Abstract
Families redistribute. Redistribution occurs with goods purchased from outside producers and also those produced within the household. This presents at least two problems for an autocrat seeking to expand control over the production of goods. First, he cannot use policy to target individual consumption or production directly; rather, all incentives are filtered through the redistribution of the family. Second, family members benefit from this redistribution; that is, families function as adversarial interest groups. Autocrats also have a third problem--gathering the necessary information for control-- that families have a comparative advantage in solving. Thus an autocrat must first break apart the redistribution of the family to more tightly control the consumption and production of individuals, and then incentivize family members to provide information to him. I test this theory against family policy in the Soviet Union, arguing that the seeming policy reversal was a way to reach the level of optimal “withering" in which families do not redistribute resources but still gather and provide information to the autocrat.