Everything in here is adapted from Cereals, Appropriability and Hierarchy, by Mayshar Moav, Neeman and Pascali. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/omoav/mmnp11aug2017.pdf … 2/
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No, potatoes are wicked and lower state capacity! Brief thread on my favorite theory of why "the West won." tl;dr: tropical countries grew roots and tubers, which couldn't be stored->no theft or trade->no institutions. 1/https://twitter.com/peternka/status/1025465177943277574 …
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Tubers are high in moisture, so they’re bulky to transport. They also spoil quickly. This ensures that whoever grows tubers will be able to consume them, or at least that a faraway state won’t be able to extract them. 3/
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Cereals are more productive. But they’re seasonal, so they require storage, while tubers last year-round. Storing your produce in a barn is an invitation to thieves. Leaving it in the ground is only an invitation to thieves who really like digging. 4/
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In their theory, a state forms to fight off bandits, out of private desires for protection. A state could also just be bandits that settled down. 5/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/2938736
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I really like this explanation of how a state can emerge even in a society that’s at subsistence (with some population losses). Surplus is neither necessary nor sufficient for states. 6/pic.twitter.com/TWJX84JpA0
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As an instrument, they used the relative productivity of local cereal and tubers. Tubers are naturally suited to tropical environments. Tubers are a worse proposition in northern latitudes (darker shades of grey) and tuber societies are equatorial (red). 7/pic.twitter.com/3pEqZYWlLh
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They find that local cereals’ productivity advantage predicts the location of ancient cities. One standard deviation greater cereal advantage leads to a 13% greater probability of city formation. And raises by 65% the log odds of having a state, instead of a tribe or chiefdom. 8/
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But “locally available” changed over time. In the Old World, yams were the only tuber. What happened when the potato came over from the Americas? Peace, basically. Conflict was disincentivized. Here's the virtue of the potato I ragged on above—I guess it’s not entirely wicked. 9/
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State-building, meanwhile, took off in areas that gained new access to cereals, even outside of colonies. (I’m skeptical of the magnitude of this, there were lots of other state-building pressures they don’t control for, like the slave trade and commodity trades.) 10/pic.twitter.com/FwUwESLdaR
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This doesn’t explain why Europe “won” instead of, say, Egypt or Japan. But the head start on state capacity does explain why powerful states didn’t emerge in the (agriculturally productive) tropics. Thanks for reading. Apologies to the authors if I misstated anything. /FIN
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Why can't both be true? (The difficulty of stealing potatoes is supposedly a factor in the reduction of civil deaths in European wars.)
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I think you underestimate how widespread trade and cereal grains are. Also tropics uh, technically correct but potatoes were originally grown in the high mountains. Blight gets them if its warm all year.
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