38 ms·
The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)
- kirab 13y agoSeems like a centralized economy does not have to be inefficient after all.
- mathattack 13y agoThe article doesn't make many comments about efficiency. Achieving an empire through forced labor is different than doing it efficiently.
- Demiurge 13y agoCould you say labor is forced if you have a choice between starvation and labor? If such is the case, I wish I wasn't forced to work for money in this society and then exchange it for goods and seek out the most favorable deal.
- eloisius 13y agoThere's a big difference between being compelled by the laws of nature and being forced by the bidding of another man.
- rayiner 13y agoThe situation with the Incas was that, without the force coordination necessary to conduct agriculture in the mountains, everyone would die. Where does that fall on the nature versus man spectrum?
- eloisius 13y agoOh, no argument against that really. It still falls under the compelled by another man side of the spectrum, but I've long held the belief that collectivist forms of society were necessary in more primitive times. Only with technological progress are we capable of stronger individualism. I only mean to answer the question, "Could you say labor is forced if you have a choice between starvation and labor?"
- icambron 13y agoThe Inca used forced labor to build temples and roads and provide food and other goods to the military. Cooperative farming can certainly become more efficient with additional infrastructure like irrigation and food storage, but I find it hard to believe that the tradeoff here is starvation vs massive cleptocratic absolute monarchy. It went way beyond the need to grow food cooperatively. And in fact, the only way that you would end up with all of this labor available for armies and temples and so on is by generating large food surpluses, so it's clear they weren't on the boundary of starvation. How did I work, I wonder, before there was an emperor? That said, we currently use money to build roads and provide food and other goods to the military, which we fund through taxes. Taxes are just a more nuanced, easier-to-administer form of "provide x% of your labor to the central authority". The evil part here is the absolute monarchy that makes self-interested decisions about what to do with that labor, but the Inca were hardly alone in that respect.
- marcosdumay 13y agoThe hard to cultivate terrain where the Inca prospered already tells enough about efficiency. Ayway, it's easier to organize efficiently an economy based on a dozen of stable products with well known necessities than it is to organize one on our times. Also, an ecomomy being efficient does not make it a good one to live under.
- mason240 13y agoWhen using slaves, anything is possible.
- consonants 13y agoCan you provide evidence that a centralized economy is inefficient?
- contingencies 13y agoBureaucrats and the growth of bureaucracy.
- consonants 13y agoCounterpoint: capitalists and the growth of inequality. I find it hard to believe that a group of people who act in complete self interest can or should efficiently and effectively distribute vital resources. See: oil, diamonds, and commodities in general.
- acheron 13y ago"I find it hard to believe that a group of people who act in complete self interest can or should efficiently and effectively distribute vital resources." 1775 called, it wants its understanding of economics back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations
- NelsonMinar 13y agoThe book _1491_ is a great read to learn more about what the Americas were like before the European arrival. Recent archaeology is finding that the societies in the Americas were way more complex and interconnected than most of us understand. http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum...
- agumonkey 13y agoSaw a documentary about Gauls where they reshaped the view on what was said to be a simple civilisation (~hunters) where in fact they had a non trivial economy based on manufacture of goods (amphoras) backed by recent discovery of burried factory remains.
- contingencies 13y agoSounds good... link please!
- agumonkey 13y agoYou're lucky someone put it online http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8S4BbWhayk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8S4BbWhayk Some additional info from the tv channel who broadcasted it http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/047580-000/les-gaulois-au-dela-du-mythe http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/047580-000/les-gaulois-au-dela-d...
- mseebach 13y agoThe secret of the Inca's great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life. Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society. Isn't this just a variant of feudalism?
- samatman 13y agoIt is called Corveé: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee While a part of feudal practice, it is far more ancient and widespread, having been part of Sumerian culture.
- ahomescu1 13y agoIt also sounds a lot like communism.
- consonants 13y agoNot at all. Incan society had a caste system, nobles, royalty, etc. Nobles owned estates and laborers. Workers did not own the means of production.
- ahomescu1 13y agoWell, theoretically, workers own the means of production in communism, but that's now how it happened in practice. In practice, the Party owned everything, and its high ranking members were effectively nobility. Workers in communism were nothing more than indentured servants.
- soperj 13y agoThat seems a best a very bad caricature of what happened in the Soviet Union. What's happening in Communist China now?
- tokenadult 13y ago"This io9 flashback previously ran in January 2012." This note on the submitted article prompted me to look for earlier discussion of the Inca empire through the HN Search tool. This article appears not to have been submitted before, but we have had other discussions here about the Inca empire and its conquest by the Spanish. The submitted article correctly notes that the history of the Inca empire is fragmentary because of a severe lack of written sources. Archeology is a poor substitute for history (relying on actual written records from the time studied) because it is hard to figure out what people were thinking. The rather rapid conquest of the Inca empire by a badly outnumbered group of Spanish explorers surely relied most on the epidemic diseases that the Spaniards inadvertently brought with them, but it appears to have relied as well on dissatisfaction with Inca rule on the part of many Inca subjects. People don't fight hard against invaders if their "home" rulers are dictators--World War II provides other examples of that principle. Maybe the greatest mystery of the Inca empire is that it lasted any length of time at all. The empire collapsed rapidly once a new, tiny group of potential rulers arrived. South America's Andean territories soon became viceroyalties of Spain, far away.
