ABSTRACT
Introduction We set out various economic “forces” or “mechanisms” that make a person happier and/or more productive when she is living with a group rather than alone or with multiple families rather than with a single family. One of the strongest such “mechanisms” for hunter-gatherer people is mutual defense. It is safe for a family to live with other families of able-bodied people if mutual defense is a standard problem. More “soldiers” can repel an attack better than fewer “soldiers” and effective strategy is better sorted out by a group of “interested” people than by only one or two defenders. I have division of labor in mind here. Mutual defense is a service mutually “consumed” by a group of people. The group shares in the production of “defense services.” When one person in the group is effectively protected from outside violence, the other members of the group are generally equally protected. Defense services are shared in a somewhat roundabout fashion. From the dawn of human history, defense of members of groups has been an issue and the standard course of action was to live close to one’s fellow members of the group and learn to help in defensive activity. Defense in a modern state has changed little except for scale. “National defense” is a flow of defense services provided by the state and one person’s security generally means that everyone else is getting protection as well. National defense is said to be a public good. Much of this chapter is about public goods. There is a sense in which public good analysis is about a form of sharing in consumption. Thus a large dimension of life is about shared consumption. Selfinterest may be the behavior ground-rock of modern economics but there is another large branch of economics that focuses on sharing. Curious, no?
