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Trade, merchants, and the lost cities of the Bronze Age (2019) [pdf]
(changed from https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/ancient-clay-tablets-show-markets-worked-4000-years-before-economists-explained-them/ https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/ancient-clay-tablets-sho...)
- spudlyo 4mo agoIt'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%E1%B9%A3ir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
- cwnyth 4mo agoEveryone points to Ea-nasir, but that's a meme. Meanwhile, Diocletian outlawed price gouging and standardized prices across a variety of goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices From Polanyi, Finley, and Weber to Austin and Malkin, we've come a long way in recognizing the sophistication of ancient economic thought.
- spudlyo 4mo agoWe are about ~300 years closer to Diocletian than Diocletian was to Ea-nasir. Too bad he didn't have access to Adam Smith, who could have told him that price fixing wouldn't work and might have pointed to Roman currency debasement as one of the major causes of inflation. Of course greed is always a factor I suppose.
- cwnyth 4mo agoFair! Chronologically, at least, Diocletian's time is closer to us, though not technologically or population-wise. And by Diocletian's time, inflation was already out of control. If anything, the political stability that came with Diocletian's reforms actually helped bolster the economy, though it wouldn't last, as soon the center moved to Byzantium, leaving Rome (and Italy) to whither and die over the next century.
- microgpt 4mo agoLots of people say lots of things. I don't see why Adam Smith is special. Price fixing can work within reason. Did you know that the communism-themed Fusion Festival fixes the price of a meal, across all 100+ vendors, currently at 7€? This is presumably negotiated between the festival organisers and the food vendors as a reasonable price. (Some of them make a point of advertising 6.50€ but that doesn't actually make a difference. If you like the food you would've bought it for 7€ and if you don't like the food you aren't going to change your mind over 0.50€. They're just throwing away money.)(Some stands that sell more "snacky" items like crepes or smoothies use lower prices.) Because the price is the same everywhere you don't have to comparison-shop and can just pick the food you like.
- jeremysalwen 4mo agoWhat is a meal though? Do you get the same volume of food from all vendors, and the same number of calories? I definitely order multiple items from restaurants that have small portion sizes, so I suspect some vendors would be better or worse deals even at a uniform price.
- microgpt 4mo agoI don't know what goes on in the back end, but 7€ buys you what you get for more money at other music festivals, including from the exact same vendors.
- WalterBright 4mo ago> we've come a long way See "Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls" which shows that humans are very slow learners. https://www.amazon.com/Forty-Centuries-Wage-Price-Controls/dp/1610161408 https://www.amazon.com/Forty-Centuries-Wage-Price-Controls/d...
- dosisking 4mo agoI guess Diocletian was the first Communist, before there was such a thing as Communism. The price fixing was a failure, as would be expected. I am not sure if 'sophistication' is the right word to describe it.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo agoI thought communism was about central ownership of the means of production? But yeah, long term price fixing always fails.
- AngryData 4mo agoNot neccessarily central, but somehow distributed ownership over business by the working class. The most simple case though being the state owns it and then workers theoretically own the state. An economy of all independent co-op businesses could probably be defined as communism too though.
- psychoslave 4mo agoYou forget to mention life and biology, earth and geology, universe and cosmology.
- applfanboysbgon 4mo ago> The article weirdly makes a big deal out this. Ctrl+F "This matters"; of course it's because it's LLM-generated BS which is designed to produce sensationalist slop. (There are about 30 other tells reinforcing this but this one seems to be in literally every single LLM-generated article produced by current models)
- Animats 4mo ago> It's interesting that commerce/business was this sophisticated in the Bronze Age. That trade would have records is not surprising. That trade would follow patterns based on distance is not surprising, especially since transport costs were very high in that era. Hence the "gravity model". The surprise here is in organizational form. The article describes a limited partnership contract, with partner investments and a cap table. It's impressive to see that so early. It requires a legal system, or strong social pressure, able to enforce a private contract that complex. Most early commercial organizations were built around families. Corporations are generally considered to have first appeared in the 1300s, and were rare until the 1700s. I don't think the Roman Empire ever developed the concept of a corporation. Traders, bankers, and merchants existed, of course, but not private organizations larger than one owning family. Although it's hard to tell; not much Roman business info survives.
- jltsiren 4mo agoRoman law recognized various types of legal entities at different points of time. Some of the terms they used include "collegium" and "universitas". And that's were the word "university" comes from. It emphasizes that a university is not just any school but a self-governing corporation (or a body) of students and scholars.
