11, 14-5, 28; Alfred Marshall, The Early Economic Writings of Alfred Marshall, 1867-1890, 2 vols., ed. J. K. Whitaker (New York: Free Press, 1975) 1: 78; Thomas Nixon Carver, The Distribution of Wealth (1904; London: Macmillan, 1932) 170 (quote); G. P. Watkins, Welfare as an Economic Quantity (Boston: Houghton, 1915) 90-1; Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Psychology: An Outline and Source Book (1908; New York: Macmillan, 1920) 262; Richard T. Ely et al., Outlines of Economics, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1935) 428. Cf. Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (Boston: Houghton, 1923) 179-80. On the comparable notion of a natural wage rate which allowed the wage earner to reproduce himself and his family, see David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, 11 vols., ed. Pierro Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951) 1: 93-7. See also E. P. Hutchinson, The Population Debate: The Development of Conflicting Theories up to 1900 (Boston: Houghton, 1967) 223-8, 367-70, 402n et passim; Social Theories of Fertility 54-127 et passim; E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) 457-83; E. A. Wrigley, “Malthus’s Model of a Pre-Industrial Economy,” Malthus Past and Present, eds. J. Dupaquier et al. (New York: Academic Press, 1983) 111-24. See Chapter 3 on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political economists. ↩
G. Udny Yule, “On the Changes in the Marriage‑ and Birth‑Rate in England and Wales during the Past Half Century: With an Inquiry as to their Possible Causes,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 69 (1906): 88‑132; Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Social Aspects of the Business Cycle (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1925); Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 551-7; Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Social and Economic Aspects of Swedish Population Movements 1750-1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1941) 81-4, 161-9; Dudley Kirk, “The Influence of Business Cycles on Marriage and Birth Rates,” Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) 241-57; Dorothy Swaine Thomas, “Comment,” Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) 257-60; Morris Silver, “Births, Marriages, and Business Cycles in the United States,” Journal of Political Economy 73 (1965): 237‑55; Richard A. Easterlin, “Towards a Socioeconomic Theory of Fertility: Survey of Recent Research on Economic Factors in American Fertility,” Fertility and Family Planning: A World View, eds. S. J. Behrman et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969) 129-32, 145-8; Richard A. Easterlin, “Relative Economic Status and the American Fertility Swing,” Family Economic Behavior: Problems and Prospects, ed. Eleanor Bernert Sheldon (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973) 170-223; Deborah Freedman, “Introduction,” Population and Development Review 2 (1976): 411‑5; Richard A. Easterlin, “The Conflict between Aspirations and Resources,” Population and Development Review 2 (1976): 417-25; Easterlin, Birth and Fortune 37-59; E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) 457-83; Roger S. Schofield, “Through a Glass Darkly: The Population History of England as an Experiment in History,” Population and Economy: Population and History from the Traditional to the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 28. ↩
Lujo Brentano, “The Doctrine of Malthus and the Increase of Population during the Last Decades,” Economic Journal 20 (1910): 371-93. Cf. K. Davis, “Theory of Change and Response” 354-5. ↩
For opportunity interpretations, see Rudolf Braun, Industrialisation and Everyday Life, trans. Sarah Hanbury Tenison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 37-60; Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization” 249-53; Matras, Populations and Societies 457; Stanley L. Engerman, “Expanding Protoindustrialization,” Journal of Family History 17 (1992): 243-4. For necessity interpretations, see E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969) 135-43; Medick, “Proto-industrial Family Economy” 301-6. Gavin Kitching stresses both opportunity and necessity, with opportunity giving way to necessity. See Kitching, “Proto-industrialization” 225-6. ↩
Myron P. Gutmann and René Leboutte, “Rethinking Protoindustrialization and the Family,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (1984): 587-607; Ulrich Pfister, postscript, Industrialisation and Everyday Life, by Rudolf Braun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 188-92. ↩
This, of course, highlights the difficulty of determining any specific response to necessity. See below section on “Solution Set.” ↩
Polgar, “Culture, History and Population Dynamics” 5-6; McGee, “Poverty Syndrome” 60; Mead Cain, “Fertility as an Adjustment to Risk,” Population and Development Review 9 (1983): 688-702; C. Lwechungura Kamuzora, “High Fertility and the Demand for Labour in Peasant Economies: The Case of Bukoba District, Tanzania,” Development and Change 15 (1984): 105-24; William A. Sundstrom and Paul A. David, “Old-Age Security Motives, Labor Markets, and Farm Family Fertility in Antebellum America,” Explorations in Economic History 25 (1988): 164-97. ↩
See further discussion of horizontal and vertical organizational responses in section on “Sociopolitical Responses” below. ↩
See, e.g., Wolf, Peasants 70; Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 23-4; Lutz K. Berkner, “Rural Family Organization in Europe: A Problem in Comparative History,” Peasant Studies Newsletter 1 (1972): 153. Barbara Agresti found that “within all stages of the life cycle” the percentage of extended families “increased in response to economic difficulties.” See Barbara F. Agresti, “Household Composition, the Family Cycle, and Economic Hardship in a Postbellum Southern County: Walton County, Florida, 1870-1885,” International Journal of the Sociology of the Family 9 (1979): 257. Hans Medick found that the extended family with servants and apprentices under protoindustrialization occasionally appeared as a result of pauperization, pop pressure, or the family life-cycle. See Medick, “Proto-industrial Family Economy” 307-9. See also Ronald Angel and Marta Tienda, “Determinants of Extended Household Structure: Cultural Pattern or Economic Need,” American Journal of Sociology 87 (1982): 1360-83. Scholars also acknowledge that wealthier landed families were more likely to be extended because they could afford them. See, e.g., M. F. Nimkoff and Russell Middleton, “Types of Family and Types of Economy,” American Journal of Sociology 66 (1960): 215-25; Wolf, Peasants 65; Berkner, “Rural Family Organization” 151-2; Steven Ruggles, Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). As with fertility, such a paradoxical discrepancy–a result of a complex balance of needs, constraints, opportunities, and resources divorced from its sociocultural context–need not really surprise us or prevent us from addressing how necessity affects the nuclear or extended nature of the household. To begin with, a helpful distinction would distinguish whether the shift to an extended household arrangement represents more a horizontal (equal units) or vertical (unequal units) organizational response. Eric Wolf’s analysis of the horizontal response stresses inherent centrifugal tensions within the extended households that tend to give way to fragmentation into nuclear households unless constrained by necessity and cultural constaints. Thus, ceteris paribus, nuclearization tends to accompany a reduction in necessity, such as the shift from land shortage to land abundance with frontier colonization, and extended households tend to increase with growing land pressure. However, at the level of extreme necessity when the extended family is no longer able to support its members, increasing necessity leads in the opposite direction promoting fragmentation. Of course, all things do not remain the same, and whether necessity will promote extended family formation depends in practice much more on the other concomitant responses to necessity. See Wolf, Peasants 65-73. ↩
Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy 112. ↩
See, e.g., Sarah F. Harbison, “Defining and Measuring the Supply of Children: Some Anthropological Considerations,” Social Biology 30 (1983): 32-40, esp. 35. ↩
See, e.g., Albert Augustus Trever, A History of Greek Economic Thought (1916; Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1978) 97; Alvin W. Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1965) 240-4; C. Clark, Population Growth and Land Use 135-6; Michael H. Jameson, “Agriculture and Slavery in Classical Athens,” Classical Journal 73 (1977/8): 122-45; Carneiro, “Circumscription Theory” 505-6; Gallant, Risk and Survival 31-2. ↩
William Temple, The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart., 4 vols. (London, 1814) 1: 15; Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson, Vol. 4 (1747; Hildesheim: George Olms, 1969) 272-3. Cf. James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 163. On selling children, see Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 26; Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 36-7; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 364, 372; Gallant, Risk and Survival 129-33. On selective removal in general, see Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual 55; Jochim, Strategies for Survival 185-6; Gallant, Risk and Survival 129-39. ↩
See, e.g., Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man, trans. M. Epstein (1915; New York: Howard Fertig, 1967) 16; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958) 58-60; Ross, Social Psychology 263-4; James S. Duesenberry, Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (1949; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967) 19-32; James S. Duesenberry, “Some Aspects of the Theory of Economic Development,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 3 (1950): 71-2; Henry Smith, “The Minimal Economy,” Economic Journal 75 (1965): 31-43; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Analytical Economics: Issues and Problems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966) 376-7; Edward Joseph Hundert, “The Conception of Work and the Worker in Early Industrial England: Studies of an Ideology in Transition,” diss., University of Rochester, 1969, 64-70; Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress 173; Gordon Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 41-3, 100-8, 124-6; Krishan Kumar, “Unemployment as a Problem in the Development of Industrial Societies: The English Experience,” Sociological Review 32 (1984): 197-8; Charles Perrings, “The Natural Economy Revisited,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 33 (1985): 831-3, 848n22; Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 22, 105; David Levine, Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 21. For other target income interpretations of “backward peoples,” see W. Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 2nd ed. (London, 1879) 198; William Roscher, Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols., trans. John J. Lalor (Chicago, 1882) 1: 211; Karl Bücher, Industrial Revolution, trans. S. Morley Wickett (New York: Henry Holt, 1901) 19-20; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920) 528; Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1911) 697-8n; Don D. Lescohier, The Labor Market (New York: Macmillan, 1919) 94-6; Ross, Social Psychology 262-5; Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (1920; New York: Kelley & Millman, 1957) 233-5; Frank W. Taussig, Principles of Economics, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1926) 1: 51-3; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926) 269; Paul H. Douglas, The Theory of Wages (1934; New York: Kelley, 1964) 271; Edmund Whittaker, A History of Economic Ideas (New York: Longmans, Green, 1940) 58-60, 579-80; Sheila T. van der Horst, Native Labour in South Africa (1942; London: Frank Cass, 1971) 197-9; W. Moore, Industrialization and Labor 35-7; Harold G. Vatter, “On the Folklore of the Backward-Sloping Supply Curve,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 14 (1961): 579; Charles P. Kindleberger, Economic Development, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw, 1965) 106; Edwin Dean, The Supply Responses of African Farmers: Theory and Measurement in Malawi (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1966) 1, 30-2; Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1968) 2: 978; Sahlins, Stone Age Economics 86. ↩
Even “bourgeois” defenders of Third World peoples against such charges regularly suggest their applicability at earlier times in the pre-market, pre-money, or pre-colonial past when consumer goods were not so readily available or opportunities were limited. See E. Berg, “Backward-Sloping Labor Supply Functions” 468-92; Vatter, “On the Folklore of the Backward-Sloping Supply Curve” 585-6; Marvin P. Miracle and Bruce Fetter, “Backward-Sloping Labor-Supply Functions and African Economic Behavior,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 18 (1970): 240-51. For more critical views (but still not totally rejecting) of the entire concept of target income hypothesis, see Peter T. Bauer and Basil S. Yamey, The Economics of Under-developed Countries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) 83-4; Gerald K. Helleiner, “Smallholder Decision Making: Tropical African Evidence,” Agriculture in Development Theory, ed. Lloyd G. Reynolds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) 30-1; Marvin P. Miracle, “Interpretation of Backward‑sloping Labor Supply Curves in Africa,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 24 (1975): 399‑406; Gene Ellis, “The Backward-bending Supply Curve of Labor in Africa: Models, Evidence, and Interpretation–and Why It Makes a Difference,” Journal of Developing Areas 15 (1981): 251-74. ↩
Everett E. Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Began (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1962) 37-40. ↩
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936; New York: Harbinger, 1964) 96. ↩
William Fellner, Monetary Policies and Full Employment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946) 60-5; William Vickrey, “Resource Distribution Patterns and the Classification of Families,” Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 10 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1947) 266‑97; Duesenberry, Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior; T. M. Brown, “Habit Persistence and Lags in Consumer Behaviour,” Econometrica 20 (1952): 355-71; Tom E. Davis, “The Consumption Function as a Tool for Prediction,” Review of Economics and Statistics 34 (1952): 270-7; Talcott Parsons and Neil J. Smelser, Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic and Social Theory (New York: Free Press, 1956) 221-32; William Fellner, Trends and Cycles in Economic Activity: An Introduction to Problems of Economic Growth (New York: Henry Holt, 1956) 120-1; William Fellner, “Relative Permanent Income: Elaboration and Synthesis,” Journal of Political Economy 67 (1959): 508-11; David Banting, “The Consumption Function ‘Paradox,'” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 11 (1989): 347‑59. Other studies identify a similar correlation between income and savings but downplay or dismiss the role of any standards. See, e.g., Franco Modigliani, “Fluctuations in the Saving‑Income Ratio: A Problem in Economic Forecasting,” Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 11 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1949) 369‑441; Milton Friedman, A Theory of the Consumption Function (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Albert Ando and Franco Modigliani, “The ‘Life Cycle’ Hypothesis of Saving: Aggregate Implications and Tests,” American Economic Review 53 (1963): 55‑84. For a review of the literature, see Robert Ferber, “Consumer Economics, A Survey,” Journal of Economic Literature 11 (1973): 1303‑42. ↩
See Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy 78-84,218; Nõu, Studies 468-71; Harrison, “Chayanov” 393-6; Medick, “Proto-industrial Family Economy” 298-9. For a misinterpretation of Chayanov, see, e.g., Jean-Philippe Platteau, “Malthus et le Sous-Développement ou Le Problème de la Cohérence d’une Théorie,” Revue Économique 35 (1984): 664; Perrings, “Natural Economy Revisited” 831-3, 848n22. Although Chayanov himself must be blamed in part for this misinterpretation due to a certain looseness in language in his casual use of terms like “constant level of well-being,” much of the blame must be placed on Marshall Sahlins’s notorious exegesis of “Chayanov’s rule.” See Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy 12, 218; Daniel Thorner, “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy,” A. V. Chayanov on The Theory of Peasant Economy, eds. Daniel Thorner, et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) xvii-xviii; Sahlins, Stone Age Economics 87-92. For critiques of Sahlins and his followers, see A. E. Smith, “Chayanov, Sahlins, and the Labor-Consumer Balance,” Journal of Anthropological Research 35 (1979): 477-80; Nicola Tannenbaum, “The Misuse of Chayanov: ‘Chayanov’s Rule’ and Empiricist Bias in Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 86 (1984): 927-42. The necessity synthesis also rejects views which equate Herbert Simon’s satisficing with the target income hypothesis. See, e.g., Herbert C. Kelman and Donald P. Warwick, “Bridging Micro and Macro Approaches to Social Change: A Social-Psychological Approach,” Processes and Phenomena of Social Change, ed. Gerlad Zaltman (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973) 46; Lloyd G. Reynolds, “Agriculture in Development Theory: An Overview,” Agriculture in Development Theory, ed. Lloyd G. Reynolds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) 5. ↩
Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921; New York: Harper, 1965) 117n. ↩
Whittaker, History of Economic Ideas 102-8, 128-35; H. W. Arndt, “Prestige Economics,” Economic Record 48 (1972): 585. ↩
Charles J. Erasmus, Man Takes Control: Cultural Development and American Aid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961) 13-4, 101-56; Raymond Firth and B. S. Yamey, eds., Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies (Chicago: Aldine, 1964); Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual 50-4, 57-63, 70-4; Harner, “Scarcity” 126-9; Arndt, “Prestige Economics” 584-92; Douglas and Isherwood; Roger S. Mason, Conspicuous Consumption: A Study of Exceptional Consumer Behavior (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981) 7-10, 47-53. The “hierarchy of needs” approach of Abraham H. Maslow, which stresses that “growth” needs (e.g., the need for self-esteem) come into play once “maintenance” needs (e.g., hunger and safety) are secured, would seem to play some role in the consumption moderation response but as far as I can tell no one has specifically explored the connection. ↩
See section on “Production Diversification/Specialization. ↩
George J. Stigler, “The Early History of Empirical Studies of Consumer Behavior,” Journal of Political Economy 62 (1954): 95-103; Catlin, Progress of Economics 322-48. ↩
P. N. Mathur and Hannan Ezekiel, “Marketable Surplus of Food and Price Fluctuations in a Developing Economy,” Kyklos 14 (1961): 396-408; Friedmann, “World Market” 563, 567-8; Howard N. Barnum and Lyn Squire, A Model of an Agricultural Household: Theory and Evidence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) 10, 81-2; Subrata Ghatak and Ken Ingersent, Agriculture and Economic Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) 6; Inderjit Singh, Lyn Squire, and John Strauss, eds., Agricultural Household Models: Extensions, Applications, and Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) 25-7; Gallant, Risk and Survival 99. ↩
Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual 71-2. This is consonant with Wolf’s concept of a “ceremonial fund.” See Wolf, Peasants 7-9. ↩
Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 25; Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 35-6, 39, 41-2; Corbett, “Famine and Household Coping Strategies” 1107-8, 1111n33; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 364, 369-70, 372. Cf. Wolf, Peasants 15-7. ↩
Eames and Goode, Urban Poverty 163-72; McGee, “Poverty Syndrome” 56-9. These studies in the context of this necessity synthesis should put in proper perspective the great debate among economists over the possibility of a positively-sloped demand, known as the “Giffen paradox.” See George J. Stigler, Essays in the History of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965) 374-84; Roger S. Mason, Robert Giffen and the Giffen Paradox (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1989; Michael V. White, “Invention in the Face of Necessity: Marshallian Rhetoric and the Giffen Good(s),” Economic Record 66 (1990): 1-11; Otis W. Gilley and Gordon V. Karels, “In Search of Giffen Behavior,” Economic Inquiry 29 (1991): 182-9. ↩
Temple, Works 1: 138. See also Francis Bacon, The Essays; or, Counsels, Civil and Moral of Francis Bacon (New York, 1883) 154-5; T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England 1700‑1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) 42. Political economists before Benjamin Franklin, David Hume, and Adam Smith, despite the ubiquitous concern with “bullionism” and interest rates, were less concerned with questions of savings per se than the consumption of luxuries, although they regularly noted that frugality implied both reduced luxuries in the present and increased savings for future provisions and inheritance for posterity. See Sir William Petty, The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. Charles Henry Hull, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1899) 1: 254; 2: 446; John Houghton, Husbandry and Trade Improv’d, ed. Richard Bradley, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (London, 1728) 4: 382; Jacob Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things, ed. Jacob H. Hollander (1734; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1914) 29; Malthus, Works 6: 322. See also Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York: Harper, 1937) 27n36; W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times: The Mercantile System, 6th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925) 565n6; Guy Routh, The Origin of Economic Ideas, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1989) 101-2. ↩
Keynes, General Theory 63, 96. On treatment of saving as a residual, see Duesenberry, Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior 37. ↩
Petty, Economic Writings 1: 20. ↩
Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy 218; Mathur and Ezekiel, “Marketable Surplus” 368-408. ↩
Herbert Spencer comments on necessity as a requisite spur for the development of thrift and foresight. See John C. Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View: Essays in the History of Evolutionary Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) 74. ↩
For a similar critique, see Kyrk, Theory of Consumption 276-7. For a discussion of non-Western forms of savings and investments, see Firth and Yamey, Capital, Saving and Credit; Harbison, “Defining and Measuring the Supply of Children” 32-40. On the difficulties of physical saving or storage, see Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 21; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 367-8. ↩
