Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…… most of the time? That’s a really important idea to remember. Same with the US president, frankly, in terms of the grand arc of history, what is the actual impact? But I would say the big one is probably starting wars, major global wars or ending them in both directions. And then taxation too, as you said. What was the taxation? What was the economic system? What was the role of taxation in the Roman Empire? Romans are really weird with this. So in the Republic, once they started to acquire overseas provinces, they had to decide, well, what are we going to do with these provinces? And they, in the end, settled on this notion of, we’ll put a Roman governor in charge. We’ll collect some sort of taxes. But they often didn’t collect the taxes directly. Instead, they would sell contracts to private businesses to collect taxes. So the private businesses would bid and say, “All right, if you give us the contract to collect taxes in Sicily, we’ll give you X number of money up front and then we go out and try to collect enough to make back that money and make ourselves a profit.” And this is a terrible system, because obviously, they’re going to go and try and squeeze as much as they can out of Sicily. And these companies were called publicans, publicani. And in the Bible, there’s a phrase, publicans and sinners, and that should give you an idea how they’re viewed. So everybody hated these tax collectors, and it was a really kind of dumb system because the publicans were going out and squeezing way more than they should in an unhealthy way from the provinces. And the Roman state was doing this kind of weird thing that they should have been doing themselves. And over time, that shifts a bit and it becomes more like your standard taxation. And a lot of the taxation ends up being in kind too. So it’s like, okay, we’re taxing you, you pay it in wheat if you’re a farmer or something, not necessarily in cash. So in many ways, the Roman economy is underdeveloped. They didn’t have a lot of the sophisticated systems that we have today, and it probably held them back in some ways. And again, they have that resistance to change. The Romans also had weird notions about just business and profit making, that at least originally, there was this notion that’s shameful, again, the only thing that’s a worthwhile profession is farming. So rich Romans would get involved in what we would call business manufacturing, particularly long distance trade with ships, but they would often do it through sort of front companies or employees who did it on their behalf, officially, and then they funneled the profits to the guy funding it because they don’t want to be soiled with business, which is beneath them. So the Romans had a lot of weird attitudes about the economy that I think in some ways didn’t help.…

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