- teleforce 4mo agoAnother Bronze Age civilization with sophisticated commerce system is Indus Valley Civilisation [1],[2],[3]. The wikipedia entry somehow is outdated [4]. Perhaps some of the new findings are too controversial for the editors, meanwhile reseacher receiving death threat [5]. [1] The Indus Script and Economics. A Role for Indus Seals and Tablets in Rationing and Administration of Labor: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00049 https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00049 [2] Indus civilisation reveals its volumetric system: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/Indus-civilisation-reveals-its-volumetric-system/article16892188.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/Indus-civilisation-re... [3] The Indus Script-Computational Analysis and Interpretations (2020) [video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF_nJ4vfG-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF_nJ4vfG-A [4] Indus Valley Civilisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation [5] Rajesh Rao: Computing a Rosetta Stone for the Indus script [video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwYxHPXIaao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwYxHPXIaao
- Michelangelo11 4mo agoRight, and that's also true of physical inventions that you might think are a straightforward application of scientific knowledge. The steam engine is a good example -- it was produced by tinkering, and we devised a theory of how it works much later. Probably for the vast majority of human inventions, the thing exists long before the theory of the thing. I think that feels counterintuitive in part because examples to the contrary are very conspicuous -- e.g., the A-bomb. But inventions like that, where a theory is meticulously worked out then applied, probably only happen when you have to follow that path for whatever reason -- for the A-bomb, because of enormous capital expenditures. Yet there are countless inventions that came to be only because someone noticed an interesting effect and built something around it (off the top of my head, the microwave is another example), without creating a theory beforehand.
- pram 4mo ago“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
- thesmtsolver2 4mo ago[dead]
- dudeinjapan 4mo agoI'm looking for the tablet that says "We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune..."
- psychoslave 4mo agoObviously not exactly that, but egalitarian regims in complex societies was apparently a thing, or at least strong evidences back this scenario. https://asiatimes.com/2023/06/mystery-of-missing-indus-valley-ruling-class/ https://asiatimes.com/2023/06/mystery-of-missing-indus-valle... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/indus-valley-egalitarian-ancient-society-mohenjo-daro https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/indus-val...
- AbrahamParangi 4mo agoThis is AI generated slop.
- thesmtsolver2 4mo agoWhat signs do you see?
- roywiggins 4mo agoLong sequences of short sentences. Not X, but Y. And Pangram flags it, too. https://www.pangram.com/history/126831e1-562f-4e65-9874-52501f094b57 https://www.pangram.com/history/126831e1-562f-4e65-9874-5250...
- oxonia 4mo agoYup - pretty obvious.
- black_13 4mo ago[dead]
- dgellow 4mo agoDamn, you’re right. It’s a surprisingly well written article for an AI, but reading it again with hindsight I see Claude fingerprints all over it
- usernamed7 4mo agoit started out alright, but then it just became obvious. > Wall Street calls it securitization. The merchants of Assur called it Tuesday. was the give away for me.
- addaon 4mo agoWoulda given the AI credit if it had gone with "The merchants of Assur called it Nergal."
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- nativeit 4mo agoShould we be surprised that economics preceded economists?
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- imtringued 4mo agoAs far I know economists are neither historians nor do they perform any management or business function. Considering how necessary economies are and how economists claim economists are unnecessary to run an economy, I wonder why economists even exist. The first thing a rational economist would do is tell the government to fire all economists and stop accrediting economics degrees.
- squidbeak 4mo ago> Considering how necessary economies are and how economists claim economists are unnecessary to run an economy, I wonder why economists even exist. Biological processes are also 'necessary', and work just as well without biologists. Do you also wonder why Biologists exist? Or more broadly, should we give up trying to understand processes and systems if they run without intervention?
- teliosix 4mo agoI think a better framing is trying to understand biology before the microscope. While the methods may look ridiculous to us today, the microscope doesn't just spring into being spontaneously. There needs to be a field of inquiry and ignorance that the tool evolves from in order to answer questions. The reality that economics in 2026 is a type of folk science lacking its microscope or telescope doesn't mean the inquiry is useless. "Economics is bullshit, the end" is not useful at all.
- arter45 4mo agoEconomists can be useful as observers, much like the Universe doesn't need astronomers or the weather doesn't need meteorologists. >The first thing a rational economist would do is tell the government to fire all economists and stop accrediting economics degrees Please elaborate.
- jrm4 4mo agoI 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.
- dudeinjapan 4mo agoAlso, should we capitalize the "C" in "Capitalism"? One might think we should, because C is a capital letter. But capital itself is lowercase, and therein lies the paradox.
- t-3 4mo agoCapitalism was a term coined by Marx, so not really surprising that most using it are anti-capitalist.
- kubb 4mo agoI think it’s productive because it serves to stabilize the society by giving it an ideological underpinning. Roughly: there’s no better alternative to capitalism and we have capitalism therefore we have reached optimal society.
- microgpt 4mo agojust in case anyone else misunderstood this comment on their first reading, kubb is not praising capitalism here
- AngryData 4mo agoA 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.
- yieldcrv 4mo agoI’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
- chr15m 4mo agoHere's the original paper if you want to skip the slop: https://keremcosar.uvacreate.virginia.edu/publications/BCCH-BronzeAgeTrade-qje.pdf https://keremcosar.uvacreate.virginia.edu/publications/BCCH-...
