Kim Bowes: belief

Transcript context

…Here’s a question I’ve wrestled with for a long time. I’ve never made progress on it. As you know, in your own book, Surviving Rome, you show the Romans had quite sophisticated and advanced economic lives. Why is it the Romans never had anything resembling economic reasoning? You can read any Roman text, and no one sits down and says, “Well, here’s how supply and demand work,” but there are advanced contributions to many other areas, right? Is supply and demand that tough an idea? They have absolutely an idea of supply and demand. They understand, and you see this never laid out in those terms, but they absolutely understand that at the harvest, when there’s a large supply of whatever’s been harvested, the prices go down. They know this for sure, and they respond, and they make planning on the basis of this basic understanding. I think, though, what you’re asking, Tyler, is what we have a harder time seeing is them making future planning around profit in a quantified way that we would understand as part and parcel of an economic thinking that involves supply and demand. There’s nothing like Euclid, right, or even Plato from ancient Athens, who defined the terms of philosophy. Ancient Rome had no Adam Smith, right? Nothing remotely close to him.…

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