The emergence of government as organized violence-cum-robbery

The transition from tribal societies to hierarchical chiefdoms occurred several millennia after the Neolithic Revolution as a first step towards the emergence of states. The standard explanation for this transition is the stationary bandit model, where societies economize on investment in arms as the chief installs a monopoly of violence. We propose an alternative model where we show, first, that small egalitarian tribes can contain violence by everybody monitoring everybody else combined with low investments in arms and, second, that larger chiefdoms rely on a monopoly of information and monitoring by the chief. This monopoly accounts for a Hicks-Kaldor efficiency gain of chiefdoms, but also offers the chief extraction power making most of society worse off. In contrast to the stationary bandit model, our model shows that chiefdoms require more investment in arms while saving on monitoring cost compared to tribes. Our model has explanatory power beyond the transition from tribes to chiefdoms.