Nobility and stupidity: modeling the evolution of class endogamy

Nobility and stupidity: modeling the evolutin of class endogamy
Theodore C. Belding

What we have here is a suggestion of the mechanism of status disparity caused by marrying and reproducing based on status or class. Further the models Belding uses create a step clustering effect, meaning status isn't uniformly distributed but bunches up in certain ranges. His aim to create a computational model from Marcus and Flannery's verbal model of 'class endogamy'. A computational model is incredibly powerful since it's outcomes are "follow rigorously from the model's assumptions. Furthermore, the model's assumptions and mechanisms can be specified explicitly" (3).

He uses the simplest agent-based model there is, a one-dimensional model, an agents status is their position, and there is only one status. Each male and female choose someone to marry relative to some tolerance. They will only marry someone that is only so much higher or lower than their own status. Originally everything is totally random, the distributions of status is practically uniform. Next the agents can learn and keep a list of their most recently encounters. This creates somewhat modular groups, but still a uniform distribution of status. The mechanism that tends to create status classes, really, with multinomial distributions of status is a mechanism of inheritance. That is, when a child is born from an interaction it inherits the mean of the parent's status.

In all I think that the computational model, although simple, provides support that the mechanism expressed in the verbal model is sufficient to create classes of status. I don't tend to agree with the assessment of the agents as "stupid" but rather I would say they are boundedly rational - or rather they are simple and mechanistic. There doesn't have be some intentionality towards raising one's status to create the distributions we see, the agents can just be following simple rules.