See, e.g., Kyrk, Theory of Consumption 270-3; Keynes, General Theory 324-5; Louis Schneider, Paradox and Society: The Work of Bernard Mandeville (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987) 114. For an overview of economic theories of saving, see Douglas and Isherwood, World of Goods 25-55; Karl-Erik Wärneryd, “On the Psychology of Saving: An Essay on Economic Behavior,” Journal of Economic Psychology 10 (1989): 515-41; Karl-Erik Wärneryd, “Improving Psychological Theory through Studies of Economic Behaviour: The Case of Saving,” Applied Psychology 38 (1989): 213-36; Francis Green, “Institutional and Other Unconventional Theories of Saving,” Journal of Economic Issues 25 (1991): 93-113. ↩
The work of George Ainslie points strongly in this direction. See George Ainslie, “A Behavioral Economic Approach to the Defense Mechanisms: Freud’s Energy Theory Revisited,” Social Science Information 21 (1982): 735-79; George Ainslie, “Beyond Microeconomics: Conflict among Interests in a Multiple Self as a Determinant of Value,” The Multiple Self, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 133-75. ↩
Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 18-29; Arnold, Famine 47-95; Corbett, “Famine and Household Coping Strategies” 1100-3; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 363; Gallant, Risk and Survival. Cf. Eames and Goode, Urban Poverty 161-2. ↩
The necessity synthesis brings some light to the hoary paradox that some people save less if the rate of interest rises and more if it falls, an idea traceable as far back as Thomas Mun and Josiah Child and perfectly understandable within the necessity synthesis. See William Lucas Sargant, Recent Political Economy (London, 1867) 78-9; D. H. Robertson, “Economic Incentive,” Economica 1 (1921): 233-4; Whittaker, History of Economic Ideas 551-4. ↩
Vanderlint, Money Answers all Things 31; Dorothy S. Brady and Rose D. Friedman, “Savings and the Income Distribution,” Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 10 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1947) 248-9; Douglas and Isherwood, World of Goods 50-1. ↩
Sauvy, General Theory 291-2; Allen C. Kelley, “Savings, Demographic Change, and Economic Development,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 24 (1976): 683-93; Jeffrey S. Hammer, “Population Growth and Savings in LDCs: A Survey Article,” World Development 14 (1986): 579‑91; Andrew Mason, “Saving, Economic Growth, and Demographic Change,” Population and Development Review 14 (1988): 113‑44. Such an interpretation is backed by the traditional belief that children and family affection provide the chief motive for savings and the fear that smaller families would lead to a reduction in savings. See A. Marshall, Principles of Economics 288-9; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical , Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939) 699, 1035-6; Joseph J. Spengler, Population Economics: Selected Essays of Joseph J. Spengler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972) 136n. ↩
On pre-historic storage, see Hayden, “Subsistence and Ecological Adaptations” 387-94; Redding, “General Explanation of Subsistence Change” 71-3; Keeley, “Hunter-Gatherer Economic Complexity” 373. On famine storage, see Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 21-2, 26; Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 34-7; Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply 53-5; Corbett, “Famine and Household Coping Strategies” 1106-9; Gallant, “Crisis and Response” 401-3; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 363-4, 367-71; Gallant, Risk and Survival 94-8, 121-9. In a similar vein, see below on “social” forms of storage. ↩
Pierre Gourou, La Terre et L’homme en Extreme-Orient (1940), quoted in Michel Cépède, “Relationship between Population Pressure (or Growth) and Systems of Land Tenure, the Fragmentation of Holdings, and Customs Affecting Fertility in Rural Areas,” Proceedings of the World Population Conference: Belgrade, 1965, Vol. 3 (New York: United Nations, 1967) 355; Julian H. Steward, “Cultural Causality and Law: A Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Civilizations,” American Anthropology 51 (1949): 23; Julian H. Steward, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Urbana, IL: University Illinois Press, 1955) 206; Carneiro, “Slash-and-Burn Cultivation” 142; Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual 56; Carneiro, “Theory of the Origin of the State” 733-8; Harner, “Scarcity”; C. Clark, Population Growth and Land Use 135-6; Jochim, Strategies for Survival 185-6, 194-201; Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) 114-7; Carneiro, “Circumscription Theory” 505-6. For critics of Carneiro, see Dumond, “Population Growth and Political Centralization” 286-310, esp 310n6; Robert M. Schacht, “Circumscription Theory: A Critical Review,” American Behavioral Scientist 31 (1988): 438-48. For an opposing traditional view of warfare linking poverty to peace and avarice to warfare, see Samuel C. Chew, The Virtues Reconciled: An Iconographic Study (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1947) 25-6. ↩
For a seventeenth-century analysis that tends to flip-flop between these competing views, see Temple, Works 1: 1-30. ↩
Ernest Barker, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (1906; New York: Russell & Russell, 1959) 28-30, 36-8, 72-3, 99; Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935; New York: Octagon, 1965) 209-10; Whittaker, History of Economic Ideas 7-8, 11-2; R. C. Cross and A. D. Woozley, Plato’s Republic: A Philosophical Commentary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964) 68-74. ↩
Barker, Political Thought 101-10, 265-76; Cross and Woozley, Plato’s Republic 75-99; Gouldner, Enter Plato 238-41, 251, 341; Martin Sicker, The Genesis of the State (New York: Praeger, 1991) 1-4, 21-2. On the ancient Greek obssession with the division of labor, see Gouldner, Enter Plato 90-4. Albert Trever notes although Plato’s emphasis on the origin of society in “mutual need” and division of labor qualifies as “a natural theory of social origins” opposed to the social contract of the Sophists, his argument does not really go so far as an Aristotelian emphasis on an innate social impulse. See Trever, History of Greek Economic Thought 22, 34-5. For seventeenth-century England, see J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London: Longman, 1986) 106. ↩
Actually, it is hard to say who is more Democritean since Democritus placed himself on all sides of this debate. Aristotle shared Democritus’s ethnocentric determinist emphasis on a final nature. But the Sophists shared Democritus’s theory of an original atomistic nature. Plato was somewhere in between these views. See Barker, Political Thought 37, 73n1; Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism 164, 175-6; Alban Dewes Winspear, The Genesis of Plato’s Thought (New York: Dryden Press, 1940) 195-202; De Waal Malefijt, Images of Man 7; Michael Landmann, De Homine: Man in the Mirror of His Thought, trans. David J. Parent (Normal, IL: Applied Literature, 1979) 28; Thomas Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (1967; Atlanta: Scholars, 1990) 107-10. ↩
