Stanford scholar debunks beliefs about economic growth in ancient Greece | Hacker News Reader

Stanford scholar debunks beliefs about economic growth in ancient Greece

news.stanford.edu

46 pointsbenbreen11 comments

I have to question what variety of serious classical scholar would form the opinion that ancient Greek society had little to no economic growth. The archaeology should show the massive expansion of the city-states between the Archaic period and the Hellenic. We have historical accounts of numerous expansionist city-states that founded overseas colonies stretching from the Crimea, to Italy, to the south of France. Navies of hundreds and thousands of warships, and numerous wrecks of traders carrying goods from all around the Mediterranean. Excavations of sites that housed factories for mass-production of pottery. The sheer expense entailed in fielding thousands of citizen-soldiers (and later professional mercenaries), kitted out in thirty or forty pounds of bronze arms and armor, while at the same time constructing monumental architecture.

Well, maybe. Or maybe they had a flourishing of conquest, slavery, and inequality. That would also lead to an increase in treasure hordes.

Like the Romans! Although, their economy should have/would have collapsed like the Romans when the pickins became slim. Or so I would imagine?

War is also a great reason to horde. The History of the Peloponnesian War talks about people burying their money in hopes the the conquering army won't find it. Then you can go back and retrieve it later.

This practice was widespread in WWII. German families buried their belongings before going West. A lot of silverware is still buried, and occasionally found by construction teams.

Is a slave/conquest/plunder economy any less an economy?

We shouldn't confuse "strong economy" with "moral economy".

"Ober realized that the massive Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek City-States (2005) could be used to get answers for some of his questions. However, it was in the form of an encyclopedia, with no searchable data, graphs or tables.

"Over several years, Ober enlisted the help of a group of graduate and undergraduate students to digitize the inventory of data, such as population numbers and urbanization levels, into a machine-readable form."

This sounds like a colossal waste of resources. Presumably, a book published in 2005 is already digitized somewhere (the author or the publisher would be a good guess), and getting structured data out of it is just a matter of writing a few simple extractors. I would hate to be the Stanford student paying good money to do the menial work described.

I think what they mean is not that they didn't have the text available digitally, rather that the text is a collection of essays and there was no way to automatically pull out data they needed.

On reflection, I realize that I didn't have any particularly clear beliefs about the matter. If asked, I would have said that they often had strong economies based agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and trade. And as somebody else says, plunder, and the trade in slaves among other items.

tl;dr

Free people equals growth. Property rights are critical.

Although i think he draws the wrong conclusion from hoarding currency. His scenario only happens during massive deflation when money outstrips goods in terms of value.

"Free people equals growth. Property rights are critical."

Most of human history proves this false. For thousands of years, the biggest economies were the biggest slave economies. If you want to, you can cherry-pick a small handful of countries, and then cherry-pick a small number of decades from their history, and then conclude that freedom equals growth. But you'd be deluding yourself with your cherry-picked data.

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