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Rome was a slave economy. When you are using millions of slaves for no-cost labor, there is little need for develop technology to improve industrial output. Bei

• shadowgovt 4y ago
  It's really key for people to understand this, because that economic imbalance doesn't require slaves, though slaves are a sufficient condition. It can also be done (on paper at least) with automation. The key point is "capital consolidation (which can scale) divorced from individual labor output (which does not scale)," and however you get there (slaves or robots), you can create a massive societal wealth imbalance that results in an economic arrangement utterly unlike the arrangement that spawned it. ... that reminds me, my phone pinged five minutes ago. I should go pick up that Amazon package off my porch.
• spaniard89277 4y ago
  But the romans actually did innovate. Or at least put other's knowledge to massive use. The scale of planning and engineering put into their infrastructure is just awesome. It's not just roads. Their sewage systems, water treatment plants, siphons, aqueducts, pipes... IDK if any of you had a deep dive into this, but I watch some YT channels by spanish professors and this people were no joke. And they seemed to have some research on materials too.
  • ajuc 4y ago
    They innovated in areas where slaves didn't helped.
    • csours 4y ago
      I worry that capitalism is using us in a similar manner. Neoliberal capitalism has given us a lot of very cheap, very technologically advanced stuff. An extremely basic integrated circuit in the 1960s costs the same as an entire iPhone now, accounting for inflation. Accounting for inflation, automobiles are as cheap as they've ever been, and have many more features that work much better than they ever have. But ... the edges wear thin. A Raspberry Pi (computer) and a Raspberry Pie (food) may be purchased for around the same price. A varied and healthy diet can be quite expensive (though there are deals to be found if you can travel to get them). Companies want to "add value" to food with extensive processing that increases the engineered taste factors to make us consume more. Housing is insanely expensive in many areas. Health care in the United States is not designed for any humans - not doctors, nurses, other professionals, and certainly not patients. Neoliberal capitalism won't innovate on these areas. Are we just stuck with what we have? Certainly government mandates could change the game, but just like the Romans, people think the system is working because they can buy a smart phone and a gaming console and some cheap snacks and go for a ride in their fine automobile. We can't see what the collapse will be, and we can't see what's next. I wonder how many Romans talked like this? I don't believe that our doom is inevitable, but I also think that progress requires specific intention, and progress can be very easily disrupted. --- I have a thesis that the economic benefits of integrated circuit microchip and the economic benefits of neoliberalism cannot be distinguished. They both feed each other. I don't see myself putting enough effort into researching it and writing it up, but I strongly believe that thesis.
      • WillPostForFood 4y ago
        >Neoliberal capitalism won't innovate on these areas. Wouldn't you put the transition from agriculture based economy under neoliberal capitalism? We went from 90% farm employment to 10% while massively increasing output. Tech folks don't think food production is exciting so they miss all the innovation. https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/1/8/22872749/john-deere-self-driving-tractor-autonomous-farming https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/1/8/22872749/john-deere-self... As to housing and health care, we don't have "neoliberal capitalism", we have highly regulated, captured, markets. If you moved to zero zoning in SF you'd start to have innovative building.
  • beej71 4y ago
    Fine. But aside from the roads, sewage systems, water treatment plants, siphons, aqueducts, and pipes, what have the Romans ever done for us?
    • the_af 4y ago
      Well played! "What have the Romans given us in return?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
    • insane_dreamer 4y ago
      More importantly, what have they done for us lately? Literally nothing in the past 1000 years.
    • DigiDigiorno 4y ago
      Irrigation? Medicine? Oh, and the wine.
      • SergeAx 4y ago
        They just took the whole wine industry from Greeks. No added value whatsoever.
  • lr4444lr 4y ago
    Yes, the Roman military enterprise demanded technological innovation both to expand and maintain their conquered territories. But their productivity as the OP pointed out was severely hamstrung by the plentiful slave labor that conquest afforded.
  • Cupertino95014 4y ago
    re materials: google "pozzolanans" they knew it worked, and Caesarea in Israel shows that it really did.
