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Comment by jostmey | Hacker News Reader

The author fails to present any serious evidence for their claim. I suspect that sexism began long before the invention of farming.

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Which author? The Economist author, or Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn, the authors of the academic study? The Economist is just giving description of the results for a popular audience, so I don't think they have to provide serious evidence.

The original academic article can be read here:

The Quarterly Journal of Economics http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/19/qje.q... (open access full text, at least for now)

I haven't read it, it is a peer reviewed publication, so I imagine they do have some evidence.

It's a slippery slope, but I don't think they're directly claiming the cause of sexism. Instead, the point they're claiming is: "Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than their counterparts in countries at similar levels of development who happen to be descended from hoe-users."

So the bulk of the argument stems from some initial qualitative assessment of the region's agricultural state (i.e. hoe or plow) and then comparing it to present day stats for the metrics he outlines.

Your suspicions are probably right, but I don't think the author would even disagree necessarily. I think this is just an interesting look into one of the factors that may have been responsible.

If anything the invention of farming may have lead to less violence and greater equality. This was a period of time when humanity transitioned from the Hunter to the Farmer.

Farming promoted development. It did not hold it back.

Isn't it pretty well established that farming led to an increase in violence?

Thinking in terms of "development" is generally a bad approach. History doesn't have levels. Using generic terms like that implicitly assumes all sorts of correlations that don't actually exist.

Isn't it pretty well established that farming led to an increase in violence?

Not that I'm aware of. My understanding is that agricultural societies were less violent. As I understand it, when humans are in hunter-gathering societies, we are more territorial and less accepting of those outside of our tribe. (On the order of 50 people.) I'd like to know if that understanding is wrong.

What I do know is that we have gotten much less violent over time. The 20th century, even with all of its wars, was still much less violent than all previous centuries.

I would suggest there are two related factors here.

Before significant agriculture some amount of warfare was simply a part of life as usual. This scenario suggests martial competence is fairly ubiquitous, and thus dominating enemies without paying a high cost in blood is difficult (e.g. you might need great political skills to stitch together a powerful local coalition).

However once significant cities were established, being skilled at warfare was potentially very lucrative. This means a soldier specialist may be a very rewarding career.

Is it really the plough itself, or that the larger cities the plough helped create were a big incentive for professional soldiers to become the ruling class?

Farming promoted "development", but it was also the cause of the majority of social inequality in society. Those who controlled the food supply had an inordinate amount of power over the population, far more than could be achieved in hunter-gatherer societies. Read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for a decent introduction regarding this.

I think you have that backwards - in an agricultural society, food production is distributed - so you can't have control over the food supply unless you have an inordinate amount of power over the population.

The point is that the existence of agriculture leads to many things, of which even more centralized control is the result. Agriculture by its nature supports more people than necessary to produce the food. This surplus necessarily begets an underclass and an a ruling class. The book Guns, Germs, and Steel has some very interesting case studies of societies that grew into very stratified political societies based on the discovery of agriculture. The cause/effect implication is clear because of analysis of cultures with a recent common origin who where the difference in outcomes were only a matter of properties of the land which encouraged or precluded agriculture.

Ok, you're taking the linear progression of history part, but leaving the slaughter-bench?

Hegel would be very disappointed

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