Aristotle and Finley

1
Aristotle and Finley

• J. Bradford DeLong
• UC Berkeley

2
Readings

• Moses Finley (1965), "Technical Innovation and
  Economic Progress in the Ancient World", Economic
  History Review NS 181, pp. 29-45
  http//www.jstor.org/stable/2591872
• Sir M.I. Finley
• Moses Israel Finkelstein

3
TFP Growth

• Why did TFP growth used to be so terribly,
  pitifully slow?

4
Aristotle

• Aristotle of Stagira was not an idiot. For two
  thousand years people called him "the
  philosopheras if there was only one

5
Aristotle on Acquisition

• A general account has now been given of the
  various forms of acquisition to consider them
  minutely, and in detail, might be useful for
  practical purposes but to dwell long upon them
  would be in poor taste.... There are books on
  these subjects by several writers
• The natural art of acquisition has a boundary
  fixed, just as there is in the other arts for
  the instruments of any art are never
  unlimited...
• There are two sorts of wealth-getting... one is
  a part of household management, the other is
  retail trade the former necessary and honorable,
  while that which consists in exchange is justly
  censured for it is unnatural, and a mode by
  which men gain from one another

6
Aristotle on Economics

• Shepherds are '...the laziest of men... lead an
  idle life... get their subsistence without
  trouble from tame animals...?
• Aristotle's story of Thales of Miletos and his
  corner of the olive-press-rental market on Khios
  Aristotle is saying we could get rich (or
  richer) with little effort, but that is not an
  important or proper thing to do
• Note Aristotle's "limit" is probably the
  full-time year-round labor of at least fifty
  people, at today's OECD wage levels some
  3,000,000 a year in one sense very, very few of
  us will ever come near to Aristotle's point of
  satiation in another sense every single one of
  us has already gone far beyond Aristotle's limit

7
Aristotle on Slavery

• If every instrument could accomplish its own
  work, obeying or anticipating the will of others,
  like the statues of Daedalus, or the catering
  serving carts of Hephaestus... the shuttle would
  weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a
  hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want
  servants, nor masters slaves....
• But is there any one thus intended by nature to
  be a slave, and for whom such a condition is
  expedient and right?... There is no difficulty in
  answering this question... that some should rule
  and others be ruled is a thing not only
  necessary, but expedient from the hour of their
  birth, some are marked out for subjection, others
  for rule...

8
Ancient Aint Primitive, Is It?

• Could we teach
• Themistokles or Augustus much about politics?
• Homer much about writing poetry?
• Gaius Julius Caesar of Leonidas much about
  generalship?
• Sophokles much about drama?
• Phryne much about presentation-of-self-as-celebrit
  y?
• Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simon much
  about painting ceilings?
• Praxiteles much about sculpture?
• Johann Sebastian Bach much about music?
• Yet technological progress and economics seem to
  be differentareas where we have a serious edge.
  Why?

9
What Does Finley Have to Say?

• Assertions about responsiveness to fashion and
  imperatives of craftsmanship
• Lots of incremental improvements
• Little wide dissemination
• Intellectually (or scientifically) speaking,
  there was a basis for more technological
  advancein productionthan was actually made
• Archimedes' practical inventions, I hasten to
  add, were military and were made only under the
  extraordinary and irresistible stimulus of the
  siege of his native Syracuse by the Romans.
• it is this unanimity which justifies the
  argument from silence
• Why did neither the Ptolemies nor the Sicilian
  tyrants nor the Roman emperors systematically (or
  even spasmodically) turn their engineers to the
  search for higher productivity, at least in those
  sectors of the economy which produced the royal
  revenues? Whatever the answer, it was not lack of
  capital (or lack of authority). Funds, manpower
  and technical skills were made available (and
  wasted) in vast and ever increasing amounts for
  roads, public buildings, water supply, drainage
  and other amenities, but not for production. Of
  course, the effort to increase productivity might
  have proved unsuccessful - but it was never even
  attempted

10
What Does Finley Have to Say? II

• It is unnecessary to examine the economic
  history of the later Roman Empire in detail to
  make the point, with which no one disagrees, that
  neither technique nor productivity nor economic
  rationalism made an advance in those final
  centuries of antiquity. It is, necessary,
  however, to ask once more why, when circumstances
  seemed to demand progress on those lines, the
  only solutions to the problems of labour and
  production were bureaucratic pressures, greater
  tax exploitation, and a general debasement of the
  status (and perhaps the standards) of the free
  elements in the productive population. The
  answers, I suggest, are those I pointed to
  earlier. Servile and other forms of dependent
  labour were very profitable. Such changes as
  occurred in the Roman Empire in the position of
  the wealthy were political, not economic, and
  therefore they had no significant incentive to
  alter the productive arrangements. In the end, it
  was the military and political breakdown of the
  Empire which drove the western aristocracy back
  onto their estates and to the beginnings of a
  manorial system

11
Growth Conundrums Again

• Why was worldwide TFP growth so terribly,
  pitifully slow before MEG?
• Finley says culture
• Other possibilities
• 7 billion heads are better than 5 million
• Standing on the shoulders of giants
• Incentives to innovate rather than plunder
  (William Gates vs. William Marshall)

12
Aristotle Stray Notes

• Artistotle and Polanyi Karl Polanyi thought
  Aristotle's economic naivete was because the
  commercial economy was new. He was surely wrong
  it was rather something that Aristotle as a
  Hellenic aristocrat would have been embarrassed
  to be caught thinking seriously about..