  • psychphysic 4y ago
    Similarly slave labour is not free in the economic sense. You still pay housing, food and time at a minimum.
    • kozikow 4y ago
      If your job can't afford you housing, food and basic healthcare you have it worse than most slaves did.
      • nautilius 4y ago
        Holy shit, man. What's your take on concentration camps? At least the prisoners are not homeless?
        • kozikow 4y ago
          If Amazon or Uber workers were slaves they probably would be treated better. Not saying that slavery is by any means even slightly positive. Just that economic system allows for extreme exploitation of people without alternatives.
          • deleted 4y ago
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        • kleer001 4y ago
          concentration camps were (are?) built to kill people, subject them to abject torture, to hell, it was not an economic end let alone an ostensibly sustainable venture
          • badpun 4y ago
            Depends on the country. Soviet ones (Gulags) were created for economic purposes as much as for political. The economic idea behind the Gulags was to extract free slave labor out of population and basically free calories out of their bodies - the prisoners were barely fed, so their bodies had to burn their own tissues (starting with fat) to survive. Millions of prisoners/slaves doing hard manual labor for no pay and eating 800 kalories per day helped the country's rapid industrialization in the 20s and 30s.
  • visarga 4y ago
    - Water mills - Steam engine - the Aeolipile - Concrete - even underwater concrete - Automations - see Heron of Alexandria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPu9OQpH6uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPu9OQpH6uo
  • unity1001 4y ago
    All of those existed before Romans. From Sumeria to Indus Valley civilization to Egypt. If you dive into their history and watch related channels, you will find even more amazing things. What Romans did, however, was building them systematically and in a standardized fashion to bring them everywhere. That is an innovation. However... Aside from that and what advances Rome was able to do from their inception until the Late Republic period, Romans did not innovate as you would describe it. That's why the Roman history from Middle Republic until its fall is a story of slow decline and deterioration into feudalism.
• azernik 4y ago
  The United States was a slave economy too, and still industrialized. That is not a sufficient explanation for Rome.
  • bragr 4y ago
    Slavery is usually the reason given why the North industrialized and the South did not pre civil war.
    • anonporridge 4y ago
      The real reason is that wage slavery in the North is more effective than chattel slavery in the South. When the slaves imagine themselves free and have a slightly greater amount of agency, they are more productive than those who are motivated by the whip alone.
  • CrazyStat 4y ago
    Mostly the North industrialized, whole the South relied on slave labor as long as they could and then sharecroppers and other forms of barely-not-slavery.
    • bcrosby95 4y ago
      > and other forms of barely-not-slavery The "funny" part about those barely-not-slavery practices, some were outlawed and successfully defended in court by arguing it was... actually slavery, which was illegal but had no "or else". The US didn't crack down on this until World War 2, and that was just because they were getting bad press about it.
  • pinewurst 4y ago
    There was very little direct cross though. The industrialized places (cotton milling etc) almost never had enslaved workers. Those were mostly on the plantations.
  • watwut 4y ago
    At the time slavery existed, north was much more industrialized then south. The free labor ideology made North have a lot more small producers trying to innovate and earn money in market. South ressembled and seen itself more like aristocratic gentlemens so to speak. Slavery meant that trades and smaller production were jobs for slaved, looked down at.
• ladyattis 4y ago
  It's more complex than that. The cost of slaves is non-zero regardless of how you shoulder the burden of them; feeding, keeping them in line, giving them tools for their tasks, and so forth. What would've excluded the use of early steam engines for them would've been their higher cost versus their potential output. Plus, industrialization didn't start with the steam engine, it started with the water wheel and windmill. Whether it was grinding grain, cutting wood, or even running power hammers (some smithies were found around rivers), the industrialization effort before the steam engine was nearly three or four hundred years earlier than the official starting of the late 18th century as told in popular narratives. In fact, I believe there's evidence of industrialization in Europe happening as early as the 11th century in some countries (again, windmills and water wheels running milling and other labor intensive operations). Another problem with the Roman economy was the lack of complex financial arrangements and instruments. There wasn't any conception of the modern loan or corporate bonds in their world which are integral to the acceleration of industrialization and the growth of capitalism. Rome basically couldn't industrialize because its people and its norms were incongruent with the possibility. And even if some ancient engineer magically did create a simple two stroke engine, there wouldn't be any incentive to invest as to produce them with regularity. At most, they would've been a curiosity of the wealthy with little usage beyond some minor conveniences.
