Human Sacrifice - Peter Leeson

“[E]very durable social institution or practice is e¢ cient.”
— George J. Stigler (1992: 459)
“[W]here we …nd a warlike ferocious race, delighting in cruelty and devastation,
we may be assured that they will have deities delighting in slaughter, and rites
polluted with blood.”
— C.R. (1846a: 60)
1 Introduction
Few practices evoke the shock and horror of human sacri…ce: the purchase and ritual slaughter
of innocent persons to appease divinities. And few practices seem more obviously irrational.
Indeed, purchasing persons only to murder them to satisfy the blood thirst of
imaginary beings might be considered the apotheosis of irrationality. 1
Even the economists who have mentioned human sacri…ce take this view. One asserts
that human sacri…ce is “properly considered as noneconomic”and thus beyond the power of
rational choice theory to illuminate (Hunter, Teaf, and Hirschman 1957: 59). A more recent
reference adduces human sacri…ce in support of behavioralist doubts about the canonical
rendition of “economic man”(Ainslie 2005: 816).
My paper takes the opposite view. It develops a theory of rational human sacri…ce, tests
that theory, and explains the practice of human sacri…ce among the same people whose reliance
on ritual immolation the work pointed to above suggests is inexplicable using orthodox
economics.
I argue that human sacri…ce is a technology for protecting property rights. My theory
builds on Allen (2002) who introduced the idea that lowering an asset’s gross value might
sometimes be a sensible way to improve its enforcement. My theory is simple.
In agricultural societies nature produces variation in land’s output. This variation creates
disparities between communities’wealth. Absent government, wealth disparities induce
con‡ict between communities, as those occupying land that received a relatively unfavorable
1 In contrast, human sacri…ce as, for instance, the Aztecs famously practiced it is neither surprising nor
mysterious. The Aztec’s sacri…cial victims were overwhelming one of two sorts: captured enemy soldiers and
criminals. Here human sacri…ce was little more than capital punishment. This paper exclusively considers
the puzzling practice of immolating innocent persons purchased only for that purpose.
2