The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire | Hacker News Reader

The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire

michelecoscia.com

167 pointsmikk1442 comments

The last paragraph is a reference to Cato the Elder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est

"As a third and final action point, I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed."

And speaking of Cato and economic complexity:

As his income grew, Cato also became a regular investor in commercial lending. Although a law from 218 BC banned senators from engaging directly in commercial shipping, Cato formed partnerships of fifty investors that backed the commercial operations of fifty ships. He fronted all of the initial capital and then lent money to investors that they could each use to buy a share in the enterprise. Cato himself entrusted one share to a freed slave who acted as his agent. He then profited from the trading activities as well as the interest on these loans, while following the letter of the law and limiting his direct exposure in case the cargo was lost.

I'll just leave this here: I think the destruction of Carthage was a great catastrophe. Both for the world from a humanitarian perspective and for Rome which squandered a lot of economic generativity.

If Rome had stayed a local power, could a divided Mediterranean have been even more dynamic than a unified empire? Perhaps rivalry between regional powers would have inspired greater human achievement. There certainly would have been wars, but not necessarily more than those the Roman Empire actually fought.

Rome conquered many places without committing genocide. The fate of Carthage stands out even by the standard of the time.

Can you name some?

Genocide seemed to be part and parcel.

Notice how few examples there are in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbicide#In_premodern_times, and how prominently Carthage figures. Or scan the years in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Razed_cities.

The usual approach of the time was enslavement and taxation. Because they were less effort and more reward.

>honored tradition of ignoring the fact that women exist and do stuff

Yes, they birthed and raised children.

As someone raising children, and having been a child myself, the erasure of children from the historical record by academics is far more egregious than ignoring what a fraction of women did.

What does this have to do with economic complexity? Could you elaborate? You mean like child labor? What's the fraction, how small is it? I don't get it. "As a former child" is hilarious though

I'm curious if that third factor is just geography

Guns Germs and Steel is a great book that explores geographic determinism.

I am trying to find links but can't right now. There are many cross cultural studies they have found the effects of social class systems and family economic advantages persist over centuries. A millennia isn't unbelievable to me.

I imagine it's a mix of both with strong geographic determinism tilting the scales for certain regions.

You should read Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall.

Another commenter mentioned the book under the comment you responded to.

I wrote about it here in #30 - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know

That was my first thought. Playing Civ games and reading books like Prisoners of Geography makes it pretty explicit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio

It is 35 metres high now, 20,000 or so m^2, after 1500 years, and composed of ancient pottery fragments (the trade went sharply down after the 5th century A.D.)

Caesar reports of a wall more than 20 km long, several meters high, with a canal in front of it, constructed by a legion or two, I don't remember now exactly, in two weeks time. Maybe an exaggeration, but..

And the real question for me, is how they managed to do the logistics, with just the Roman numbers.. So the economical complexity should not be such a surprise, I suppose.

If this is your vibe, Erdkamp’s The Grain Market in the Roman Empire is worth a read.

It’s easy to project modern markets onto ancient empires. But proper capital market are just a break from ancient ways of thinking in ways that are surprising.

For current info see https://oec.world/

https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/

So they estimate economic complexity by the number of discovered Latin documents or inscriptions. Wasn't Greek prevalent in the East?

Which is why the title explicitly names the Western Roman Empire, and the article briefly discusses data issues with Greek inscriptions near the end.

can't read it seems

No, based on the professions named within the inscriptions. If a province has relatively many professions that are rare for the WRE, then it's considered more complex. See the paper for the actual estimates, the map in the article does not show the complexity estimation

They really do a lot to correct for bias, but is it enough?

I would suspect that a prosperous and thereby complex economy also has more resource to discover or document inscriptions. While they talk about researcher bias, they do not really mitigate this.

And yes, I searched the article and the extensive additional material.

Still a valuable contribution.

I’d argue that a complex economy in a failing society is actually a sign of weakness. Lots of nobles and the likes wanting their cut of a pie that doesn’t really exist anymore. So all of that complexity is not really backed up by the reality and you just have a bubble. I can imagine all kinds of roles and professions that just exist to endow people. This also happens a lot in modern society.

I know this wasn’t actually your point but I just wanted to add.

Wanted to read more on this

Same here - I suppose this article did what it was supposed to do - give a short primer introducing the topic and if you want to see how they computed this look at the paper!

Carthago delenda est.

Server died already?

impressive

All roads lead to More.

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