Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Why not? How did they do this? They have a really elaborate system of repression. They're worried about it. Probably the parts of Roman society where there are 20, 30, 40% slaves are pretty limited to certain regions and certain time periods. Partly because once you cross some kind of threshold, the challenges of repressing direct violent resistance increase. It's a system of exploitation. That means there's always a mix of carrots and sticks, to put it crudely. The Romans extract people's labor partly through physical violence, but also partly through systems of manumission that try and incent people to obey and not to rebel in order to earn their freedom. They're using everything from literal chains to enticements to try and keep rebellion from ever coalescing in a way that can turn into collective violence. It's a little bit challenging for us to look back. We know in Pompeii, the slave population is huge. It must be 30%. Not all of these people would've been plantation workers who were lashed every day and worked to the physical bone. A lot of them are nurses and textile workers and maids and tutors and all sorts of things that are sort of quasi-embedded in households as well, where there's always this weird psychological dimension too. Part of the strangeness of slavery is how deeply embedded in domestic institutions it is as well. There are ideologies in which the paterfamilias is sort of the father and the master. That tries to brainwash people against resistance. The important thing to recognize is it's just a pervasive system that tries to colonize people's minds and pervasively tries to keep them from resisting. I wonder if we can close the loop with the question we began with, which is, why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution? I don't know if it's a plausible explanation that cheap slave labor reduced the incentives for mechanization and engineering and other crafts or if not. I don’t know. It's definitely an argument that's been made. Aldo Schiavone was an Italian historian who argued that. It's kind of a neo-Marxist tradition that argues this. It's an interesting argument. I don't buy it at all. The good version of that argument would just be that the Roman Empire is using slaves in many of the most forward elements of the economy too. We tend to think progress and economic growth and innovation is good, and we know slavery's bad, so we tend to think that those things don't go together. But in reality, it's the most economically advanced sectors of the Roman economy that had a high degree of organization and productivity that tended to employ slaves. In the Roman world, you could make the argument that if the labor in those sectors had been free, there would've been more opportunities for positive feedback loops. The way the argument's usually made is just that the Romans got rich without really thinking about productivity. They just wanted to extract labor, extract wealth rather than create wealth. That's not a terrible argument, but ultimately I don't think it's the system of labor that keeps the Roman world from industrializing. There are lots of sectors in the Roman world where slavery is not a dominant institution, and it's not like they're more productive or flirting with some kinda breakaway. So it's an interesting argument, but not one I've ever found all that persuasive.…

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