For a similar view, see Sicker, Genesis of the State 18-9. On Spencer’s belief that necessity or self-preservation led to both the social state and the division of labor, see Spencer, Principles of Sociology 2: 245-8, 278-9; J. Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View 73. However, Durkheim rejects this view in favor of pre-existing cooperation and seems to suggest that Comte and Spencer side with him. See Durkheim, Division of Labor 278. Here one should note the ambiguous position on these central questions of modern sociological human ecologists and anthropological cultural evolutionists who‑-in the tradition of Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim‑-retain a semblance of the necessity model but primarily emphasize the “organic” role of increased population density in cultural evolution, downplaying or inconsistently applying behavioral insights. Their functionalism, with its emphasis on “survival” or “adaptation” to one’s environment, verges on “necessitarian” and Democritean brands of necessity rather than the type central to the necessity synthesis. However, the insights of these scholars are certainly potentially reconcilable with the necessity synthesis. For sociological human ecologists, see Spencer, Principles of Sociology 1: 8-15, 449-50, 464-5, 594-5; 2: 261-2, 268; Amos H. Hawley, Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure (New York: Ronald Press, 1950); Otis Dudley Duncan, “Human Ecology and Population Studies,” The Study of Population, eds. Philip M. Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959) 678-716; Amos H. Hawley, “Population and Society: An Essay on Growth,” Fertility and Family Planning: A World View, eds. S. J. Berhman et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969) 189-209. For anthropological cultural evolutionists, see Bronislaw Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944) 91-8; J. Steward, Theory of Cultural Change 207-8; White, Evolution of Culture 281-302; Martin Orans, “Surplus,” Human Organization 25 (1966): 24-32; Morton H. Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1967); Robert F. Stevenson, Population and Political Systems in Tropical Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). ↩
On Aristotle, see Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) 56. Even Hobbes recognized the emergence of the family out of the early necessity to perpetuate the human race. See De Waal Malefijt, Images of Man 14. ↩
See, e.g., Max Savelle, Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948) 188, 288‑9; Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956) 130; Marsilius of Padua, Vindicae contra tyrannos defense of people, and Richard Hooker, in J. S. Slotkin, ed., Readings in Early Anthropology (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1965) 35-6, 76-8; J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) xii, 107; Joyce Appleby, “Ideology and Theory: The Tension between Political and Economic Liberalism in Seventeenth‑Century England,” American Historical Review 81 (1976): 502; Sicker, Genesis of the State 6-7, 65-113, 131-3; A. John Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 33, 36. When using the language of contracts, these theorists often stressed a two-stage process: first, a social contract to form a civil society and, second, a governmental compact. See Sicker, Genesis of the State 77-113. Protagoras had highlighted a similar two-stage process but attributed the second stage to the gift of the gods who taught all men the art of government. See Sicker, Genesis of the State 20-1. The belief in the need for government driven by a fear of anarchy was a view shared by the conservative Pythagoreans. See Winspear, Genesis of Plato’s Thought 82-9. ↩
Spencer, Principles of Sociology 2: 307-8; C. B. McPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1962) 149-50; Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern 38-9. ↩
Andrew P. Vayda and Bonnie J. McCay, “New Directions in Ecology and Ecological Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 4 (1975): 300-2. ↩
Pitirim A. Sorokin, Carle C. Zimmerman, and Charles J. Galpin, eds., A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1930-2) 1: 279-81; Dumond, “Population Growth and Political Centralization” 299. ↩
Sorokin, Zimmerman, and Galpin, Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology 1: 282-6. ↩
Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit 239. ↩
Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 21, 23-4; Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 20-4; Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 23-4; Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply 43, 55-63; Gallant, “Crisis and Response” 404-13; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 363-4, 368; Gallant, Risk and Survival 143-82. ↩
Edwin N. Wilmsen, “Interaction, Spacing Behavior, and the Organization of Hunting Bands,” Journal of Anthropological Research 29 (1973): 25; Richard B. Lee, “!Kung Spatial Organization: An Ecological and Historical Perspective,” Human Ecology 1 (1972): 125-47; Hayden, “Subsistence and Ecological Adaptations” 360-1. ↩
Wolf, Peasants 78-97; Paul Halstead and John O’Shea, “A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed: Social Storage and the Origins of Social Ranking,” Ranking, Resource and Exchange: Aspects of the Archaeology of Early European Society, eds. Colin Renfrew and Stephen Shennan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 92-9; David P. Braun and Stephen Plog, “Evolution of ‘Tribal’ Social Networks: Theory and Prehistoric North American Evidence,” American Antiquity 47 (1982): 504-25; Thomas E. Emerson and R. Barry Lewis, eds., Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). ↩
Eames and Goode, Urban Poverty 161-2, 190-9; Donald V. Kurtz, “The Rotating Credit Association: An Adaptation to Poverty,” Human Organization 32 (1973): 49-58; McGee, “Poverty Syndrome” 55; M. Estellie Smith, ed., Perspectives on the Informal Economy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990). ↩
Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 395‑8; Dumond, “Population Growth and Cultural Change” 313-5; Harner, “Population Pressure” 67-86; Dumond, “Population Growth and Political Centralization” 295-9; Mortimore, “Land and Population Pressure” 64; Netting, “Agrarian Ecology” 40-1; Vernon L. Smith, “The Primitive Hunter Cultures, Pleistocene Extinction, and the Rise of Agriculture,” Journal of Political Economy 83 (1975): 727-56; D. Harris, “Settling Down” 401-17; M. Cohen, “Population Growth” 27-57; Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors 26‑7; Schacht, “Circumscription Theory” 443-5; Rosenberg, “Mother of Invention” 407-12. On crises in general, see John A. Hicks, Theory of Economic History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) 13; Crozier, Bureaucratic Phenomenon 195-8; Robert D. Cuff, “American Historians and the ‘Organizational Factor,” Canadian Review of American Studies 4 (1973): 27-8. The most common division in competing theories of the rise of the state falls along voluntary/coercive lines emphasizing alternatively the voluntary pursuit of opportunity and the coercion of powerful groups. The organizational response considered here shares both voluntary and coercive elements, highlighting the voluntary response to necessity (rather than opportunity) but stressing an inherent aversion to such hierarchical organization except under conditions of necessity whether physical coercion, threat of war, population pressure, etc. On the two approaches, see Carneiro, “Theory of the Origin of the State” 733-4; Elman R. Service, “Classical and Modern Theories of the Origins of Government,” Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution, eds. Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978) 21-34. ↩
Keeley, “Hunter-Gatherer Economic Complexity” 373. ↩
Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, “The First Economic Revolution,” Economic Historical Review 2nd ser. 30 (1977): 229-41; Douglass North, “Economic Growth: What Have We Learned from the Past,” International Organization, National Policies and Economic Development, eds. Karl Brunner and Allan H. Meltzer (Amsterdam: North‑Holland, 1977) 170-3; Brenner, History 62-104. For an example of a more recent response emphasizing community property rights, see Staughton Lynd, “The Genesis of the Idea of a Community Right to Industrial Property in Youngstown and Pittsburgh, 1977-1987,” Journal of American History 74 (1987): 927. ↩
