How Rising Affluence May Have Turned Ancient Predators Into Cooperators

Between roughly 500 and 300 BCE, something extraordinary happened across three distant corners of Eurasia. In northern India, the Buddha and Mahavira taught compassion and renunciation. In Greece, philosophers from Pythagoras to the early Stoics debated virtue and justice. In China, Confucius and later thinkers reimagined ethics as the foundation of social order. Karl Jaspers famously called this the Axial Age, a period when the moral and spiritual foundations of much of later humanity were laid down almost simultaneously. A new paper by economist Ratul Lahkar of Ashoka University, published in the International Review of Economics, offers a strikingly mathematical explanation for why this transformation occurred when and where it did.

The paper’s central claim is that Axial Age values were not primarily a philosophical accident or a purely religious revelation. Instead, they emerged as a stable equilibrium outcome of changing economic incentives. Using the theory of Tullock contests, a workhorse model of conflict and rent-seeking developed by economist Gordon Tullock in the 1960s, Lahkar formalizes an argument that historians and cognitive scientists have long made in qualitative terms: rising affluence made predation less profitable and cooperation more attractive, and the great moral traditions of the Axial Age took root in the resulting less predatory, more cooperative society.

To understand the mechanism, it helps to grasp what a Tullock contest is. In such a model, agents compete for a prize, such as an economic surplus, by expending costly effort. The probability of winning depends on the share of effort each agent contributes relative to the total. Rent-seeking effort is wasteful: it consumes resources without creating new wealth, merely redistributing the existing prize. Economists call the fraction of the prize destroyed by this competition rent dissipation. When dissipation is high, a society channels its energy into fighting over the pie rather than baking a bigger one. When dissipation is low, agents have less incentive to grab and more reason to produce.

The model hinges on two parameters that capture how easy it is to appropriate wealth by force. The first is the impact elasticity, denoted r, which measures how strongly an additional unit of predatory effort raises one’s chance of seizing the prize. The second is the cost elasticity, denoted gamma, which measures how steeply the cost of predatory effort rises as effort expands. Intuitively, the greater the impact elasticity and the lower the cost elasticity, the higher the incentive to exert wasteful rent-seeking effort. When grabbing is effective and cheap, predation pays. When grabbing is ineffective and expensive, it does not.

Historical analysis suggests that both parameters shifted during the first millennium BCE. Trade expanded across the Eastern Mediterranean, India and China, and agricultural productivity improved. Expanding trade networks meant that surpluses became harder to seize by local predation: merchants could move goods and wealth across vast distances, out of the reach of any single predator. Rising agricultural output meant that the cost of extracting a given amount of plunder rose relative to the size of the prize. In the language of the model, appropriability of the economic surplus declined while the elasticity of the cost of predatory rent-seeking effort increased. As a result, rent dissipation declined, and society moved to a new equilibrium characterized by greater affluence and less inequality.

This economic shift aligns remarkably well with the empirical record. In a landmark 2015 study published in Current Biology, Nicolas Baumard and colleagues showed that the Axial Age doctrines emerged precisely in the economically most dynamic regions of Eurasia, where energy capture reached about 20,000 kilocalories per capita per day, significantly more than in other parts of the world or in earlier civilizations. Crucially, affluence measures explained the rise of moralizing religions better than political complexity measures. The transformation did not begin in the largest ancient empires such as Egypt, Babylon, Assyria or Persia, but in the commercially vibrant areas where wealth was growing fastest.

The model also speaks to the long arc of inequality. Structural inequality was low in hunting-gathering societies, began increasing with the advent of agriculture, and peaked in the pre-Axial states such as Egypt, Babylon and Assyria. Since the Axial Age, it has been declining, although researchers debate whether the Axial turn or the later Enlightenment turn is more meaningful. The paper’s equilibrium logic offers a mechanism for that decline: in the new, less predatory equilibrium, norms of cooperation and fairness became self-sustaining because the incentives to grab had weakened.

The behavioral shift is visible in the rhetoric of rulers themselves. Comparing the proclamations of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I, who reigned from 1114 to 1076 BCE, with those of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who reigned from 268 to 232 BCE, reveals a profound change of mindset. The very fact that rulers would no longer brag about flaying or impaling their enemies suggests that violent terror tactics were no longer a legitimate instrument of power. Ashoka’s famous edicts of remorse and benevolence after his bloody conquest of Kalinga would have been unthinkable in the boastful inscriptions of the earlier Assyrian court.

The formal analysis also clarifies why the transition required specific economic conditions rather than happening everywhere at once. In a Tullock contest, a pure strategy Nash equilibrium exists only when the impact elasticity r is sufficiently small relative to the cost elasticity gamma. As the number of competitors grows large, the condition approaches r being less than gamma. When r approaches gamma, the value of the prize is almost completely dissipated in wasteful effort, meaning nearly all the surplus is burned in the struggle to seize it. Pre-Axial societies, with high appropriability and low cost elasticity, sat close to that dissipative regime. The economic changes of the first millennium BCE pushed key regions away from it, lowering dissipation and freeing surplus for production, exchange and, ultimately, moral and religious innovation.

There is even a monetary clue. The anthropologist David Graeber observed that the three regions where the Axial Age emerged, the Eastern Mediterranean, India and China, were also the first where the use of coins became widespread. Coinage lubricated the expanding trade that made surpluses mobile and harder to expropriate, reinforcing the decline in appropriability that the model identifies as the trigger for the whole transformation. The Axial Age, in this account, was not a mysterious spiritual coincidence but the cultural superstructure of a deep change in the economics of grabbing versus producing.

The paper is careful about its claims. Improvements in cooperation and welfare are relative to earlier eras, and the same period witnessed genocide, imperialism, slavery and wars. The argument describes a general trend toward improvement, with the possibility of setbacks always present. Nor does the model claim that economics alone produced the great religions; it provides an equilibrium framework in which their emergence becomes intelligible as a rational response to changed incentives. Still, the implications are provocative. If the moral breakthroughs of the Axial Age were anchored in declining rent dissipation, then the same logic may apply today. Societies that make predation unprofitable, through secure property rights, broad trade and inclusive institutions, should expect not only greater affluence but also more cooperative norms. Conversely, when appropriability rises and grabbing becomes cheap, the model predicts a drift back toward predation. The Axial Age, seen through the lens of Tullock contests, becomes less a miracle and more a lesson: cooperation is an equilibrium, and equilibria depend on the economics of the day.

Subject of Research: A game-theoretic model of rent dissipation explaining the economic origins of the Axial Age

Article Title: From predation to cooperation: rent dissipation and the emergence of the Axial Age

Article References: Lahkar, R. (2026). From predation to cooperation: rent dissipation and the emergence of the Axial Age. International Review of Economics, 73(2), Article 39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-026-00554-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12232-026-00554-w

Keywords: Axial Age, Tullock contests, rent dissipation, rent-seeking, economic history, game theory, cultural evolution, moralizing religions, inequality, affluence, trade, cooperation