Found some interesting points in Michael E. Smith's commentary.
I found the tDoE interesting, but felt the case the Davids made was fairly weak. Their vision for the power of choice and play in organizing populations didn't rigorously address issues with scaling or scarcity. Also, the perspective seems to operate free of any conception of path dependency and the resilience of contemporary arrangements.
You seem to be aware of this (e.g. the Scheidel critique), but there is a special issue of Cliodynamics on The Dawn of Everything -->https://escholarship.org/uc/irows_cliodynamics/0/0
Found some interesting points in Michael E. Smith's commentary.
I found the tDoE interesting, but felt the case the Davids made was fairly weak. Their vision for the power of choice and play in organizing populations didn't rigorously address issues with scaling or scarcity. Also, the perspective seems to operate free of any conception of path dependency and the resilience of contemporary arrangements.