See, e.g., Webb and Webb, Industrial Democracy 676-9, 700-2; Commons, Labor and Administration 259; Kyrk, Theory of Consumption 172-4; Whittaker, History of Economic Ideas 9, 77-8, 185-6, 410-2, 604-7; Brenner, History 210-1. Of course, inherent in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates was the recognition that necessity in whatever form affected individuals, households, communities, and even nations differentially. What was one group’s necessity was often another group’s golden days, reflected best in the impact of rising real wages on manufacturers and workers. Similarly, one group’s response to necessity could actually necessitate other groups, as reflected in landlords’ enclosures of open fields. See, e.g., Friedlander, “Demographic Responses and Socioeconomic Structure” 266-7. The degree to which such sociopolitical responses may be classified as organizational rather than simply allocative is rather moot, depending on the degree to which they benefit the whole rather than simply the part and the temporal and spatial scope of the analysis. ↩
Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism 1885-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) 48-70. On farmers’ movements, see Carl C. Taylor, The Farmers’ Movement 1620-1920 (New York: American Book Company, 1953) 10 et passim; Fred A. Shannon, American Farmers’ Movements (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1957); Walter T. K. Nugent, “Some Parameters of Populism,” Agricultural History 40 (1966): 255-70; Robert A. McGuire, “Economic Causes of Late-Nineteenth Century Agrarian Unrest: New Evidence,” Journal of Economic History 41 (1981): 835-52; James H. Stock, “Real Estate Mortgages, Foreclosures, and Midwestern Agrarian Unrest, 1865-1920,” Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 89-105; Stanley B. Parsons, et al., “The Role of Cooperatives in the Development of the Movement Culture of Populism,” Journal of American History 69 (1983): 866-85; Martin Ridge, “Populism Redux: John D. Hicks and The Populist Revolt,” Reviews in American History 13 (1985): 142-54; E. Paul Durrenberger, “Household Economies and Agrarian Unrest in Iowa, 1931,” Household Economies and their Transformations, ed. Morgan D. Maclachlan (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987) 198-211. On trade unions, see Selig Perlman, A History of Trade Unionism in the United States (1922; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1950) 275-7; George Sayers Bain and Farouk Elsheikh, Union Growth and the Business Cycle: An Econometric Analysis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976) 6-23, 62-3, 84. On business alliances, see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Neil Fligstein, The Transformation of Corporate Control (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). If one treats the household or firm as an organization of individuals rather than a decision-making body, then responses discussed in the “innovation” section belong more appropriately under “vertical organizational” responses. See, e.g., James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958); Richard M. Cyert and James G. March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1963); Jeffrey Pfeffer, “The Micropolitics of Organizations,” Environments and Organizations, ed. Marshall W. Meyer (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978) 37. ↩
Sahlins, Stone Age Economics 186-91, 210-5; Charles D. Laughlin, Jr. and Ivan A. Brady, “Introduction: Diaphasis and Change in Human Populations,” Extinction and Survival in Human Populations, eds. Charles D. Laughlin, Jr. and Ivan A. Brady (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978) 27-37; Charles D. Laughlin, Jr., “Adaptation and Exchange in So: A Diachronic Study of Deprivation,” Extinction and Survival in Human Populations, eds. Charles D. Laughlin, Jr. and Ivan A. Brady (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978) 76-94; Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 25; Dirks, “Social Responses” 21-32; Den Hartog, “Adjustment of Food Behaviour” 156; Minnis, Social Adaptation to Food Stress 6-7, 20-4, 37-42, 196-7; Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 23-4; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 372-5. Other scholars suggest an inherent ambiguity in the impact of necessity on sociality which forces individuals to centripetal or centrifugal extremes. Cf. Durkheim, Division of Labor 257-82; Wolf, Peasants 78-80. Robert Dirks, however, believes the diachronic “accordion effect” far better explains the ambiguous empirical evidence on the impact of necessity on sociality far better than the synchronic emphasis on individual and cultural differences. See Dirks, “Social Responses” 22-3. ↩
Boserup, “Impact of Population Growth” 266; Brenner, History 12. On nineteenth-century tramping and poor relief in the United States, see Priscilla Ferguson Clement, “The Transformation of the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935, ed. Eric H. Monkonnen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) 56-84; Sidney L. Harring, “Class Conflict and the Suppression of Tramps in Buffalo, 1892-1894,” Law and Society Review 11 (1977): 873-911. At the same time, however, the traditional belief that necessity knows no law makes theft less disrespectable, and serves to mollify the centrifugal effect of necessity. See, e.g., Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 373. Modern theories on criminal behavior, especially property crime, have shifted from emphasis on absolute deprivation to relative deprivation. Views have also shifted as to whether criminal activities should be interpreted better as production diversification/ specialization or as simple crime. However, both views fit within a necessity synthesis. See Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 2nd ed. (Glencoe: Free, 1957) 141-9; McGee, “Poverty Syndrome” 52-6; Louise I. Shelley, Crime and Modernization: The Impact of Industrialization and Urbanization on Crime (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981) 10-3; Scott J. South and Lawrence E. Cohen, “Unemployment and the Homicide Rate: A Paradox Resolved?,” Social Indicators Research 17 (1985): 325-43; George F. Truex, “Crime in the Development Process,” Production and Autonomy: Anthropological Studies and Critiques of Development, ed. John W. Bennett and John R. Bowen (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988) 185-98. ↩
Hayden, “Subsistence and Ecological Adaptations” 361, 371. ↩
Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 26; Gallant, “Crisis and Response” 403-4; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 364. ↩
Davies, “J-Curve” 728; Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 25-6; Easterlin, Birth and Fortune 97-111; Dirks, “Social Responses” 27; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 364, 372-5. ↩
William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883; New York: Harper, 1911) 92; Norris A. Briscoe, Economics of Efficiency (New York: Macmillan, 1914) 328-31; C. Bertrand Thompson, “Wages and Wage Systems as Incentives,” Scientific Management, ed. Clarence Bertrand Thompson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914) 685-9; Alvin H. Hansen, “Cycles of Strikes,” American Economic Review 11 (1921): 616-21; Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 576-7; Ely et al., Outlines of Economics 429; Michael Shalev, “Trade Unionism and Economic Analysis: The Case of Industrial Conflict,” Journal of Labor Research 1 (1980): 133-73; Bruce E. Kaufman, “Bargaining Theory, Inflation, and Cyclical Strike Activity in Manufacturing,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 34 (1981): 333-55; John Kennan, “The Economics of Strikes,” Handbook of Labor Economics, 2 vols., eds. Orley Ashenfelter and Richard Layard (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986) 2: 1115-23. Other economists have focused on what Keynes called the “money illusion” to explain resistance to lowering of nominal wages in periods of deflation and thus rising real wages on a similar basis (although apparently normally without strikes), but the two literatures have not yet reached any grand synthesis. See James E. Annable, Jr., “A Theory of Downward‑Rigid Wages and Cyclical Unemployment,” Economic Inquiry 15 (1977): 326-44; James E. Annable, Jr., “Money Wage Determination in Post Keynesian Economics,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 2 (1980): 405-19; Anisuzzaman Chowdury, “The Decentralized Labor Market and the Nonmarket Consideration of Wage Changes,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 5 (1983): 648‑63. On the other hand, Roger Keeran and Greg Tarpinian have attributed the decline of strikes in the 1980s to a change in the framework of industrial and labor relations as part of the restructuring of American corporations in the face of an unprecedented increase in foreign competition. See Roger Keeran and Greg Tarpinian, “Public Policy and the Recent Decline of Strikes,” Policy Studies Journal 18 (1989-90): 461-70. ↩
Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 576-7; James C. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review 27 (1962): 5-19; James C. Davies, Human Nature in Politics: The Dynamics of Political Behavior (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963) 360; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963); Ted Robert Gurr, “A Comparative Study of Civil Strife,” The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Praeger, 1969) 572‑632; Ivo K. Feierabend, Rosalind L. Feierabend, and Betty A. Nesvold, “Social Change and Political Violence: Cross‑National Patterns,” The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969) 632‑87; Davies, “J-Curve” 690-730; Wolf, Peasants 106-9; Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) 14-20; Joel S. Migdal, Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) 226-56; James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 28-31; Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 86. Joanne Martin attributes the weak correlation between relative deprivation and collective action such as riots or revolutions to the “high‑cost” nature of such behaviors, noting a much stronger correlation with “somewhat less costly behaviors, such as student participation in peaceful protests, willingness to advocate militant attitudes, and aggression against strangers in laboratory settings.” See Joanne Martin, “The Tolerance of Injustice,” Relative Deprivation and Social Comparison: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 4, eds. James M. Olson, et al. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986) 221-2, 235-9. ↩
Ross, Social Psychology 265; Davies, Human Nature 31-63; Hicks, Theory of Economic History 13-4; Wolf, Peasants 91-2. ↩
United Nations, Determinants 230; J. Steward, Theory of Cultural Change 207; E. N. Omaboe, “The Population Pressure and the Development of New Areas,” Proceedings of the World Population Conference: Belgrade, 1965, Vol. 3 (New York: United Nations, 1967) 401; Boserup, “Impact of Population Growth” 266; Durrenberger, “Introduction” 18. ↩
March and Simon, Organizations 120-9. Cf. Wolf, Peasants 78-80. ↩
Arnold Toynbee, for example, contrasts the many different responses of Greek city-states to population pressure. Cf. William Graham Sumner on the different potential responses to the non-necessity accompanying the increased demand for labor in the opening of new continents. See Toynbee, Study of History 1: 24-5; William Graham Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, ed. Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914) 119-23, 140-1. ↩
Robert L. Carneiro, “From Autonomous Villages to the State, a Numerical Estimation,” Population Growth: Anthropological Implications, ed. Brian Spooner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972) 64-77; North, “Economic Growth” 170; M. Cohen, “Population Growth” 51n8; Brenner, History 83; Keeley, “Hunter-Gatherer Economic Complexity” 375. ↩
Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy 238; Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories 357-432; Gleave and White, “Population Density” 291-4; Dumond, “Population Growth and Political Centralization” 289, 308-10; Matras, Populations and Societies 463-4; Brenner, History 41, 65. ↩
Toynbee, Study of History 1: 328-30. ↩
Matras, Populations and Societies 476. ↩
See, e.g., Migdal, Peasants, Politics, and Revolution 112-29, 226-56; Barlett, “Adaptive Strategies” 545-73; R. North, “Integrating the Perspectives” 199; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 370; Gallant, Risk and Survival 59-112. ↩
Adam Smith, in Catlin, Progress of Economics 150; William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785; New York: Garland, 1978) 615-6; William Graham Sumner, Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1963) 15; Matras, Populations and Societies 468-9; Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress 147-50; Richard A. Easterlin, “Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern United States,” Journal of Economic History 36 (1976): 46, 67; Peter A. Morrison, “The Functions and Dynamics of the Migration Process,” Internal Migration: A Comparative Perspective, eds. Alan A. Brown and Egon Neuberger (New York: Academic Press, 1977) 63-4; Alexander James Field, “Sectoral Shift in Antebellum Massachusetts: A Reconstruction,” Explorations in Economic History 15 (1978): 146-71; Gavin Wright, “Cheap Labor and Southern Textiles before 1880,” Journal of Economic History 39 (1979): 665; Dan Scott Smith, “A Malthusian-Frontier Interpretation of United State Demographic History before c. 1815,” Urbanization in the Americas: The Background in Comparative Perspective, eds. Woodrow Borah et al. (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, 1980) 19-20; Lorena S. Walsh, “Staying Put or Getting Out: Findings for Charles County, Maryland, 1650-1720,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 44 (1987): 89-103. ↩
Gustav Cassel, The Theory of Social Economy, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harcourt, 1924) 336-7; John D. Durand, The Labor Force in the United States 1890-1960 (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1948) 84; Kenneth E. Boulding, Economic Analysis, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper, 1955) 210. ↩
See, e.g., Charles H. Wood, “Structural Changes and Household Strategies: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Rural Migration,” Human Organization 40 (1981): 338-44; Charles H. Wood, “Equilibrium and Historical-Structural Perspectives on Migration,” International Migration Review 16 (1982): 298-319; Robert L. Bach and Lisa A. Schraml, “Migration, Crisis and Theoretical Conflict,” International Migration Review 16 (1982): 320-41; Marianne Schmink, “Household Economic Strategies: Review and Research Agenda,” Latin American Research Review 19 (1984): 87-101; Alice Littlefield and Hill Gates, eds., Marxist Approaches in Economic Anthropology (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991). ↩
Dirks, “Social Responses” 24-6; Corbett, “Famine and Household Coping Strategies” 1100-3; Shipton, “African Famines and Food Security” 365. ↩
Polgar, “Culture, History and Population Dynamics” 5; Colson, “In Good Years and in Bad” 26. ↩
E. de Vries, “Historical Evidence Concerning the Effect of Population Pressure and Growth on Technical Progress in Agriculture,” Proceedings of the World Population Conference: Belgrade, 1965, Vol. 3 (New York: United Nations, 1967) 426. ↩
Migdal, Peasants, Politics, and Revolution 125-7. ↩
Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy 111-5; Thorner, “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy” xxi. ↩
Joginder Kumar, Population and Land in World Agriculture: Recent Trends and Relationships (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1973) 210. ↩