- oarevalo 13y agoActually, Pizarro took advantage that at the time of his arrival at Peru, the Inca's were in a somewhat state of civil war due to the two heirs (Huascar and Atahualpa) of the recently deceased Inca (Huayna Capac) fighting each other.
- s_baby 13y ago>People don't fight hard against invaders if their "home" rulers are dictators--World War II provides other examples of that principle. You don't think the Russians fought hard?
- freehunter 13y agoI assume I have a limited knowledge of WWII history on that front, but from what I was taught in history class, the biggest deterrent of the Nazi invasion of the USSR was the weather. What we learned was that the Russians were invading Germany more than the Germans could invade Russia. Basically the Russians weren't fighting to keep the Nazis from invading, but were focused on a counter-invasion. I could very well be wrong, as I took WWII history in the US (which tends not to focus on European involvement in WWII).
- zeteo 13y agoThe extent to which the Incas did it is remarkable, but historically civil engineering had little to do with markets. The ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Persians etc. pretty much built their infrastructure and monumental buildings with drafted, unpaid labor. The French monarchy, one of the most advanced states in the world, relied on the corvée to build roads up until 1789 [1]. The decisive turn in the situation took place in Holland around the 16th century, when Dutch cities discovered they could build canals and recoup costs by charging moderate usage fees. This system of financing civil engineering, adapted to e.g. turnpikes and later railroads, increasingly became widespread, and displaced earlier arrangements in Western countries during the 18th and 19th centuries. So what would be truly surprising is if the Incas had done it with money. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee#France http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee#France
- jeltz 13y agoAgreed, there is nothing strange about the Incan system. It is one of the oldest forms of taxes.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoHowever I shared the paper's central question which was the complete lack of existence of a trading class. In other cultures there were always traders and markets and points of exchange. Perhaps as a mono-culture the Incans never had to develop such systems (or the need was small enough, as pointed out in the paper, that they did so on a case by case basis).
- jeltz 13y agoOther than the lack of a trading class the economy is very much like the early Egyptian economy, based around the production of food and with taxes extracted in the form of labor and food. My guess for the lack of a trading class is due to too few neighbors to trade with.
- venomsnake 13y agoAnd actually one of the fairest. We all are equally rich in time so requiring labor in equal amount makes sense. Then you can give everyone equal money for their labour and let them trade the surplus goods and services on the free market.
- vijayboyapati 13y agoA comment from a Peruvian friend of mine, who I passed the article onto: "This is incredibly misleading. There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners. The vast majority of people were a form of slave and trapped in basically a completely rigorous caste system. They were a mix of India and NK, ruled by a Mao "god" Inca who had total control of everything. The article gets right that people had to pay tax as labor but in some cases also as a percentage of the food they gathered, and a non-trivial percentage was stored in "tambos" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambo_(Incan_structure) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambo_(Incan_structure)) to support the military and state-controlled trading routes. OTOH the Spanish monarchy was totally evil, purposefully wiping out millions of people and creating basically what amounts of royal satraps in the new world from which to extract cheap/free labor and tons of gold and other wealth. That said, the Incas were also primitive--no real written language and barely a minimum system for tracking amounts and numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu). I took 12 years of Peruvian history and it wasn't until recently that I realized how utterly terrible the Incas were. They were proto Marxists."
- PavlovsCat 13y agoLost me at "Marxists". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism edit: this came out kinda snarky, sorry.. I found all of that very interesting and insightful, just not the very end of the ending.
- dmix 13y agoIt definitely didn't share Marx's original concepts of decentralized states and communal distribution. But almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution. So it's a fair statement, if taken as the commonly held meaning.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoWell, I think the commonly held meaning is nonsense, and that it's commonly held doesn't really change that. "almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution" Then how are any of these an actual implementation of Marxism? There have been implementations of totalitarianism claiming the label of Marxism, sure. You might also said it got co-opted real quick, and that that still reaches into today, when people equate, say, Stalinism with Marxism. I wouldn't even want to guess the ratio of people having a negative opinion about Marx' ideas, and the people who read Marx.
- mikegagnon 13y ago"Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life. Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society." I find it fascinating that this article compares the labor system more to socialism than to slavery.
- drothlis 13y agoIt certainly wasn't socialism, but it wasn't exactly slavery either. The "labor tax" was 2 years of labour (out of your entire life).
- contingencies 13y agoMore like national service as per Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland then?
- consonants 13y agoThe labor system is not at all comparable to socialism. Try feudalism.
- dsego 13y agoNot sure why, but this reminds me of youth work actions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions
- MichaelMoser123 13y agoCentralized states that pretend to be egalitarian need terror so that the peons don't forget to shore the line. Maybe that's why the Inca's had the habit of human sacrifices; (interesting, this seems to have been a common 'feature' of both Aztec and Inca culture) Also without the terror component the Soviet state became stagnant.
