Overlapping Generations Models and Graded Age-Set Societies

From Africa through North America to Asia, anthropologists have found societies with formalized age-group systems. In these societies, social and economic relations between individuals are regulated by well-established rules governing transitions through the lifecycle. In this paper we detail the relationship between the classic formulations in Stewart's [1977] Fundamentals of Age-Group Systems and the overlapping generations (OLG) model. We establish that OLG models can accurately represent a large subset of actual age-group societies called graded age-set societies. Thus, an OLG model bears a close resemblance to reality.