alt Hacker NewsAncient Tablets Show Markets Worked 4k Years Before Economists Explained Them
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A lot of people underestimate the bronze age and all the limelight goes to later Greeks and Romans because we have better records of them. But the bronze age and its empires were just as impressive in my opinion. Tin is not a very common metal to find and there are only significant deposits in a limited number of places around the globe. The trade routes required to support bronze production were thousands of miles long.
Should we be surprised that economics preceded economists?
This is a very interesting discovery. I'm fascinated by ancient economics. But...
>The full apparatus of commercial civilization, operating without a theorist in sight.
I don't get this framing. Who thinks that markets are a product of theory? Why does the author keep hammering this point?
In any case... there are lots of commercial/numerical tablets available. Most of them, I believe. And... the records go all the way back to the beginnings of Summerian proto-writing. Cuineform was used for records before it was used for prose.
My hunch is that many/most assyriologists are more interested in political history, myth and suchlike. There is probably a lot of room for researchers who want to work on the economics.
Here's the original paper if you want to skip the slop: https://keremcosar.uvacreate.virginia.edu/publications/BCCH-...
Isn't this the underlying phenomena as to why free markets outperform managed markets. Because theoretically the controlled market can be much more efficient than the free market, you know, because people don't have to fight each other for their share of the market all the time. But they never are. Why? Because nobody has to understand the market for it to work, everybody just pushes and the market molds itself into the form it needs. Where a controlled market operates under the illusion that it can be understood.
So what’s a better form than the current capitalistic (?) model? Surely we would say the market is efficient, but at the same time it can’t be good for society that so much capital is localized with a few people (bezos, musk etc.).
If the roots for capitalism or similar market economies are so old, what would be better for society?
I’m glad they have evidence, the glamorization is inaccurate
People that trust each other just learned to set that current trust in stone, literally, in case it didn’t last
The regulators allow people that trust each other far less to do business and engage in the same agreements
In some fields, completely anonymous people that don’t trust each other at all, can now transact and pool capital spontaneously
These are things governed by protocols or regulators
“The word “capitalism” would not be coined for another 3,800 years. Adam Smith was 3,700 years from picking up his pen.”
This is pretty bad writing lol. Markets are as old as civilization itself, Adam Smith obviously knew this. General commerce != capitalism
I hope people get the right message from this, which is:
The way people talk about "Capitalism" is most often silly and counterproductive because most of the time -- the person that hates capitalism and the person that loves capitalism are talking about nearly entirely different things.
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It's interesting that commerce/business was this sophisticated in the Bronze Age. I guess it's not that surprising given the famous customer service complaint[0] cuneiform tablet to Ea-nāṣir about receiving the wrong grade of copper ingots and his servant receiving rude service.
It's also no wonder that the thing a theory describes exists long before the theory itself. We had language well before we had grammarians, and we had music long before music theory existed. Adam Smith didn't invent moral sentiments or market economics, just as Pythagoras didn't invent music. The article weirdly makes a big deal out this.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...