Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, sure. So 1350 is when the Black Death is occurring, around then. Europe loses about 40 percent of its population to this bacterial infection that spreads through. And as anybody who’s taken introductory economics might suggest, when the labor supply goes down by a lot, with 40 percent of Europe dying, then wages are going to start going up. This means the bargaining power of peasants, relative to landowners and so forth, are going to increase. However, what economists often don’t take into account is, one response to this might be for people in power to double down on keeping peasants under their thumb. The second serfdom in Eastern Europe — Poland I’m thinking, in particular — this is that instead of getting better deals, the peasants were put under even greater submission after the Black Death because they were not able to get the market wage. Power played a role there with the nobility. And the nobility would often take advantage of Jews’ skills in, say, monitoring labor, keeping books — these sorts of things — to help them run this situation. So you have sorts of court Jews, Jews who were integrated into that power structure in that area. Not all of them, by any means. And the story changes dramatically as you move into the 19th and 20th centuries. But Poland never really goes through these transformations of developing state capacity. And Jews remain in this identity equilibrium in Poland, which insulates them from the persecution that we observe at the time, say 14th century, 1500s, up to 1800 or so, that we see in the other parts of Europe. But of course, you don’t get the emergence of a true form of tolerance. And this comes back doubly bad, much, much worse in the 19th and into the 20th century. You mentioned the Black Death. Let’s go back to 1347, which, I think, is when it all starts. Yes.…

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