- demaga 4mo agoThanks! I don't know if the article OP linked is slop or not - site is plainly inacessible from Ukraine. I find it interesting that they only analyzed texts that mention at least two cities, like this one: > From Durhumit until Kanes I incurred expenses of 5 minas of refined (copper), I spent 3 minas of copper until Wahsusana, I acquired and spent small wares for a value of 4 shekels of silver. (Tablet AKT 8/145, lines 24–29) Because I know some local businesses here that are based in city X would not mention this fact in the books, at least not for every transaction. They would write something like 'Got shipment from Y' or 'Sent for repairs to Z' etc. They also exclude texts that mention Assur, which is the largest city there > We exclude Assur, the home city of the Assyrians, from our automated search. First, the word Assur is also the name of the main Assyrian deity and occurs very often as an element of personal names. Second, the city of Assur is often referred to as simply alum — “the City” (comparable in use to references to the financial district of London) So very cool work, and it can be improved upon too!
- dang 4mo agoThanks! we've switched the link to that from https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/ancient-clay-tablets-show-markets-worked-4000-years-before-economists-explained-them/ https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/ancient-clay-tablets-sho... above.
- moontear 4mo agoSo 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?
- imtringued 4mo agoThe interesting part about saying the market is efficient is that currently, the market is headed for optimal extinction. The better model has always been to treat money as a zero net worth system that cannot be used to carry value into the future at no cost because such an idea inherently contradicts the biological reality that human societies and their economies are built upon. The consequences of using money as a "store of value" are so predictable and inevitable that I'm honestly tired of explaining it over and over again. If you can carry money into the future but not the real physical equivalent it is the representative of, then the difference is a loss that is not yet reflected in the state of money. Your decision making will be suboptimal as a direct consequence. This isn't something that can be swept under the rug or hand waved away. It's no different than rust eating itself through your car. If you ignore the damage when it is small, the repair will be more expensive later on. Meanwhile the economic model says, it is impossible for the condition of the car to get worse through a mere passage of time as that violates the idea of pure time preference theory and the idea of interest being a reward for abstaining from consumption. All of these are purely ideological wishful thinking. They basically claim that everything must get better through the passage of time and that rust doesn't exist. Consider a society where rusting as a phenomenon was illegal to express. You would be allowed to talk about holes in the chassis but not be allowed to invent a primer or clear coat that effectively prevents rust since rust as a problem does not officially exist. Your attempt to avoid rust through economic expenditures would be considered value destruction, because it is inefficient use of resources.
- SturgeonsLaw 4mo agoIsn't depreciation the financial system's way of acknowledging that physical things deteriorate over time?
- brudgers 4mo agoRelated (possibly) David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs
- somat 4mo agoIsn'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.
- kubb 4mo agoIn practice, markets were managed since the Bronze Age. Back then, authorities set wages and prices through palace and temple institutions, standardized weights, etc.
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- microgpt 4mo agoStandardisation can be useful but the standard has to concord with reality. The IETF model of networking works, because their approach was to build some networks, see how they work, and then standardize that. The OSI model never worked, because the OSI approach was to think really long and hard about how a network would work, standardize it, and then build some networks following the standard. If you see a variety of food vendors with prices between $6-$8 you might push for standard price of $7. You shouldn't push for a standard price of $1 or $100 because that just won't work, no matter how hard you try - best case everyone ignores you, worst case no one trades food within your zone of authority any more.
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- netcan 4mo agoThis 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.
- kubb 4mo agoThe prompter of the LLM that authored the article thought that should be the central point of it. Conclusion that they were going for: we don’t need economics today and everything should be left to its own devices. Interestingly, an LLM can totally dismantle this line of thinking (try with Claude).
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- ReptileMan 4mo ago[dead]
- Gimpei 4mo agoTerrible article title and framing. This is just about a QJE article, the QJE by the way is famous for being a little more out there. The article takes a standard gravity equation from economic geography and finds that it fits well to a dataset they created from Bronze Age slates. In general the gravity equation is one of the successes from economics so this isn’t super surprising, but it is welcome and notable. That’s pretty much it.
- arter45 4mo agoAlso, a gravity-like model makes even more sense in ancient times which were really constrained by distances, unlike modern economies for which this is more true for goods than services (although there are gravity effects for services, too). In a 100% goods economy, with information itself traveling at the speed of a man or a horse, everything becomes gravity-like.
- dang 4mo ago(We've since changed the URL from https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/ancient-clay-tablets-show-markets-worked-4000-years-before-economists-explained-them/ https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/ancient-clay-tablets-sho... to the paper itself.)
- metalman 4mo agoI think it is very important to point out that cuniform tablets which contained business contracts and day to day corespindence, were mailed useing perfect security envelopes, making reading it durring transit impossible without destroying the seal, as the envelope was made of clay, sealed with the unique unfakeable seal of the sender, giving there business activities security and a sense of trust that we dont have anymore.
- IAmBroom 4mo agoHahahahahaha, "unique unfakeable seal". You slay me!
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