So, once you have enough people - you hit this by three hundred, maybe sooner, you can't just figure out what everyone's going to need tomorrow by asking them, there's too many people to ask, and if you just try to guess and then oblige to do the amount of work that'll produce that amount of stuff, your guesses will be wrong in a way in a way that makes people starve, and you will either have to force people to work - by threatening them with death, effectively, if you have a rule like 'people who don't do their best for the tribe get exiled', or else just by hoping they'll want to work really hard for food they'll never see, and when tribes are big enough that your work hardly makes a difference, people can't function like that.

So there ends up being a lot less food than needed.

"Okay, but how does ownership fix that? Everybody hoarding stuff would just make you run out of things faster."

No, the exact opposite. Why do people hoard? Because they're expecting a shortage. If you believe that how much food you'll have is in your control, you don't need to hoard it. When people can take the food they need and count on it not being stolen, they just keep enough food on hand for if something happens and they can't work for a couple weeks, and they will independently want to work until they have enough to feel comfortable, and if they don't feel comfortable they know exactly what to do about that - they just go out and get some more.

If you're storing as a community and someone's scared they won't have enough, they have to do three hundred times as much work to increase their share by one. So instead they usually just get scared.

"But what about people who can't work?"

"Or people who do different kinds of work?"

"They do share then," Rána chimes in. "I haven't had to gather at all since I've been there, and I've only hunted because I'm so much faster at it with the magic, when they needed a lot of meat. And I was sick over the winter, and they looked after me. They do ownership; they don't follow it off a cliff."

Yeah, we definitely share. We just don't try to do it on the scale of the whole tribe.

They consider this.

"That sounds very lonely," one of them concludes, and the others nod.

"There's other ways of being close to people, though," interjects the goblin. "And other kinds of people don't usually need that as much."

There are a hundred thousand of us. I think it's just kind of impossible to extend ideas that work for a hundred people. And dunno, it definitely wouldn't make me feel close to people to put all my work in a pile and have no idea who benefits from it.

"Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous. They do okay, though."

"But..."

"...you'd be around strangers all the time!"

"Yeah. I mostly don't need to do anything with them, though. Ignoring people all the time is weird, but it's polite there, kind of."

"But -" distressed.

"And I'm a mage, nobody's going to bother me."

"...yeah, okay."

Are they taking issue with how many people there are or how we do things differently?

Mostly the first thing - they're worried about me.

Sigh.

Hm?

They don't seem to think very highly of you. 

She blinks, confused, and then after a moment says this isn't the first time I've gone off to live with another kind of people, and the other time really didn't go well; they're not worried over nothing.

I guess if it doesn't bother you it's not a problem.

It really doesn't. It's nice that they want to make sure I'm okay.

Okay. Please don't ever do that to me.

Okay.

Thanks.

No problem.

Cuddling has resumed, and after another few minutes the people at the edge of the pile go to get the baskets they brought lunch in and pass the food out: lunch is mashed sweet potatoes with berries and bits of venison mixed in, served in hollowed out squash with acorn bread on the side. "Ooh, I missed this," says Rána. "I should cook sometime. Quendi food is nice too, but it's different."

It's very tasty.

Yeah, kobolds are pretty good at that.

"Were you planning to stick around for a while?" Rána asks when lunch starts to wind down.

"We can," one of them says.

"We've been spending a lot of time away this year anyway, they won't think it's strange."

"We know you're busy, though."

"We are, kind of," she acknowledges. "Tyelkormo?"

I think we should stay a while.

"Fine with me."

Cuddling resumes; they swap stories about things that've happened over the last year; Rána shows off how she can fly, and then some of the other magic. Eventually there's a lull, and Rána snuggles up to Tyelkormo and starts singing.