It's interesting that commerce/business was this sophisticated in the Bronze Age. I guess it's not that surprising given the famous customer service complaint[0] cuneiform tablet to Ea-nāṣir about receiving the wrong grade of copper ingots and his servant receiving rude service.
It's also no wonder that the thing a theory describes exists long before the theory itself. We had language well before we had grammarians, and we had music long before music theory existed. Adam Smith didn't invent moral sentiments or market economics, just as Pythagoras didn't invent music. The article weirdly makes a big deal out this.
> It's interesting that commerce/business was this sophisticated in the Bronze Age.
That trade would have records is not surprising. That trade would follow patterns based on distance is not surprising, especially since transport costs were very high in that era. Hence the "gravity model".
The surprise here is in organizational form.
The article describes a limited partnership contract, with partner investments and a cap table.
It's impressive to see that so early. It requires a legal system, or strong social pressure, able to enforce a private contract that complex.
Most early commercial organizations were built around families. Corporations are generally considered to have first appeared in the 1300s, and were rare until the 1700s.
I don't think the Roman Empire ever developed the concept of a corporation.
Traders, bankers, and merchants existed, of course, but not private organizations larger than one owning family. Although it's hard to tell; not much Roman business info survives.
We are about ~300 years closer to Diocletian than Diocletian was to Ea-nasir. Too bad he didn't have access to Adam Smith, who could have told him that price fixing wouldn't work and might have pointed to Roman currency debasement as one of the major causes of inflation. Of course greed is always a factor I suppose.
Fair! Chronologically, at least, Diocletian's time is closer to us, though not technologically or population-wise. And by Diocletian's time, inflation was already out of control. If anything, the political stability that came with Diocletian's reforms actually helped bolster the economy, though it wouldn't last, as soon the center moved to Byzantium, leaving Rome (and Italy) to whither and die over the next century.
Ctrl+F "This matters"; of course it's because it's LLM-generated BS which is designed to produce sensationalist slop.
(There are about 30 other tells reinforcing this but this one seems to be in literally every single LLM-generated article produced by current models)
A lot of people underestimate the bronze age and all the limelight goes to later Greeks and Romans because we have better records of them. But the bronze age and its empires were just as impressive in my opinion. Tin is not a very common metal to find and there are only significant deposits in a limited number of places around the globe. The trade routes required to support bronze production were thousands of miles long.
Thanks! I don't know if the article OP linked is slop or not - site is plainly inacessible from Ukraine.
I find it interesting that they only analyzed texts that mention at least two cities, like this one:
> From Durhumit until Kanes I incurred expenses of 5 minas of refined (copper), I spent 3 minas of copper until Wahsusana, I acquired and spent small wares for a value of 4 shekels of silver. (Tablet AKT 8/145, lines 24–29)
Because I know some local businesses here that are based in city X would not mention this fact in the books, at least not for every transaction. They would write something like 'Got shipment from Y' or 'Sent for repairs to Z' etc.
They also exclude texts that mention Assur, which is the largest city there
> We exclude Assur, the home city of the Assyrians, from our automated search. First, the word Assur is also the name of the main Assyrian deity and occurs very often as an element of personal names. Second, the city of Assur is often referred to as simply alum — “the City” (comparable in use to references to the financial district of London)
So very cool work, and it can be improved upon too!
This is a very interesting discovery. I'm fascinated by ancient economics. But...
>The full apparatus of commercial civilization, operating without a theorist in sight.
I don't get this framing. Who thinks that markets are a product of theory? Why does the author keep hammering this point?
In any case... there are lots of commercial/numerical tablets available. Most of them, I believe. And... the records go all the way back to the beginnings of Summerian proto-writing. Cuineform was used for records before it was used for prose.
My hunch is that many/most assyriologists are more interested in political history, myth and suchlike. There is probably a lot of room for researchers who want to work on the economics.
The prompter of the LLM that authored the article thought that should be the central point of it. Conclusion that they were going for: we don’t need economics today and everything should be left to its own devices.
Interestingly, an LLM can totally dismantle this line of thinking (try with Claude).
