
Stanford scholar debunks beliefs about economic growth in ancient Greece - benbreen
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/june/greek-economy-growth-061115.html
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douche
I have to question what variety of serious classical scholar would form the
opinion that ancient Greek society had little to no economic growth. The
archaeology should show the massive expansion of the city-states between the
Archaic period and the Hellenic. We have historical accounts of numerous
expansionist city-states that founded overseas colonies stretching from the
Crimea, to Italy, to the south of France. Navies of hundreds and thousands of
warships, and numerous wrecks of traders carrying goods from all around the
Mediterranean. Excavations of sites that housed factories for mass-production
of pottery. The sheer expense entailed in fielding thousands of citizen-
soldiers (and later professional mercenaries), kitted out in thirty or forty
pounds of bronze arms and armor, while at the same time constructing
monumental architecture.

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chrismealy
Well, maybe. Or maybe they had a flourishing of conquest, slavery, and
inequality. That would also lead to an increase in treasure hordes.

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ripter
War is also a great reason to horde. The History of the Peloponnesian War
talks about people burying their money in hopes the the conquering army won't
find it. Then you can go back and retrieve it later.

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netrus
This practice was widespread in WWII. German families buried their belongings
before going West. A lot of silverware is still buried, and occasionally found
by construction teams.

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lern_too_spel
"Ober realized that the massive Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek City-
States (2005) could be used to get answers for some of his questions. However,
it was in the form of an encyclopedia, with no searchable data, graphs or
tables.

"Over several years, Ober enlisted the help of a group of graduate and
undergraduate students to digitize the inventory of data, such as population
numbers and urbanization levels, into a machine-readable form."

This sounds like a colossal waste of resources. Presumably, a book published
in 2005 is already digitized somewhere (the author or the publisher would be a
good guess), and getting structured data out of it is just a matter of writing
a few simple extractors. I would hate to be the Stanford student paying good
money to do the menial work described.

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robryan
I think what they mean is not that they didn't have the text available
digitally, rather that the text is a collection of essays and there was no way
to automatically pull out data they needed.

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cafard
On reflection, I realize that I didn't have any particularly clear beliefs
about the matter. If asked, I would have said that they often had strong
economies based agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and trade. And as somebody
else says, plunder, and the trade in slaves among other items.

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jnordwick
tl;dr

Free people equals growth. Property rights are critical.

Although i think he draws the wrong conclusion from hoarding currency. His
scenario only happens during massive deflation when money outstrips goods in
terms of value.

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lkrubner
"Free people equals growth. Property rights are critical."

Most of human history proves this false. For thousands of years, the biggest
economies were the biggest slave economies. If you want to, you can cherry-
pick a small handful of countries, and then cherry-pick a small number of
decades from their history, and then conclude that freedom equals growth. But
you'd be deluding yourself with your cherry-picked data.

