The second and third parts of this book classify the economic systems of foraging and agricultural societies in the SCCS based on correlations between their institutions of property an distribution. These economic types are then examined for relationships with other social, political, demographic, and environmental factors in order to draw tentative conclusions regarding the origins of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. The fourth part of the book uses cross-national data to examine similar associations in industrial/service economies, and is not included here.

Considerable disagreement exists in regard to the origin and distribution of economic phenomena such as money, slavery, markets, exchange, and imbalanced transfers. Here the author utilizes a worldwide cross-cultural sample of 60 pre-industrial "societies" to empirically test many economic hypotheses, with a focus on distributional mechanisms and institutions.

This paper investigates five different economic types of foragers: classic, transitional system, politically oriented, economically oriented, and intangibles-oriented. The author asserts that these economic types “are not mere epiphenomena of the oft-discussed social structural or political forces but, rather, are special characteristics that must be independently taken into account” (418). A myriad of environmental, subsistence, political, and social variables are examined: some differed significantly across the five economic types of foragers, but others such as famine threat, conflict, locational fixity, marital form, and postmarital residence did not differ between types.

This article tests a broad hypothesis that slavery is an inevitable stage in society's economic development. The author rejects this hypothesis; he argues that there are two main types of slavery (slaves for economic capital or social capital) and each type has its own set of social and politcal determinants. Overall, the power dynamic between husbands and wives is thought to be a key predictor of slavery.

This study examines three theories of the origin of the plow. The author rejects the universalist approach on the basis that not all cultures that are aware of the plow adopt its use. Findings provide partial support for a theory focused on population density, particularly the importance of fallowing practices and labor productivity. The author’s own ecological approach, pointing to a culture’s staple food as a crucial variable, also receives empirical support.

This article examines the origin of money. Anthropologists’ and economists’ theories are discussed and data supports a broad hypothesis that the existence of money is associated with level of economic development. The author further examines the emergence of internal, external, commercial and noncommercial moneys at high and low levels of economic development.

This paper investigates the presence of gambling in preindustrial societies. Analysis shows that the presence of gambling can be predicted by region, the presence of domestic commercial money, socioeconomic inequality, and mobility combined with food supply from animal husbandry. The author suggests that the ideas underlying the Friedman-Savage utility function (1984) can be helpful in making predictions about which precapitalist societies do and which do not engage in gambling.

This article investigates the adoption of agriculture. The author tests three possible predictors: environmental richness, population density, and division of labor by gender. Minimal support is found for these variables, and the author proposes two alternative explanations, based on diminishing returns in food production and balancing the food portfolio.

An early cross-cultural study that sought to establish correlations between "stages" of economic culture and a variety of different social and political institutions, such as form of government and justice, marriage and kinship, and behaviors during warfare.

This study explores the evolution of family systems in non-industrial agricultural societies based on environmental conditions. First, the authors conduct a multi-evolutionary simulation for each family system: absolute nuclear families (nuclear with unequal inheritance), egalitarian nuclear families (nuclear with equal inheritance), stem families (extended families with unequal inheritance), and community families (extended families with equal inheritance). Second, they use Spearman's rank correlation analyses to assess the relation between the 186 non-industrial societies and the types of inheritance relationships, either parent-child (nuclear or extended) or inter-sibling (strongly biased or equal). The results show that the four core family systems are related to wealth and land resources. Other relevant findings are that low polygyny is related to agricultural societies, higher poverty levels to extended families, and accelerated wealth accumulation to strongly biased inheritance.