
The End of the Past - diodorus
https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/the-end-of-the-past-2f028cb970ed
======
adrianratnapala
A good article with an opaque headline that gives no clue that it compares the
ancient Roman economy to the early modern one.

I agree slavery was very important but, early modern Europe had slavery too.
It begs the question to just say slavery was less important to the modern
economy: why was that? One difference is that early modern Europe, for all its
wars, had no dominant apex predator like the Roman Republic.

True, the Republic fostered advanced trade -- it was wise enough not to
destroy provincial economies. But aristocrats still lived off the taxes and
bribes payed in conquered lands.

This meant that if you had some wealth, the best investment for it was to
bribe your way to a government post. This general pattern lead to the empire,
and to its corruption.

It also explains the rentier culture that the article describes.

~~~
PeterisP
Yes, it's important to read such claims exactly and literally - as the OP
states, " __ _Roman Italy_ __had comparable per capita income to the Dutch
Republic in 1600 ". Assuming that this is true, it is still clear that Roman
_Empire_ and even more so Roman _Egypt_ did not have a comparable income.

Roman Italy was fed and clothed by products of non-Italian economies; It's
easy to get a multiplier of your GDP if you have landowners that "farm"
overseas land with overseas slave labor that isn't part of your economy
consumption.

~~~
abecedarius
There's a recent book by Ober, _The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece_,
pointing out that the pre-Roman Greek world had per-capita income that high. I
think a better question is why did _that_ culture not keep advancing, and
maybe the biggest part of the answer is that they got conquered by Rome.

~~~
adrianratnapala
But first they were conquered by Macedonia -- was Greek in many ways, but it
did not have the political culture that Ober says distinguished the Poleis.

~~~
abecedarius
I'm including the Hellenistic era. It continued to grow economically at well
above normal preindustrial rates (according to Ober), if not quite as high as
in the classical period. Technological progress might've been even faster then
-- it was the time of Archimedes and the Antikythera device, and much else.
(Russo, _The Forgotten Revolution_.) Ober concluded with a post-Alexander
chapter: the Hellenistic cities were not completely at the mercy of empire-
building despots because a walled city at the time was very hard to conquer
(instead of starving out) leaving a Nash equilibrium where cities paid
substantial taxes but weren't messed with too much in their internal politics,
so that much of that culture survived for quite some time.

(From my memory of a book I read a year ago.)

I'd guess that even without Rome, military technology & organization would've
made cities increasingly vulnerable, and it'd have been a race between
increasing despotism from such developments and the fact that freer more
dynamic societies also have a kind of military advantage (see Archimedes again
at Syracuse). But of course I'm indulging in total speculation.

------
Animats
(Title is poorly chosen.)

I've asked this question before - why didn't the Roman Empire progress to an
industrial revolution?

The Roman Empire never developed the concept of the corporation. They never
got beyond the "one rich guy" or "rich family" stage of business organization.
They never had much in the way of inter-city businesses. They didn't have
common carriers for shipments. They had the roads and the legal system to make
that work, but somehow never developed something like Wells Fargo, the
stagecoach line. They lacked the organizational tools to scale a business.

The Roman Empire had figured out how to scale government, training provincial
executives in Rome and sending them out to govern. The Empire had a sizable
grain and oil shipping operation, but this seems to have been done as a
Government contracting operation, not as a private business.

Another argument is that the industrial revolution needed coal, iron, and
water power in reasonably close proximity. Italy doesn't have much of that
that. England and France do. So do parts of the US. Once you've got railroads,
the proximity doesn't matter as much, but until then, it's hard to get
started.

The political importance of land ownership may have been an obstacle, but
England had a landed gentry all through the Industrial Revolution. The
landowners couldn't stop progress, although some of them opposed it. They
couldn't even stop railroads; Parliament could and did approve "compulsory
purchase" of the right of way.

It's a good question. For a thousand years, the Roman Empire couldn't solve
this basic economic problem. What are we missing about our own society?

~~~
milesrout
The concept of a company is not important to economic and technological
progress. In fact, it's actively detrimental to it.