  • Aunche 4y ago
    The Romans also didn't have paper or a printing presses, so knowledge only circulated among a relatively small population of elites.
    • ladyattis 4y ago
      Yep, it's a problem that couldn't be solved in Rome as it lacked many essential tools that the so-called Industrial Revolution depended upon. I can't imagine Rome or Sassanid Persia achieving such an industrial breakthrough.
    • insane_dreamer 4y ago
      But was that such a big factor? After all, most of the population even in 17thC England was illiterate. Industrial innovation was, at least initially, primarily driven by a small educated elite.
• xhkkffbf 4y ago
  Slavery is bad, but it's not no-cost. At the very least you have to feed the enslaved and also give them the bare minimum of care, if only to protect your investment. And then there are the societal costs of enforcement. I would submit that any Roman farmer or businessman relying on slave labor would be overjoyed to purchase any device that would cut the need for slaves in half. (Or even by 10-20%.)
  • giantrobot 4y ago
    A device that cuts manual labor only does so for a single purpose. A Roman farm would have grain fields, livestock, and orchards. Slaves on the farm could do all of the jobs the farm required. A harvesting gin of some sort would only reduce the labor needs for a small portion of the farm's output. For mechanization to reduce manual labor on Roman farms they would need to switch to monoculture crops of a type that were conducive to mechanization. It would take machines being extremely cheap to beat Roman slave labor where conquests of neighboring territories were constantly bringing in new slaves.
    • Attrecomet 4y ago
      That implies that other kinds of landholding did not have access to cheap labor - but serf, sharecroppers, and farm hands are all pretty cheap under the right circumstances. More pertinently, the "expensive" farm workers of the industrializing countries weren't expensive enough for farming to be mechanized until the 20th century. Second half of that before it had replaced manual forms of farming entirely. Farming itself never was the driver for industrialization, but a rather late profiteer of it. It follows that farm slaves couldn't have been the blocker for industrialization, at least not as directly as you assume.
• zajio1am 4y ago
  Slaves are not no-cost labor, they have market price (i.e. capital costs), and you need to feed them (i.e. operational costs). Also, to get simple rotational power, you do not need slaves, you just need oxen.
  • lr4444lr 4y ago
    They do, but at scale that drops, and unlike oxen, they're trainable for producing value beyond sheer energy.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Slaves aren't free. I would imagine that an oversupply of laborers (i.e. too many people, not enough places for them to be productive) was a bigger factor. If you read A Farewell to Alms - it has a pretty convincing argument that the industrial revolution only happened because England ran out of land and birth rates declined and that, combined with thriving merchant and textile and finance industries, led to a shortage of labor - which led to innovation.
  • lazyier 4y ago
    Trying to point out single factor is a exercise in stupidity. Time matters, places matter, culture matters, food, existing technology, technological connections with other regions, math, scientific progress, etc etc. For example you need to be able to make blueprints. To make blueprints you need the math technology, the printing technology, and drafting technology, and the language necessary to all be developed first. There are hundreds of thousands of different variables. Probably millions. More probably trillions. None of them aligned for the Romans. All of them aligned for coal mining industry in Britain.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      > There are hundreds of thousands of different variables. Probably millions. More probably trillions. Obviously. The point of the book was to highlight the major factors. > None of them aligned for the Romans. All of them aligned for coal mining industry in Britain. > Trying to point out single factor is a exercise in stupidity. Are you saying the coal mining industry is the cause? Because the industrial revolution leads to the explosion of the coal mining industry, not the other way around. Why do you need so much coal? For steam engines. Why do you need steam engines? Because people and animals aren't enough any more.
      • origin_path 4y ago
        The article argues it was the other way around - that pumping water out of mines was the use case that allowed steam engines to be funded and improved to the point that they could be used for other things.
