Peripheral Visions

still with us, and so is the seemingly self-evident truth it embodies. Every classroom in which grading is done on a curve (as it typically is in the large low-level economics classes that students flock to) rein-forces the message. There are only so many good grades, and every gain for someone else is a loss for you. The tests and exams enforce a view of the world more profoundly than the lectures do. The question of when and whether people are able to learn new views of the world should not be graded on a curve, however, for knowledge is like the Biblical loaves and fishes, increasing when it is shared. The principles that turn up in grading and electoral politics, above all in our use of that fluid resource called money, are based on the metaphor of arable land and are still fought out over land in the Middle East.
    Abraham had been a migrant herder, seeking land and water. The full transition to farming was made by his son Isaac. When Isaac found a place to dig a well that was not disputed by earlier inhabitants, he celebrated its amplitude, saying, “Now the Lord hath made room for us and we shall be fruitful in the land” (Genesis 26:22). But settled agriculture is a mixed blessing, bringing a change in the nature of property and thus a change in relationships. Isaac’s son Jacob, who was a farmer, set out to defraud his brother, Esau, who was a hunter, recognizing that with finite resources of arable land, competition would replace sharing. First he persuaded Esau to give up his birthright for bread and a porridge of red lentils, cultivated food. This famous meal is one of those staples of farming societies, key to the Neolithic revolution, that provide complete proteins by combining grains and legumes. Later Jacob deceived his father into giving him the firstborn’s blessing as well as the inheritance, by offering his father the meat of a domesticated goat while Esau was out hunting.
    When Isaac blessed Jacob, he blessed him with the benefits of agriculture—“the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth and plenty of corn and wine.” He also blessed him with dominance, saying, “Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee” (Genesis 27:28–29). Almost unnoticed here, the struggle for ascendancy replaces and subsumes the struggle for limited resources. The world of zero-sum economics tends to become a world of some people ruling others. Hunter-gatherers share food with kin, and herders like Abraham depend on a form of wealth that is easily subdivided and moved, flocks that will increase given care and good fortune. But settled farmers depend on the ownership of limited areas of arable land that cannot be efficiently farmed if they are divided up too often.
    Origin myths do not of course explain how ideas and institutions come into being, but they reflect the presence of those ideas and reinforce them generation after generation. The ideas conveyed in these Biblical tales pervade the cultures derived from Abraham’s tradition, but they have also developed in other cultures committed to the combination of long-term settled agriculture, patrilineal inheritance, and increasing numbers of progeny. Assumptions run deep, hard to recognize and hard to change, setting the terms of many interactions by posing the question Who in this encounter will win? The calculus of game theory, as described by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, has a certain elegant simplicity that avoids ambiguity.
    Before learning to grow their own food, human beings were far and few between, dying early, following the game, and moving in response to changes in climate. Then, some twelve thousand years ago, with the invention of agriculture, populations began a slow and steady increase, setting the stage for new conquests and migrations as communities grew toward and passed carrying capacity. New technologies were developed, some that made warfare more efficient and others that made it possible for more human beings to survive on the same territory.
    Many peoples see the world in terms of what the anthropologist George Foster called the Image of Limited Good, which is the lesson often drawn from limited and repeatedly subdivided arable land: the pie is only so large, and an increase in my neighbor’s share means a decrease in mine. The Fertile Crescent was one of the early centers of agriculture and population growth, accelerated by the invention