Jul 30, 2021
Sure, those would be advantages, but in the early centuries of history, there was so much unused land that competition wouldn't have been necessary. There was an interim period, too, when agriculture wasn't always progressive, when the crops failed, leading to mass starvation, and when diseases wiped out the remainder.
It might have been culture that spurred people to keep trying to settle even when their chances of success weren't great, and that culture would have been laced with self-serving frauds.