Kyle Harper: evaluation

Transcript context

…I found your early chapters in the book about what the Roman economy was like in this happy period quite interesting. There's a bunch of questions I have about this. If you read Gibbon, writing in the 1770s, I think he says that the happiest time in human history was this period you're talking about. That was true at least according to him as of a couple centuries ago. This was still peak civilization. You discuss the complexity of the Roman economy. The fact that millions of tons of wheat and other products have to make their way to Rome and the trade networks and everything. You basically say they were experiencing productivity gains. The wages were increasing, population was increasing, but they were still not at the level at which it was plausible that, say, for these climactic and biological factors, they might have had an industrial revolution. I'm curious why you think... paint a picture for me of what the Roman world looked like as of this happy period and why that still counterfactually couldn't have just saved us a thousand years of history if they were on the right track. First of all, I think this is the sort of question that historians ought to worry about all the time: why didn't the Roman economy catalyze the takeoff? In some ways it was so precocious for its time period, and it seems not utterly impossible. The Roman world is still a pre-industrial economy so agriculture is the dominant sector. The majority of people work in agricultural pursuits and productivity is low. They don't have modern mechanized traction. They don't have modern synthetic fertilizers. They don't have the modern green revolution yields, all the things that have made agriculture stupendously productive. The primary sector is fairly limited in terms of its productivity because of the limitations on technical inputs. We can think of the inputs to an economy are going to be capital, labor, and ideas. What the Romans have is people. They have some investment, but they don't have technology. They don't have ideas. It's a late Iron Age civilization. I do think there's productivity growth and that productivity growth comes from markets, from trade where you get comparative advantage. In Egypt, I'm really good at growing wheat. You can make glass in Syria. And then we'll trade. The urbanization of the Roman world certainly facilitates that. Cities are these hubs of productivity and exchange. There's some technology. If you look really hard over five or six centuries, there's certainly economies of scale where the production process and manufacturing is moved from artisanal to industrial scale. But there's no takeoff because they don't have science. They don't have research and engineering that drives continuous productivity gains. I think they go precociously far in a pre-industrial setting where you take trade really far. They have good institutions in terms of strong property rights. There's relatively reliable contract enforcement. There's financial markets. They have the most advanced financial markets in the world before the 17th or 18th century. There's impersonal financial intermediation. It's not like you have to know me and come ask me for a loan if you wanna build a ship and go trade something. There are banks that take money from depositors, keep balances, and then lend out to debtors who want to go and do entrepreneurial things. They have so much potential, but there's no spark. You never see these sustained productivity increases. I would just say ultimately it's because the Romans don't have technology improvements that are really self-sustaining. The reason they don't have that is because they don't have science. Their science sucks. I'm offending some of my colleagues, I'm sure. Galen is great. Ptolemy's incredible. I love Pliny the Elder's encyclopedia, but if you look in the big picture, the contribution that the Roman Empire makes to our knowledge of how nature works and then the applied technology that comes out of that is really pathetic for five, 600 years. ook in the big picture, the contribution that the Roman Empire makes to our knowledge of how nature works and then the applied technology that comes out of that is really pathetic for five, 600 years. They go as far as you can with Smithian advantages to market exchange and specialization, to banks and finance. But without the kind of creative destruction of new technologies that improve productivity, you're eventually gonna run out of improvements.…

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