Political Memes

Sure thing! Essentially, one of the issues of any community is redistribution of goods. Obviously, some people are better at, say, farming, and others are better at carpentry. You can try to force everyone to provide for their own needs, but that tends to be terribly inefficient. Like, sub-Hunter-Gatherer level stuff. So, you have to find a way to get different goods around from one person to another. One common form of economy before the rise of complex states is the 'gift economy'.

In a gift economy, goods are given without any explicit expectation of return. In other words, I don't give you ten apples for five oranges; I give you ten apples because you're part of the community, and you need ten apples. This is a very appealing thought to many who are (rightly) disillusioned with capitalism, but there are very good reasons why gift economies largely did not survive as a primary form of economic redistribution. They are very reliant on personal relationships between the gift-givers, and on long-term residence in the community.

When you're 50 people in a small tribe where your grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren will live all their life, then this is somewhat viable. Everyone knows everyone, everyone knows what everyone has, and what everyone needs. If someone isn't generous enough, they can be shunned, shamed, or even beaten or exiled in extreme cases. It is a method of redistribution that is heavily reliant on social interaction and trust. As one might expect, it does not have a great track record as a primary method of moving necessary goods in larger communities, where many people are strangers and very physically distant from one another.

As communities grow, typically they move away from gift economies to redistributive economies. In a redistributive/contractual economy, goods are given to a central (or several central) authorities, who spend a great deal of time discerning the needs of individuals in the community and getting the goods where they need to go. In its most primitive form, this is a tribal chieftain, or a council of village elders, who take what people give them and then try to address everyone's needs as fairly as possible. In more complex forms, it ends up with very elaborate legal contracts with clearly-laid-out rights and duties, as in feudal societies - "I will give the council/chieftain/lord 10 apples every harvest, and in exchange, the council/chieftain/lord will give me 5 oranges, 1 chair, 1 new suit of clothing, etc etc etc." In its most complex form, one could argue, planned economies, like the old Soviet system or hypothetical AI-run redistributive economies fall into this category.

The thing about redistributive/contractual economies is that there is necessarily some form of hierarchy, because someone, or many someones, have higher-than-average decision-making-power about how to redistribute goods, and that raises a number of problems of its own. Redistributive economies like this are very common before the modern day because of this hierarchy - it reduces moral hazard when everyone is subject to the same authority - the Pharaoh, for example, might be a stingy, favorites-playing bastard, but you don't have to worry about your neighbors not giving him (and his officials) enough and cheating everyone else in the process - the Pharaoh takes care of that. That's literally his job, the same way you work at growing apples, he works to redistribute the goods.