Population Growth, Resource Pressure, War, Production, and the Foundation of Rational and Voluntary Social Order

• In Event: Recent Advances in Mathematical Sociology

Abstract

Why are levels of cooperation higher in the large complex human societies of today than in the smaller and simpler societies of the distant past? An answer to this question is important to our understanding of the foundations of social order. Building on the insight that population growth and population resource pressure can be drivers of social change, we conceptualize the competitive struggle between human societies as a collective action contest between groups for land—a productive resource that people combine with their own labor to produce the food and other products that they need to live. This situation embeds the dual economic processes of production and rent-seeking within a single integrated game, yielding a structure that incentivizes previously unexplained levels of cooperation. Our main result is that when groups of self-interested rational actors compete for a fixed-quantity productive resource that is highly determinative of the level of production, per capita levels of contributing to the production of collective goods within groups increase with group size.

Author

• Noah P. Mark, University of North Carolina at Charlotte