- sologoub 13y agoReading this, it doesn't sound all that different from Serfdom in Europe. Essentially, people were tied to the land, and in return the noble provided protection. The main difference seems to be the centrality of supply distribution. With serfdom, the serfs were basically required to work for the lord/noble and then had to also do their own food growing/production to survive. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom) Having a central authority ensuring no-one starves and everyone had all the essentials allowed for much better specialization and efficiency. Other cultures evolved into similar specialization via trade and offered distributed societies. The Inca-style state would have similar limitations to Soviet Union, where all goods that were not produced within its boundaries were virtually unattainable by the common people. This also stifled innovation in areas that the state was not focusing on. Just look at the Soviet consumer car manufacturing sector - an automatic transmission was virtually unheard of until 90s imports started pouring in.
- rrtyyyy 13y agoJust like the Federation
- mistercow 13y agoAnother hypothesis, which is probably mostly wrong but still extremely interesting, is that put forth by Julian Jaynes: that the Incas, and most other early peoples, were not conscious (by Jaynes' very specific definition of "conscious"), but instead were unconscious agents guided by hallucinations, and that attempts to reason about them with modern models of volition and awareness are doomed. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
- bayesianhorse 13y agoI believe the point is the "missing" markets. In the old world markets arise all over the place, using some form of currency, for example cigarettes in prisons, laundry detergent-driven drug market in the US etc. Probably no Incan had gotten around to inventing the concept of token economies yet. I don't actually believe this lack of markets benefited them. It must have been an awkward way to run a society with a couple of thousands of members.
- sinkasapa 13y agoI am not familiar enough with the Incan economy specifically to say whether this lack of internal markets claim is accurate. I do know that the Inca would not have to "invent" markets because there were preexisting markets in the Andean region. In "Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms" Frank Salomon describes pre-Incan trade in the region surrounding Quito. http://www.amazon.com/Native-Lords-Quito-Age-Incas/dp/0521040493 http://www.amazon.com/Native-Lords-Quito-Age-Incas/dp/052104... They would also have been familiar with the primitive currency used by the groups they conquered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe-monies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe-monies Granted, this was in the most recently conquered area of Incan expansion. The blood had hardly dried before the Spanish came but the subjects of the Inca would have been familiar with these concepts. I also think that it wrong to talk about the descendants of these people as though they don't exist any more. Indigenous culture is quite strong and in the Andes. There was a change in power but it wasn't like turning out a light switch. Even the Inca, themselves, (who were really just a noble class) were able to self identify and organize a rebellion in the late 1700's, 200 years after the initial conquest.
- jayseattle 13y agoBitcoins! ...seriously, no one said bitcoins?
- ctdonath 13y agoPerhaps not so strange if religion is taken into account, which the article completely neglects. People will do a great deal if they believe it is for a higher cause - and especially if sacrifice is an ingrained social imperative. Between the society living very close to the edge of survival (no matter how prosperous, they were one season from possible pervasive disaster so everyone's contribution counts), and service to their gods going so far as human sacrifice (societal maintenance deemed so important people are ritualistically killed, instilling devotion to the system), people become quite content living in an abundant theocracy.
- thret 13y agoGuns, Germs & Steel discusses the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire in some detail. Well worth a read. More surprising to me than the lack of money is the fact that they did not have the wheel.
- unhe 13y agoLOL. I dont think is such a mystery. Civilizations dont need money. Although it may seem like an aberration nowadays, it is quite logic to think money isnt necessary. If governments were able to provide jobs in exchange for food, housing, medication, etc... then governments would solve all of their problems from hunger, poverty, and even crime or inequality... but hey, nobody in this world wants to be equal to another person. We always want to have more and more power over others.
- dusklight 13y agoIt is not clear to me from the article and from the brief googling I did, how they came to the conclusion that there was no trading class? What evidence did they use to prove this absence? It seems to me the ruling class of any society works by trading with each other, in promises if not in currency. I don't see how it could work any other way?
- teeja 13y agoPerhaps they were rich in sanity. Unlike the 20th century. (Stalins, Hitlers, nuclear brinkmanship, massive pollution, tens of millions killed in war ...) Sanity alone explains their remarkable success. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Money is a symptom. That and (towards the end) a couple of kings who had absolute power. Like ... Stalin.
- beloch 13y agoMita (taxation by labor) is not that weird really. Think of the most basic form of exchange in a barter society. You show up to a market with potatoes you've grown and leave with bread, pots, etc.. Well, what if you don't have potatoes and want bread? You could offer to chop wood for the baker. Work can be bartered just as easily as goods, and credit can be accrued. We do this all the time, even today. Say your sister helps you move. When she next moves, you're going to feel like a scumbag if you're not there to help her! Some campesino villages in Peru still barter labor this way on a rather large scale. Mita in such communities is a bit like a socially enforced volunteer spirit. People are socially obliged to do things for their community. The Inca empire just took that to a completely different scale! The unusual thing about the Inca is that they preferred to tax labor even from those who produced goods. Potato farmers wouldn't tithe potatoes. They'd spend some of their time working government lands that grew potatoes. The fact that farmers were feeding themselves and the state out of different fields probably had some rather interesting effects.