Isn't this the underlying phenomena as to why free markets outperform managed markets. Because theoretically the controlled market can be much more efficient than the free market, you know, because people don't have to fight each other for their share of the market all the time. But they never are. Why? Because nobody has to understand the market for it to work, everybody just pushes and the market molds itself into the form it needs. Where a controlled market operates under the illusion that it can be understood.
In practice, markets were managed since the Bronze Age. Back then, authorities set wages and prices through palace and temple institutions, standardized weights, etc.
So what’s a better form than the current capitalistic (?) model? Surely we would say the market is efficient, but at the same time it can’t be good for society that so much capital is localized with a few people (bezos, musk etc.).
If the roots for capitalism or similar market economies are so old, what would be better for society?
The interesting part about saying the market is efficient is that currently, the market is headed for optimal extinction.
The better model has always been to treat money as a zero net worth system that cannot be used to carry value into the future at no cost because such an idea inherently contradicts the biological reality that human societies and their economies are built upon.
The consequences of using money as a "store of value" are so predictable and inevitable that I'm honestly tired of explaining it over and over again.
If you can carry money into the future but not the real physical equivalent it is the representative of, then the difference is a loss that is not yet reflected in the state of money. Your decision making will be suboptimal as a direct consequence.
This isn't something that can be swept under the rug or hand waved away.
It's no different than rust eating itself through your car. If you ignore the damage when it is small, the repair will be more expensive later on.
Meanwhile the economic model says, it is impossible for the condition of the car to get worse through a mere passage of time as that violates the idea of pure time preference theory and the idea of interest being a reward for abstaining from consumption. All of these are purely ideological wishful thinking. They basically claim that everything must get better through the passage of time and that rust doesn't exist.
Consider a society where rusting as a phenomenon was illegal to express. You would be allowed to talk about holes in the chassis but not be allowed to invent a primer or clear coat that effectively prevents rust since rust as a problem does not officially exist. Your attempt to avoid rust through economic expenditures would be considered value destruction, because it is inefficient use of resources.
This is sadly a very ignorant and shallow comment. There's just so much literature that you seem to be unaware of. For starters, copy-paste your reply and ask an LLM about the Euler equation, or to find weak spots in your reasoning.
I hope people get the right message from this, which is:
The way people talk about "Capitalism" is most often silly and counterproductive because most of the time -- the person that hates capitalism and the person that loves capitalism are talking about nearly entirely different things.
Also, should we capitalize the "C" in "Capitalism"? One might think we should, because C is a capital letter. But capital itself is lowercase, and therein lies the paradox.
It's also no wonder that the thing a theory describes exists long before the theory itself. We had language well before we had grammarians, and we had music long before music theory existed. Adam Smith didn't invent moral sentiments or market economics, just as Pythagoras didn't invent music. The article weirdly makes a big deal out this.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
That trade would have records is not surprising. That trade would follow patterns based on distance is not surprising, especially since transport costs were very high in that era. Hence the "gravity model".
The surprise here is in organizational form. The article describes a limited partnership contract, with partner investments and a cap table. It's impressive to see that so early. It requires a legal system, or strong social pressure, able to enforce a private contract that complex.
Most early commercial organizations were built around families. Corporations are generally considered to have first appeared in the 1300s, and were rare until the 1700s. I don't think the Roman Empire ever developed the concept of a corporation. Traders, bankers, and merchants existed, of course, but not private organizations larger than one owning family. Although it's hard to tell; not much Roman business info survives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices
From Polanyi, Finley, and Weber to Austin and Malkin, we've come a long way in recognizing the sophistication of ancient economic thought.
The price fixing was a failure, as would be expected. I am not sure if 'sophistication' is the right word to describe it.
See "Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls" which shows that humans are very slow learners.
https://www.amazon.com/Forty-Centuries-Wage-Price-Controls/d...
Ctrl+F "This matters"; of course it's because it's LLM-generated BS which is designed to produce sensationalist slop. (There are about 30 other tells reinforcing this but this one seems to be in literally every single LLM-generated article produced by current models)
Considering how necessary economies are and how economists claim economists are unnecessary to run an economy, I wonder why economists even exist.