• kalimanzaro 4y ago
  Analogous to the British industrial revolution I suppose, where the relative cheapness of coal and iron versus labour is considered critical.
• atchoo 4y ago
  Interesting to think that the invention of effective humanoid robots could return us to this slave economy with unexpected negative consequences.
  • desindol 4y ago
    Not in a working democracy.
  • Nasrudith 4y ago
    Humanoid forms are less efficient than specialist ones. It is a nonsequitor that chasis shape will somehow make a slave economy. But even if improbably sapient robot slaves were a thing part of what made slave economies stink was not upgrading their tools and efficiency. When the tools are designed by a highly educated workforce that pitfall wouldn't apply.
• recursivedoubts 4y ago
  Rome was also a usury economy, which concentrated the wealth of the empire into fewer and fewer hands. People were often forced into slavery on latifundia to avoid starvation. The roman experience is one reason why the pre-Reformation church was so set against usury. Thankfully, we won't make the mistake of allowing usury to dominate our civilization again. :|
  • mikepurvis 4y ago
    "A latifundium is a very extensive parcel of privately owned land. The latifundia of Roman history were great landed estates specializing in agriculture destined for export: grain, olive oil, or wine." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium
  • yywwbbn 4y ago
    Wasn’t debt slavery abolished quite in Roman history? I don’t think there is much evidence that free citzens were often reduced to slavery. Slaves were almost exclusively war captives or imported from abroad.
• dalbasal 4y ago
  IDK... If you look at a very broad sweep of cultures at various times... the classification of social classes get very blurry: slavery, peasantry, serfs, cottiers, indentured labour, wage labour... Which of these best represents Middle Kingdom Egypt's labour structure? Is sharecropping the same as medieval european peasantry? The definition or labeling of these labour class structures don't tell you much about their economic implications. Slaves don't necessarily cost less than sharecroppers, serfs or tribesman. That doesn't mean it doesn't have implications, but they are complicated and relative to the specific of that system. I just don't buy this linear extrapolation from A to B.
• swalsh 4y ago
  Is a slave zero cost though? Seems like the opposite. You have to pay a large upfront cost for whatever extra marginal output they can produce, which is minimal because you still need to feed/house the slave and their family, but they're probably not the most motivated worker. So you have an expensive worker you need to feed with low productivity. The economics of slaves seem pretty poor quite frankly.
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  My completely amateur theory is that the reason there was never any Roman industrialization is because there were no innovations in literacy and information storage or spread. Aka, the printing press. The lack of innovation in this field was likely because of class issues, especially the upper class wanting to retain control over knowledge. There is a reason why industrialization followed the invention of the printing press, and not the other way around.
  • lenkite 4y ago
    1 million upvotes for the right answer. The printing press was the single, greatest factor responsible for the Industrial Revolution. It contributed to an exponential spread of knowledge that led to a rising tide of industrialisation. Most ancient civilizations had their geniuses, mathematicians and engineers - but they couldn't pass on their knowledge permanently.
    • insane_dreamer 4y ago
      Not so sure. The educated Roman elite could certainly record their knowledge onto various medium (tablet, papyrus, etc.). Sure, it wasn't disseminated to the masses (who couldn't read anyway), but it wasn't lost, at least not until the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Empire had extensive written records on all kinds of things, particularly as pertaining to the military.
      • spaceman_2020 4y ago
        That’s the thing - innovation in fields like metallurgy or carpentry usually come from actual practioners. A blacksmith in the north of England might have developed some new smelting technique but that technique would have no way of being transported across Europe since the blacksmith couldn’t write it down. The educated elite mostly wrote about things they knew and cared about - law, warfare, religion. Learning in these fields often advanced much faster than, say, blacksmithing since the elite class was invested in writing and sharing and learning about them.
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Much of the highly innovative infrastructure (roads, bridges, aquaducts, etc.) was built by the Roman army, which could be considered a form of slavery (with a freedom coupon at the end if you survived), but which had to be maintained at a certain level of effectiveness (i.e., couldn't keep them at near-starvation levels to save money), and was certainly not zero-cost.
• deleted 4y ago
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