Status Updates From Economica

8,000ish years ago, private property was born, and patrilineage, or woman living with their husbands families and property passing to sons, became the norm. This made land and heredity commodities, and destruction of whole male lineages for their land became common. We know this because of a dip in genetic diversity of Y chromosomes while women’s remained scattered but stable. Great mix of hard and social science!

On regions where nomads herded livestock between locales whose water and food ebbed and flowed with the seasons, and women’s movement had to be restricted to keep them from seizure by other tribes: “women in parts of the world with a greater history of nomadic pastoralism experience the greatest restrictions on their participation in wider society”, including higher gender violence and sexual repression.

On the invention of heavy plows moving women from farm labor to housekeeping: “History casts a long shadow. In regions which have historically made greater use of the plow, the gender gap is largest today.”

This section on how cooking fibrous food to a mush liberated women from excessive chewing, farting, and breastfeeding makes me wonder why the Netherlands doesn’t ask meat farmers to feed cattle cooked food instead of shutting down their farms in effort to reduce methane emissions.