The first thing a rational economist would do is tell the government to fire all economists and stop accrediting economics degrees.
Biological processes are also 'necessary', and work just as well without biologists. Do you also wonder why Biologists exist?
Or more broadly, should we give up trying to understand processes and systems if they run without intervention?
>The first thing a rational economist would do is tell the government to fire all economists and stop accrediting economics degrees
Please elaborate.
I find it interesting that they only analyzed texts that mention at least two cities, like this one:
> From Durhumit until Kanes I incurred expenses of 5 minas of refined (copper), I spent 3 minas of copper until Wahsusana, I acquired and spent small wares for a value of 4 shekels of silver. (Tablet AKT 8/145, lines 24–29)
Because I know some local businesses here that are based in city X would not mention this fact in the books, at least not for every transaction. They would write something like 'Got shipment from Y' or 'Sent for repairs to Z' etc.
They also exclude texts that mention Assur, which is the largest city there
> We exclude Assur, the home city of the Assyrians, from our automated search. First, the word Assur is also the name of the main Assyrian deity and occurs very often as an element of personal names. Second, the city of Assur is often referred to as simply alum — “the City” (comparable in use to references to the financial district of London)
So very cool work, and it can be improved upon too!
David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years
https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs
>The full apparatus of commercial civilization, operating without a theorist in sight.
I don't get this framing. Who thinks that markets are a product of theory? Why does the author keep hammering this point?
In any case... there are lots of commercial/numerical tablets available. Most of them, I believe. And... the records go all the way back to the beginnings of Summerian proto-writing. Cuineform was used for records before it was used for prose.
My hunch is that many/most assyriologists are more interested in political history, myth and suchlike. There is probably a lot of room for researchers who want to work on the economics.
Interestingly, an LLM can totally dismantle this line of thinking (try with Claude).
If the roots for capitalism or similar market economies are so old, what would be better for society?
The better model has always been to treat money as a zero net worth system that cannot be used to carry value into the future at no cost because such an idea inherently contradicts the biological reality that human societies and their economies are built upon.
The consequences of using money as a "store of value" are so predictable and inevitable that I'm honestly tired of explaining it over and over again.
If you can carry money into the future but not the real physical equivalent it is the representative of, then the difference is a loss that is not yet reflected in the state of money. Your decision making will be suboptimal as a direct consequence.
This isn't something that can be swept under the rug or hand waved away.
It's no different than rust eating itself through your car. If you ignore the damage when it is small, the repair will be more expensive later on.
Meanwhile the economic model says, it is impossible for the condition of the car to get worse through a mere passage of time as that violates the idea of pure time preference theory and the idea of interest being a reward for abstaining from consumption. All of these are purely ideological wishful thinking. They basically claim that everything must get better through the passage of time and that rust doesn't exist.
Consider a society where rusting as a phenomenon was illegal to express. You would be allowed to talk about holes in the chassis but not be allowed to invent a primer or clear coat that effectively prevents rust since rust as a problem does not officially exist. Your attempt to avoid rust through economic expenditures would be considered value destruction, because it is inefficient use of resources.
Besides the tendency to absolute oligarchy, there's the small matter of wholesale resource consumption and planet trashing.
People that trust each other just learned to set that current trust in stone, literally, in case it didn’t last
The regulators allow people that trust each other far less to do business and engage in the same agreements
In some fields, completely anonymous people that don’t trust each other at all, can now transact and pool capital spontaneously
These are things governed by protocols or regulators
This is pretty bad writing lol. Markets are as old as civilization itself, Adam Smith obviously knew this. General commerce != capitalism
https://asiatimes.com/2023/06/mystery-of-missing-indus-valle...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/indus-val...
The way people talk about "Capitalism" is most often silly and counterproductive because most of the time -- the person that hates capitalism and the person that loves capitalism are talking about nearly entirely different things.
Roughly: there’s no better alternative to capitalism and we have capitalism therefore we have reached optimal society.
And Pangram flags it, too.
https://www.pangram.com/history/126831e1-562f-4e65-9874-5250...
> Wall Street calls it securitization. The merchants of Assur called it Tuesday.
was the give away for me.