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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5672 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

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But what keeps it fixed? The Malthusian model is not consistent with a caste maintaining both a material advantage and not outgrowing the poorer castes, unless it is losing people to those lower castes, which we know from genetic studies was very rare.

The more elites there are, the less material benefit they get from the finite resource base. See all the second and third sons of Spanish nobility - they couldn't inherit the estate so they had to do other things. Military careers, becoming conquistadors, the church... They didn't replace the peasantry, how could they?

If state X has too many elites, there will be some kind of automatic stabilizer that fixes this. The elites compete more with eachother for the positions they want - internal conflict, decadence and collapse of the state. It gets conquered and the ratios will be fixed. Maybe when the Muslims showed up they killed much of the Hindu elite caste and restored balance. Or they'll find some way to get rid of excess elites in foreign wars or whatever. Maybe disease and inbreeding get rid of most of the excess. We observe that not everyone is an elite, there must be some mechanism that forces this.

Obviously something is preventing them from replacing the lower castes. The question is what.

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