Redding, “General Explanation of Subsistence Change” 71-80. ↩
Carneiro, “Circumscription Theory” 506. Cf. Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies 19, 26. ↩
W. Moore, Industrialization and Labor 48-77; Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress 63,107-9,151. See also above discussion of proletarianization in the section on “Production Diversification/Specialization.” ↩
On settlements, see Smith and Young, “Evolution of Early Agriculture” 9. On the rise of the state, see Spencer, Principles of Sociology 25, 466-7; Carneiro, “Slash-and-Burn Cultivation”; Robert B. Graber and Paul B. Roscoe, “Introduction: Circumscription and the Evolution of Society,” American Behavioral Scientist 31 (1988): 409-10; Carneiro, “Circumscription Theory”; Carneiro, “From Autonomous Villages to the State.” On fertility control, see Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy 12; K. Davis, “Theory of Change and Response” 355; Friedlander, “Demographic Responses and Population Change” 359-60; Zelinsky, “Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition” 219-49; Robert McC. Netting, Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 226-7; Friedlander, “Demographic Responses and Socioeconomic Structure” 265, 268; Adams and Kasakoff, “Ecosystems over Time” 218-9. On proletarianization and the labor safety valve, see Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968) 89-90. ↩
R. Adams, “Migration Geography” ii; Easterlin, “Towards a Socioeconomic Theory of Fertility” 146. ↩
That Davis especially would have trouble with many of the ideas presented here, see Kingsley Davis, “Colin Clark and the Benefit of an Increase in Population,” Scientific American 218 (1968): 133-8. Cf. Richard E. Bilsborrow, “Population Pressures and Agricultural Development in Developing Countries: A Conceptual Framework and Recent Evidence,” World Development 15 (1987): 183-5. ↩
Robert L. Carneiro, “Slash-and-Burn Cultivation among the Kuikuru and Its Implications for Cultural Development in the Amazon Basin,” Man in Adaptation: The Cultural Present, ed. Y. A. Cohen (Chicago: Aldine, 1968) 131-45; D. E. Dumond, “Population Growth and Cultural Change,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21 (1965): 302-24; Richard A. Easterlin, “Effects of Population Growth on the Economic Development of Developing Countries,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 369 (1967): 103-4; Richard A. Easterlin, “Towards a Socioeconomic Theory of Fertility: Survey of Recent Research on Economic Factors in American Fertility,” Fertility and Family Planning: A World View, eds. S.J. Behrman et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1966); Alfred Sauvy, General Theory of Population, trans. Christophe Campos (New York: Basic, 1969); Richard A. Easterlin, “Relations between Population Pressure and Economic and Demographic Change,” International Population Conference, London 1969, Vol 3 (Liege: International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, 1971) 1661‑74; Wilbur Zelinsky, “The Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition,” Geographical Review 61 (1971): 219-49; Don E. Dumond, “Population Growth and Political Centralization,” Population Growth: Anthropological Implications, ed. Brian Spooner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972) 286-310; Richard G. Wilkinson, Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Model of Economic Development (London: Methuen, 1973); Judah Matras, Populations and Societies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973); Joel S. Migdal, Peasants, Politics, and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social Change in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Robert McC. Netting, “Agrarian Ecology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 3 (1974): 21-56; Richard A. Easterlin, “The Conflict between Aspirations and Resources,” Population and Development Review 2 (1976) 417-25; James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Douglass North, “Economic Growth: What Have We Learned from the Past,” International Organization, National Policies and Economic Development, eds. Karl Brunner and Allan H. Meltzer (Amsterdam: North, 1977) 157-77; Julian L. Simon, The Economics of Population Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) 183-203; Mark N. Cohen, The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); David R. Harris, “Alternative Pathways Toward Agriculture,” Origins of Agriculture, ed. Charles A. Reed (The Hague: Mouton, 1977) 181-9; David Grigg, “Ester Boserup’s Theory of Agrarian Change: A Critical Review,” Progress in Human Geography 3 (1979): 73-6; D. B. Grigg, “Migration and Overpopulation,” The Geographical Impact of Migration, eds. Paul White and Robert Woods (London: Longman, 1980) 61-5; Michael A. Jochim, Strategies for Survival: Cultural Behavior in an Ecological Context (New York: Academic, 1981); Dov Friedlander, “Demographic Responses and Socioeconomic Structure: Population Processes in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century,” Demography 20 (1983) 250-1; Reuven Brenner, History‑‑The Human Gamble (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Robert M. Netting, Cultural Ecology, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1986) 73. See also B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe A.D. 500-1850 (London: Arnold, 1963) 12-3; David F. Aberle, The Peyote Religion among the Navaho (New York: Wenner, 1966) 324-5; Michel Cépède, “Relationship between Population Pressure (or Growth) and Systems of Land Tenure, the Fragmentation of Holdings, and Customs Affecting Fertility in Rural Areas,” Proceedings of the World Population Conference: Belgrade, 1965, Vol. 3 (New York: United Nations, 1967) 354-7; Philip E. L. Smith, “Land-Use, Settlement Patterns and Subsistence Agriculture: A Demographic Perspective,” Man, Settlement and Urbanism, eds. Peter J. Ucko et al. (London: Duckworth, 1972) 411; T. Cuyler Young, “Population Densities and Early Mesopotamian Urbanism,” Man, Settlement and Urbanism, eds. Peter J. Ucko et al. (London: Duckworth, 1972) 829; Gerald Francis Murray, “The Evolution of Haitian Peasant Land Tenure: A Case Study in Agrarian Adaptation to Population Growth,” diss., Columbia University, 1977, 15-32; Charles H. Wood, “Structural Changes and Household Strategies: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Rural Migration,” Human Organization 40 (1981): 338-44; Charles H. Wood, “Equilibrium and Historical-Structural Perspectives on Migration,” International Migration Review 16 (1982): 298-319; Robert C. North, “Integrating the Perspectives: From Population to Conflict and War,” Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Population and Conflict, ed. Nazli Choucri (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984) 199; John W. Adams and Alice Bee Kasakoff, “Ecosystems over Time: The Study of Migration in ‘Long Run’ Perspective,” The Ecosystem Concept in Anthropology, ed. Emilio Moran (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984) 218-9; Allen W. Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) 12-6; Morgan D. Maclachlan, “From Intensification to Proletarianization,” Household Economies and the Transformations, ed. Morgan D. Maclachlan, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987) 8-9; E. A. Hammel and Nancy Howell, “Research in Population and Culture: An Evolutionary Framework,” Current Anthropology 28 (1987): 141-60; Michael Rosenberg, “The Mother of Invention: Evolutionary Theory, Territoriality, and the Origins of Agriculture,” American Anthropologist 92 (1990): 399-415. Students of Easterlin have extended his framework to a wide range of historical experience. See Michael R. Haines, Economic‑Demographic Interrelations in Developing Agricultural Regions: A Case Study of Prussian Upper Silesia 1840‑1914 (New York: Arno, 1977) 10-11. ↩