[bell-cot]

Not an anthropologist - but instead of "How farming promotes inequality", I'd frame it as "How resource-producing capital promotes inequality". It could be livestock in a migratory herding society, or boats and nets when those were critical for fishing, or whatever.

> In contemporary Western societies, unigeniture is either considered wrong or is illegal; we no longer differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate offspring...

At best, those are common ideals in Western society. Try talking to an old attorney who does family law.

Also worth a mention - in primitive conditions, polygamy can speed the spread of highly beneficial genes through the society. The textbook case is immune system genes - historically, disease killed a lot of our ancestors.

[mandevil]

TFA talked about the difficulty of division, and waved at the idea that farming was different from pastoral societies because of the ease of division: farming land is more valuable as it is concentrated (because of the well known dangers of having many very small plots that are difficult to work and improve) but a herd (or fishing tools) can be split and merged far more easily. So agriculture drives to unigenture.

A blog post like this is mostly hand-waving at complex ideas, but that was her argument for it.

[bell-cot]

Based both on family history (farmers both sides) and experts such as https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... - I have grave doubts as to the downsides of having many small plots of land in early agricultural conditions. The critical issue is having enough total land (measured by productivity) to feed your family in bad years.

And whatever nice-sounding things TFA might suggest about diving a herd, it's obvious that 8 cattle are worth 4X as much as 2 cattle. And any "leave 1/4 of my herd to each of my 4 children" division will result in a 4X downgrade to the next generation's standard of living.

(Oh, yeah - the TFA has plenty of optimistic hand-waving.)

[ekjhgkejhgk]

> I'd frame it as "How resource-producing capital promotes inequality". It could be livestock in a migratory herding society, or boats and nets when those were critical for fishing, or whatever.

I agree, but nitpick: capital by definition can be put to use to produce or gather something. So resource-producing capital is redundant.

[bell-cot]

Yes-ish? I'm not a CPA or MBA (ditto most folks here) but looked at a few online dictionaries for "capital". From cases like gold in a hunter-gatherer society - a status-signaling luxury and trade good, but you probably can't get much more than perishable foods or nicer stone tools in exchange - it seemed worth the clarifying/emphasizing redundancy.