Divisions of labor are common among many species. They occur when some sets of individuals (usually defined by age or gender) regularly perform specific tasks, either as a result of individual decision-making patterned by social and ecological contexts (differences in labor), or emerging from an organized, cooperative task specialization designed to benefit a larger collective (divisions of labor). This chapter explores both differences in labor and divisions of labor by drawing on ethnographic cases of subsistence production. These case studies illustrate how intrinsic variation in size and strength may structure differences in labor by age, and they demonstrate how variation in the assessment of acquisition risk may influence women’s and men’s subsistence decisions. These differences may lead to true cooperative divisions of labor when team rates, bargaining, or signaling reduce conflicts of interest between individuals, in turn facilitating increased returns to scale for larger collectives, families, households, or other unit of economic production. Understanding the maintenance of patterns in "divisions of" and "differences in" labor provides a firmer foundation for explanatory models of human decision-making, ranging from questions about the emergence of our genus to contemporary patterning in occupational specialization and gender identity.

Today we face a long-run crisis of democratic legitimacy. Our increasing human interdependence is steadily increasing the numbers of “collective action,” or “free-rider” problems. Those problems in turn require increasing amounts of state coercion. Yet, in part precisely because state coercion is growing, that coercion is becoming less legitimate. As the demand for legitimacy increases and the supply decreases, every ounce of legitimacy becomes more precious.

A long-run response to this crisis requires many changes, including major restructuring to decrease inequality.

A relatively modest, but perhaps practicable and far-reaching, change in our thinking would make recursivity, meaning mutually responsive and iterated communication between representatives and constituents, more central to both the ideals and the practices of the representative system. In the aspirational ideal of recursive representation, representatives in the legislative, administrative, and societal realms engage in ongoing back-and-forth communication with their constituents. That recursivity allows each party to listen and learn, facilitating mutual influence and mutual adjustment. Because the process is more respectful of each citizen than the current system, the outcomes are more likely to reflect citizens’ needs. The resulting coercion should be both more defensible normatively and experienced as more legitimate.

Absent effective public action, attention has shifted to what individuals and organizations can do on their own, using carbon audits and footprint estimates to pursue the goal of neutrality. Unfortunately, economics long ago demonstrated that the calculation of “physical” prices like embodied carbon is forbiddingly complex and that the interconnectedness of our decision-making makes it impossible to decompose social outcomes into separate individual choices. This is illustrated in case studies of electric versus internal combustion-powered vehicles and the carbon accounting exercises of Microsoft and a public university. Meanwhile, governments have been preoccupied with setting emission targets slated to be reached decades in the future. At best, they have only a loose relationship to the cumulative emissions that drive climate change. The solution is to switch to carbon budgets, limits on total future emissions. Calculation of budgets compatible with 1.5°C or 2°C warming can be only approximate, but climate scientists have given us reasonable estimates. A useful benchmark is the corresponding emission cuts under the simplification of equal annual reductions. This equals 3.5% globally for a 2° target. Social justice and political realism call for much larger percentage cuts in rich nations’ emissions, perhaps about 5% per year.

This chapter pivots to social science and reviews the leading literature in respect of the governance of climate intervention. It starts with the influential Oxford Principles that derived from a 2009 report on geoengineering issued by the (British) Royal Society. It proceeds to consider the particular challenges presented by collective action problems like emissions reduction. It notes that the all-voluntary nature of nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement render this a rather light touch governance architecture, but that the carbon accounting rules being promulgated are essential to success. Carbon removal is a collective action problem very similar to emissions reduction, such that the Paris Agreement may also prove well suited to governing CDR. Nonetheless, several social scientists see risks in mixing emissions and carbon capture targets and would seek to maintain separate targets for each. As CDR may well continue long after emissions have been reduced to zero, the dynamics of post-zero CDR governance are also considered.

Having developed a suitable normative approach, this chapter considers how best to achieve this, in light of current international law. A variety of legal modalities (treaty or soft law), fora (e.g. existing or standalone forum) and drafting approaches (multi-stakeholder or expert-led) are considered. An international expert-led soft law approach, outside the auspices of any existing international body, is recommended in the first instance, noting that, in due course, a more permanent forum may be warranted and that, indeed, binding treaty approaches may also be contemplated in the longer term. It is finally considered whether such an approach would remain consistent with existing international law, notably international intellectual property law. It is concluded that the proposed approach would be fully consistent with existing international law.

This review essay was original published in the Journal of Bioeconomics in March, 2012. It was initiated by Ulrich Witt, Professor of Economics and Director of the Evolutionary Economics Group at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany. He asked me to write a review of The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good (Princeton University Press) by the economist Robert H. Frank, to which Frank would reply. It was an intense but constructive exchange on some of the most important political and economic issues of our time, most notably solving the “collective action” problem of getting selfish actors in a social system (i.e., each of us individually) to forego what is good for us in the short term for what is good for all of us in the long term.