Welcome to my Substack and hopefully the first of many posts. The purpose of this Substack is to write up reflections on a variety of topics in economic history, including How the World Became Rich, my recent book with Jared Rubin. Expect book reviews and reflections on various topics I am teaching or writing about.
This is an interesting summary, I'll have to check out this book!
Although I feel we ought not be to harsh on Aurelius for his failings. How can expect a government to fight pandemics when they had only the faintest concept of how disease spread? Even if they had known, the Roman state was tiny by modern standards. Would it have even had the capacity to do anything if they had wanted to? Today it's easy to criticize Roman price controls, but economics as a field did not exist at the time. So how were they supposed to know?
Something that stood out to me reading Meditations was the strong sense of fatalism and a recognition of our own limitations. I sometimes hear counterfactuals like what if the Romans had an industrial revolution. But I do not think the knowledge or institutions existed to create such a thing, and building that capacity necessarily took a very long time. Perhaps the romance in the narrative of Marcus Aurelius the stoic is that the grand sweep of history makes even great men look small.
This is an interesting summary, I'll have to check out this book!
Although I feel we ought not be to harsh on Aurelius for his failings. How can expect a government to fight pandemics when they had only the faintest concept of how disease spread? Even if they had known, the Roman state was tiny by modern standards. Would it have even had the capacity to do anything if they had wanted to? Today it's easy to criticize Roman price controls, but economics as a field did not exist at the time. So how were they supposed to know?
Something that stood out to me reading Meditations was the strong sense of fatalism and a recognition of our own limitations. I sometimes hear counterfactuals like what if the Romans had an industrial revolution. But I do not think the knowledge or institutions existed to create such a thing, and building that capacity necessarily took a very long time. Perhaps the romance in the narrative of Marcus Aurelius the stoic is that the grand sweep of history makes even great men look small.