Soooo... if Keltham is getting this right... the key assumption is that people can direct varying levels of effort into farming, and higher efforts yield higher yields, and the higher yields are observable.  So we assign everybody a plot of land, they get to keep all the food from that land, and that incentivizes everyone to... well, actually it incentivizes everyone to work just hard to feed themselves with pretty high probability.  This brilliant trick eliminates the need for anybody else to monitor anyone.  Some people will probably die of starvation due to bad luck, but better them than everyone!

Sounds like the work of reconstructing Civilization is all done!  Just tag equal-sized lots of land as belonging to various individual people - where the tags are a kind of social construct about who gets to eat the produce from the land - and we leave it up to whoever eats the produce to grow it.

People seemed to be talking about some system more complicated than that, but Keltham doesn't see yet why it would be necessary.

Soooo... if Keltham is getting this right... the key assumption is that people can direct varying levels of effort into farming, and higher efforts yield higher yields, and the higher yields are observable.  So we assign everybody a plot of land, they get to keep all the food from that land, and that incentivizes everyone to... well, actually it incentivizes everyone to work just hard to feed themselves with pretty high probability.  This brilliant trick eliminates the need for anybody else to monitor anyone.  Some people will probably die of starvation due to bad luck, but better them than everyone!

Sounds like the work of reconstructing Civilization is all done!  Just tag equal-sized lots of land as belonging to various individual people - where the tags are a kind of social construct about who gets to eat the produce from the land - and we leave it up to whoever eats the produce to grow it.

People seemed to be talking about some system more complicated than that, but Keltham doesn't see yet why it would be necessary.  Once you know which person gets to eat the edibles that grow on any particular piece of land, you're done.

Soooo... if Keltham is getting this right... the key assumption is that people can direct varying levels of effort into farming, and higher efforts yield higher yields, and the higher yields are observable.  So we assign everybody a plot of land, they get to keep all the food from that land, and that incentivizes everyone to... well, actually it incentivizes everyone to work just hard enough to feed themselves with pretty high probability.  This brilliant trick eliminates the need for anybody else to monitor anyone.  Some people will probably die of starvation due to bad luck, but better them than everyone!

Sounds like the work of reconstructing Civilization is all done!  Just tag equal-sized lots of land as belonging to various individual people - where the tags are a kind of social construct about who gets to eat the produce from the land - and we leave it up to whoever eats the produce to grow it.

People seemed to be talking about some system more complicated than that, but Keltham doesn't see yet why it would be necessary.  Once you know which person gets to eat the edibles that grow on any particular piece of land, you're done.