Hey You're Doing A Great Job, Just Remember: A Semicolon Can Be Used To Combine Two Sentences Where You

Saw this in my Roman economics book and I just had to sit there stunned for a moment. The fastest growing economy in the 1600s hit 0.2%. For comparison, the average country's growth last year was 2.7% (in real GDP), or thirteen times as much. A huge portion of that is thanks to improvements in human capital: public schools, healthcare, improved access to nutrition, and social safety nets. Another big part, the rate of technological progress, increases in proportion to human capital. I suspect that reduced prevalence of war also plays a role.

Like shit, man, if I were a rational capitalist, I should want higher taxes if the money would go to public education, mental health and addiction recovery programs, low-income assistance, and universal healthcare. I should be more anti-war than the goddamn Pope. The slight increase in my tax rate would be plenty offset by the improved skills and productivity of my workers, the disposable income of my customers, and decreases in my personal cost of healthcare and education.

But that's a rational, impartial capitalist. Someone who isn't beholden to shareholders, or trying to win votes. One of the weirdest things in economics is how individuals trying to do what's profitable for themselves can produce less profitable outcomes for everyone, including themselves.

(From "Human Capital and Economic Growth" by Richard Saller, in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel.)

And here is the most devastating fact of Frank's posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: we know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don't want to hear it.

The line most often quoted from Frank's diary are her famous words, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." These words are "inspiring," by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank's hiding place, in her writings, in her "legacy." It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being "truly good at heart" before meeting people who weren't. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren't.

Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writings. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.

We know this, because there is no shortage of writings from victims and survivors who chronicled this fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents have achieved anything like Frank's diary's fame. Those that have come close have only done so by observing those same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don't insult their persecutors The work that came closest to achieving Frank's international fame might be Elie Wiesel's Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank's diary, recounting the tortures of a fifteen-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Was Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story told in Night, but it exploded with rage against his family's murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version under the new title La Nuit—a work that repositioned the young survivor's rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how this society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame G[-]d. This approach earned Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as, years later, selection for Oprah's Book Club, the American epitome of grace. It did not, however, make teenage girls read his book in Japan, the way they read Frank's. For that he would have had to hide much, much more.

from "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew" in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn, pp 9–10

do yall know about this

Nothing retains its own form; but nature, the great renewer, ever makes up forms from other forms. Be sure there's nothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form. What we call birth is but a beginning to be other than what one was before; and death is but cessation of a former state. Though, perchance, things may shift from there to here and here to there, still do all things in their sum total remain unchanged.

Metamorphoses

Ovid

The number one phrase I have adopted into my lexicon from ACD Sherlock Holmes is all the times Watson says “I cudgeled my brains” when he’s trying and failing to think through a mystery. Huge mood, deeply relatable, I too spend far too much time cudgeling my brains with no real result

normalest guy ever 👍

These are amazing — and shockingly accurate. Did you know there’s a “Bechdel test” for female scientist biographies?

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Notes on "The Contribution of Economics" by Peter Temín, in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel:

There are two main purposes of this article. First, to argue that economic theory is applicable to the classical world. Second, to introduce a few economic ideas that classicists and historians may find useful in their work.

I gotta be honest, I'm not a fan of Temín's writing style. Usually, I can overlook that, but in an essay about abstract concepts aimed at non-specialists, I think clarity and conciseness matter more. Several parts of this were hard for me to follow, and I like economics.

Temín might have some...interesting ideas elsewhere about monetary policy and the Great Depression, and in this article he's oddly accepting of the original Malthusian model. These points by themselves do not necessarily mean he is unreliable, or a crackpot, or politically motivated. It's also possible that the Wikipedia article is wrong. But economics is a controversial and politically charged field, so I try to be alert for biased sources.

In short, I don't know whether I can automatically trust Temín's claims about the classical world the way I would trust most authors in a Cambridge-published anthology. (I am also biased because I prefer Keynesian economics, which contradict the views Wiki attributed to Temín.)

So, what is Temín actually claiming?

First, he argues that the Roman world did operate according to competitive market forces, in a similar way that modern markets do. I actually think this is a very solid claim. Our written and material evidence seems to back it up.

Temín describes how supply and demand curves work, how comparative advantage could enable Rome and her colonies to both become wealthier through trade, how technological innovation improved productivity, and how incomes could rise and fall in response to plagues, peace, and wars. Most of his explanations here are normal, useful concepts explained in a rather dense way.

His explanation of Malthusian economics is...not wrong, or irrelevant, but I found it concerning that he didn't include the limitations or criticisms of the Malthusian model. It may be applicable to the Roman economy, I don't know, but I feel like you need to keep such claims very narrow and within a specific context.

He briefly mentions of Babylonian commodity prices exhibiting random walks a la modern stocks - see Temín, P. (2002) “Price behavior in ancient Babylon,” Explorations in Economic History 39: 46–60.

He also says wheat markets in the late republic exhibited competition that suggests the land was not being consolidated by large latifundia until the imperial era - see Rosenstein, N. (2008) “Aristocrats and agriculture in the Middle and Late Republic,” Journal of Roman Studies 98: 1–26.

I'm including the citations here because these are "HOLY SHIT"-level claims if you're interested in the Gracchi brothers or efficient market theory, but Temín zips past them and goes back to talking about Econ 101 material. I gotta check these out later!

On the whole, a mildly interesting article. But if you're a classics or history major who needs a crash course in economics, grab The Cartoon Introduction to Economics instead.