3 ms·

This is lots of fun to read, because it's good to keep a perspective on history. That said, it's not at all clear that the next several thousand years will be

This is lots of fun to read, because it's good to keep a perspective on history. That said, it's not at all clear that the next several thousand years will be analogous to the last several thousand. We have a rather different starting point. The key difference is mass production. A society without printing can come close to losing the works of Plato: every copy of Plato cost weeks, months, or years of a laborer's salary to make. [1] So, even at the height of Greek and Roman civilization, there were a limited number of copies of Plato's work. There were also a limited number of educated people who could read those works -- not because people were stupid, but because reading material was sufficiently expensive that it wasn't worthwhile for the majority of people to master its use. Meanwhile, Plato himself was seen by perhaps only a few thousand people in his lifetime, at most. There were no planes or trains. There were no photographs or recordings. Hence, there weren't a lot of eyewitnesses to spread tales of Plato's genius. Inefficient as they were, the written books did most of that work. Compare that to the atom bomb. I never got to see one in person, but I've seen them a hundred times in photographs and films. Literally half the people alive today have seen the atom bomb in one way or another. And the stories of those who encountered them directly can be heard by everyone, who then compose stories which mention the bomb, which themselves get mass-produced. There are probably more action figures of Godzilla in existence today than there ever were copies of Plato's works. --- [1] I was recently listening to Brad Delong's economic history course from Berkeley, and at one point he tried to explain the value of a book in medieval times. A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars -- that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the writing by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or three personal books.

jwhite 17y ago
> There are probably more action figures of Godzilla in existence today than there ever were copies of Plato's works. And plastic doesn't break down at nearly the same rate as parchment or papyrus. You make good points.
hughprime 17y ago
A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars -- that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the writing by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or three personal books. Without detracting from your actual point, is that really tens of thousands of dollars' worth? Paper isn't all that hard to make, binding is just a matter of sewing, and copying a book out in longhand is, what, a few man-weeks' worth?
- philwelch 17y ago
  You forget that copying a book out in longhand required the services of someone who was literate, which at one point was a rare skill. A few man-weeks of highly educated skilled labor was and is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    One interesting implication of this logic is that an ancient society could lower the price of books by achieving a critical mass of literate people. Because a literate person can spawn other literate people, and these literate people can in turn be set to work copying books which the entire community can then read, loaning them back and forth hundreds or thousands of times... This explains how the ancient scholars managed to get anything done in the first place. It's all about the density. This is why the Library of Alexandria had so much stronger a reputation than the Library of Congress does today: The Library of Congress is great, but since each of the works in it is a printed work with potentially many other extant copies, it's not the same level of unique resource. Obviously it didn't do you as much good to train a literate person if they then journeyed away to a distance where you could neither lend them your books nor borrow theirs. Not only would that person not contribute to your local library, but they would also be forced to spend a great deal of their precious education time copying out the two or three vital books that would sustain them in their isolation: The Bible, plus maybe one of the classical legal or medical treatises. You tended to end up with the same handful of books distributed over the landscape. Which suggests that the key problem which put the "dark" in the "dark ages" was not some kind of barbarian hatred of learning: It was the collapse of Roman civic society and the spreading of scholars thinly over the landscape. When the central authority with the power to collect taxes from an entire empire, drag those taxes to Rome, and use them to support a sizeable class of co-located educated people collapsed, so did the intellectual standard. Also explains why the centers of higher learning became associated with the Church: The Duke of Normandy could only tax Normandy, but the Church could collect tithes across political boundaries and pool them. Application of this kind of logic to, say, Wikipedia or the open source movement is left as an exercise for the reader.

jwhite 17y ago

> There are probably more action figures of Godzilla in existence today than there ever were copies of Plato's works. And plastic doesn't break down at nearly the same rate as parchment or papyrus. You make good points.

hughprime 17y ago

A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars -- that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the writing by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or three personal books. Without detracting from your actual point, is that really tens of thousands of dollars' worth? Paper isn't all that hard to make, binding is just a matter of sewing, and copying a book out in longhand is, what, a few man-weeks' worth?

philwelch 17y ago
You forget that copying a book out in longhand required the services of someone who was literate, which at one point was a rare skill. A few man-weeks of highly educated skilled labor was and is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  One interesting implication of this logic is that an ancient society could lower the price of books by achieving a critical mass of literate people. Because a literate person can spawn other literate people, and these literate people can in turn be set to work copying books which the entire community can then read, loaning them back and forth hundreds or thousands of times... This explains how the ancient scholars managed to get anything done in the first place. It's all about the density. This is why the Library of Alexandria had so much stronger a reputation than the Library of Congress does today: The Library of Congress is great, but since each of the works in it is a printed work with potentially many other extant copies, it's not the same level of unique resource. Obviously it didn't do you as much good to train a literate person if they then journeyed away to a distance where you could neither lend them your books nor borrow theirs. Not only would that person not contribute to your local library, but they would also be forced to spend a great deal of their precious education time copying out the two or three vital books that would sustain them in their isolation: The Bible, plus maybe one of the classical legal or medical treatises. You tended to end up with the same handful of books distributed over the landscape. Which suggests that the key problem which put the "dark" in the "dark ages" was not some kind of barbarian hatred of learning: It was the collapse of Roman civic society and the spreading of scholars thinly over the landscape. When the central authority with the power to collect taxes from an entire empire, drag those taxes to Rome, and use them to support a sizeable class of co-located educated people collapsed, so did the intellectual standard. Also explains why the centers of higher learning became associated with the Church: The Duke of Normandy could only tax Normandy, but the Church could collect tithes across political boundaries and pool them. Application of this kind of logic to, say, Wikipedia or the open source movement is left as an exercise for the reader.