~~~
MR4D
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion, let alone your confidence in it.

A corporation allows for both pooled and limited risk.

This permits a civilization to take on large projects such as building a
railroad or a refinery - activities that were both expensive and financially
risky.

The only other alternative is the State, but then that involves taxes and
keeping the populace happy, which tends to impede progress. Things like the
Coliseum get built instead of railroads.

Individuals have high tendency not to do it because once people have attained
a certain amount of wealth, they are more interested in protecting against
losses than taking on expensive risky projects. Daniel Kahneman wan a Nobel
prize for work related to this kind of decision making
([http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec02/nobel.aspx](http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec02/nobel.aspx)).

------
maldusiecle
The author links to pseudoerasmus's blog post about Empire of Cotton as if it
were a refutation of Empire of Cotton's thesis. But that blog post is a
summary, not a critique--the author says this explicitly in its comments. The
closest the author comes to a critique is an aside in this post:
[https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/04/26/mccloskey-cotton-
ir/](https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/04/26/mccloskey-cotton-ir/) with similar
points made earlier in:
[https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/slavery_and_industriali...](https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/slavery_and_industrialism/)

...which is far from open-shut, in my reading of it. It's a tangential point,
I guess, but worth considering in evaluating the plausibility of the whole
argument.

~~~
adrianratnapala
Just in case anyone is wondering, the linked pseudoerasmus post is:
[https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/](https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/)

------
zeteo
> Was the Roman economy only as developed as that of Europe circa 1300 or was
> it as advanced as that of western Europe on the eve of the Industrial
> Revolution in say 1700.

The question is ill posed. It assumes that economies move on a linear scale -
with definite positive and negative directions. Was the economy of the Soviet
Union in the 1930s more advanced than that of the Dutch Republic in the 1600s?
Well, the USSR could produce tractors and icebreakers. But the Dutch had a
stock market and a really good internal transportation network.

------
b_emery
Makes me wonder: Would the slavery-based economy of Roman times represent a
model for what will be the robot-based economy of the future?

~~~
bdrool
That was my first thought as well. Another thing that came to mind is that way
manual work / craftsmanship was looked down upon has its parallels in the
present day, particularly in the US. It's often said that other parts of the
world see engineering in particular as a prestigious line of work, but the
same cannot be said for the US. It's strange how the US lauds only the
extremes: either very blue-collar manual laborers, or very white-collar
0.001%-ers (very often rent-seekers who don't actually add much value to
society). People who actually engineer things and drive innovation are not
looked up to.

~~~
ci5er
> People who actually engineer things and drive innovation are not looked up
> to.

In the US? Compared to whom? Doctors? Bankers? Lawyers? Politicians?

Who do you think that you are better than?

~~~
bigger_cheese
I don't know about the US but here is Australia Engineers are consistently
rated as one of the most ethical and trusted professions eg.
[http://thenewdaily.com.au/money/work/2016/05/14/most-
trusted...](http://thenewdaily.com.au/money/work/2016/05/14/most-trusted-
professions/)

Most of my ethics course from university focused on US based case studies
(Tacoma Bridge, Kansas City walkway collapse, Space Shuttle etc.) So it could
be possible Engineers in US have a worse reputation.

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thisrod
There is potentially a really simple answer to the question, "What happened in
England in the 17th Century and changed everything?"

Isaac Newton.

I'm surprised that historians don't consider that possibility, at least to the
extent required to exclude it.

~~~
GlennS
It's an interesting proposition. There is certainly a history of scientific
paradigm shifts, although I don't think it's very popular among historians.

Consider also the printing press. Invented much earlier, but something which
built up momentum as it was improved and paper was made cheaper.

Perhaps the improved ability to disseminate information made the industrial
revolution inevitable?

------
lolive
Holy cow, dudes!!! There is a massive cultural overload in all these comments!
Are you really the same guys who code websites all day/night long?

