1. From Adam Davidson in the NYT magazine:
At the city gate, Assur-idi ran into a younger acquaintance, Sharrum-Adad, who said he was heading on the same journey. He offered to take the older man’s donkeys with him and ship the profits back. The two struck a hurried agreement and wrote it up, though they forgot to record some details. Later, Sharrum-Adad claimed he never knew how many textiles he had been given.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
This apparently took place in the 19th century, BC. Long-time readers will know that I have taken the view that archaelogists are finding evidence of plunder and calling it evidence of trade. But this example (read the whole story) shows that I am wrong about that.
The main focus of the article is the gravity model of trade, which says that trade between any two entities (cities, countries) is positively related to their size in terms of population and negatively related to the distance between them.
2. Josiah Ober says,
The key to unlocking the puzzling success of the Greek city-state ecology is economic specialization and exchange. Specialization was based on developing and exploiting a local advantage, relative to other producers, in the production of some valued good or service. . .
the costs of transactions were driven down by continuous institutional innovations, notably by the development and rapid spread of silver coinage as a reliable exchange medium; the dissemination of common standards for weights and measures; the creation of market regulations and officials to enforce them; and increasingly sophisticated systems of law and legal mechanisms for dispute resolution.
The whole piece is interesting.
Last week I visited the Ancient Agora with my wife. In the museum there we saw:
-Products from trade: send out pottery, receive silver and gold
-Currency
-Government building with free usage of standardized weights
-Tool for randomized jury or judge selection
-Voting tiles, including for the exile of politicians (that sounds like a dangerous game)
-Trophies from a war with Sparta
Thanks for pointing me to this fascinating article/book.
Unsurprisingly, I like the author’s stance as it shows the vital intertwining of politics and the economy, an important aspect of understanding society that libertarians love to ignore, at the cost of a distorted notion of freedom.
Though a complete amateur as for Ancient Greece, the vast literature that I have read on the subject matter leaves me somewhat sceptical as to the extent and continuity of wealth in Ancient Greece that Ober seems to insinuate. His story strikes me as a bit too smooth and idealising.
http://redstateeclectic.typepad.com/redstate_commentary/2015/03/the-inventiion-of-the-modern-public.html
But the basic story line is fascinating and may well represent an important scholarly advance.
“The historically distinctive Greek approach to citizenship and political order was the key differentiator that made the Greek efflorescence distinctive in pre-modern history. It drove specialization and continuous innovation through the establishment of civic rights, aligned the interests of a large class of people who ruled and were ruled over in turn and encouraged the free exchange of information. The emergence of a new approach to politics is what propelled Hellas to the heights of accomplishment celebrated by Lord Byron.” (quoted from the Ober interview to which Arnold links).
Ober’s approach may help libertarians overcome their unwillingness to extend the idea of spontaneous order from its “economistic ghetto” to social life in general, including the spontaneous order of politics and the state and its interaction with the narrower Hayekian spontaneous order.
Also, and perhaps of particular interest to Arnold, it is advisable to think through the concepts of division of labour and specialisation as naturally comprising politics and the state. Highly populous and productive societies are predicated on a fairly efficient political and governmental division of labour making possible and supporting (the beginnings of) civil society.
No modern markets, no modern economy without a division of labour that encloses politics and the state.
For more, see
http://redstateeclectic.typepad.com/redstate_commentary/2014/08/questions.html
and
http://redstateeclectic.typepad.com/redstate_commentary/2015/06/spontaneous-order-of-politics-and-the-state.html
You have said nothing persuasive yet.
States win the monopoly on sovereign violence. That’s all.
And they win because someone has to win. And the state wins because we call,the winner of the competition “the state.”
We may describe one among many aspects of the state as the possession of a monopoly of coercion. Mind you, that “monopoly” consists of a bundle of competencies that change all the time and are subject to acute competition among powerful and resourceful parties trying to add or subtract to that bundle. In some places in the US, the state is not even able to exercise its right to carry out capital punishment – because it is subject to severe contestation on that central matter of “monopolistic” coercion.
More generally, I cannot convince myself of the state being a uniform entity with a uniform utility function against which it might make sense to speak of the state as “the winner of the competition.”
Also, the state is often tasked with facilitative projects rather than the pursuit of a final aim. The state is not supposed to decide an election but facilitate its implementation – in fact, one wonders, if the state is to be conceived of as a uniform winner-entity, what political party does “the state” belong to?
The state consists of individuals, factions, departments etc that represent differing and often competing notions of success.
Large and important parts of the state are specifically set up to accommodate competitive and compromise-building processes, including players with very different goals, values and notions of success.
The state is, among its many functions, a set of institutions with the purpose of having the most diverse opinions and interests compete among each other; it is itself open to permanent contestation and competition for temporary governance – on countless levels down to municipal affairs.
Personally, I find it hard to conceive of the modern liberal state as anything but a means for preventing total or permanent victory by any one person, group or institution.
The Achilles heel of libertarianism is (1) preconception according to which the state is evil, dysfunctional and destructive, (2) an attendant attitude according to which “we know all about the state,” and (3) a practice according to which one does not bother to look carefully at the complex phenomenon of the state with its innumerable surprises and subtleties – and its outstanding significance for freedom.
Is the same true for all states?
You have said nothing persuasive yet.