Agricultural subsistence economics structurally suppress cooperation and trust beyond the family

Evidence

First, they are overwhelmingly dependent on land because theirs is an economy of agricultural subsistence. Land is essentially a zerosum commodity: If my family has more land, some other family has less. … Finally, in a subsistence system it is natural, because sensible, to be highly risk averse and to develop practices that are sure to have the least likelihood of crop failure in especially bad years, when many would starve, rather than the greatest likelihood of producing a surplus in the average year. In the longer run, though, this risk aversion undercuts the possibility of escaping from the poverty of subsistence. If there is variation in the productivity of particular pieces of land, yours being very good this year and mine next, we can introduce a system of mutual insurance to cover for the variation and to allow us to plant more productive strains. If, on the other hand, the variation is from year to year across all our lands, such insurance would have little value, and we would have no incentive to develop the cooperative institution of mutual insurance. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 470

Categorization

• XREF: Supplies a concrete economic mechanism for why some contexts lack the ‘familiarity’ substrate Luhmann’s trust requires — directly feeds the reader’s integration project. — connects to: Self-sustaining household economies are not exchange or profit-driven economies — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1146; Population pressure produced cooperation and commons regulation, not tragedy — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 266
• SEED: Angle: why subsistence economies rationally refuse cooperation — the logic that risk aversion is individually sensible yet collectively trapping.