Mark Koyama: prediction

Transcript context

…And now we turn to Mark Koyama, also a colleague of mine. He’s an economics professor at George Mason. I asked your coauthor Noel this question. I’d like your take. It’s often alleged by historians that, as the Renaissance came about, capitalism was more prominent. Prejudice against Jews, other minorities, went up when there was more capitalism. Is this true? And if so, what was the mechanism? It’s an interesting question. What I find about capitalism is really on the rise, particularly around the 18th century, it’s certainly hard to ascertain in my view. Because I think eventually, the 13th century, the Commercial Revolution in the 12th century, is a high point of expansion, of new cities being founded in northern Europe, of Italian merchants going to the Middle East. There’s the Crusades. The Crusades initially exhibited a lot of religious violence and intolerance. But as the Crusaders come back to Europe, they’re bringing with them knowledge of Arabic numerals, and there’s actually quite . . . There’s a cosmopolitan flavor to that period, to the high Middle Ages. Then you get to the 14th century and the Black Death, which is a terrible economic collapse. But it’s an economic collapse which changes the ratio between labor and land, so incomes go up. Incomes go up, and that changes the nature of the European economy in certain ways which does favor the rise of art. Incomes are higher. People can afford luxuries. So maybe cities, to some extent, are growing. But whether or not the Renaissance is a period of dramatic economic change is, I think, open to questioning. A lot of merchant ventures and trading ventures are still controlled by charter companies or by royal agents. So I don’t see it as a decisive break in the same way I see, say, post-17th-century Industrial Revolution period. I see that as a seismic change on the scale of economic activity. The Renaissance is . . . It’s not clear to me that it’s qualitatively different from what went before. A separate question is, why is violence and intolerance and religious violence going up? And I see that in terms of more conventional noneconomic factors: the printing press, the Reformation, those types, and other shocks you see. That’s what I see as being associated with this kind of greater intolerance in the Renaissance. So you think the best story we have about changes in toleration for this period — it’s ultimately technology driven? Printing press? Communications?…

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