alt Hacker NewsAnd knives apparently.
I recently encountered this randomly -- knives are apparently one of the few products that nearly every household has needed since antiquity, and they have changed fairly little since the bronze age, so they are used by economists as a benchmark that can span centuries.
Source: it was an aside in a random economics conversation with charGPT (grain of salt?).
There is no practical upshot here, but I thought it was cool.
Yeah I’d definitely take that knife thing with a grain of salt. I have most of a history degree, took a lot of Econ classes (before later going back for CS), and it’s a topic I’m very interested in and I’ve never heard that (and some digging didn’t find anything).
It’s also false that the technology has changed very little.
The jumps from bronze to iron to steel to modern steel and sometimes to stainless steel all result in vastly different products. Not to mention the advances in composite materials for handles.
Then you need to look at substitute goods and the what people actually used knives for.
A huge amount of the demand for knives evaporated thanks to societal changes and substitute goods like forks. A few hundred years ago the average person had a knife that was their primary eating utensil, a survival tool, and a self defense weapon. Knives like that exist today but they’re not something every household has or needs.
This is a good example of why learning from ChatGPT is dangerous. This is a story that sounds very plausible at first glance, but doesn’t make sense once you dig in.