Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism? The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it's all about rice. Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. Not just back

‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley.

If a life of foraging is really better than a life of farm labor, why wouldn’t humanity find a path back from agriculture to hunting and gathering? The best guess is that early farm settlements faced a one-way demographic trap. Here is a simple illustration: Suppose that the first generation of farmers got a boost from farming. Instead of eating tw

Farming, after all, replaces natural ecosystems with human-made ecosystems that are engineered to yield far more foodstuffs per unit area. The plant and animal species not cultivated on farms are the sure losers, as humanity encroaches on the habitats of other species that are not directly conducive to food production or that compete directly with