Samuel Bowles of Santa Fe Institute and CORE Econ reviews “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Presents an interpretation of human history that revises long-held assumptions about the emergence of social inequality and hierarchy, considering the implications of this counternarrative for accounts of the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.”

Drawing on experimental economics, anthropology, social psychology, sociology, history, the theory of cultural evolution as well as more conventional economic sources, I review models and evidence concerning the impact of economic institutions on preferences, broadly construed. I identify a number of ways in which the form of economic organization of a society appears to influence the process of human development by shaping tastes, the framing of choice situations, psychological dispositions, values, and other determinants of individual behavior. I conclude by commenting on some implications for economic theory and policy analysis.

I. Introduction, 189. — II. An outline of the model, 191. — III. The objective function, 195. — IV. The constraints, 198. — V. The pattern of enrollments and resource use within the educational sector, 203. — VI. The choice of educational techniques, 207. — VII. Optimal total resource use by education, 209. — VIII. The importation of educated labor, 212. — IX. Conclusions, 214.

Treating civic preferences as endogenous and government policies and tax capacities as both an influence on and a consequence of their evolution is an important new strand of thinking to which Besley has contributed. I ask: Does his model provide a convincing explanation of the way that civic cultures and the expansion of the state evolved as a matter of historical fact? And I suggest a number of alternative modeling approaches that both would recognize that policy makers take account of the effects of their policy choices on preferences and, consistent with empirical observations, would support equilibria with culturally heterogeneous rather than homogeneous populations.