'Chiefs, Thieves, and Priests'

Science writer Matt Ridley on the causes of poverty and prosperity

Ronald Bailey from the February 2009 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Ridley: That’s right. [University of California at Irvine historian] Kenneth Pomeranz’s answer to that is very straightforward: The coal was in Shanxi in Inner Mongolia in the far northwest. Those areas got hit very soon after Marco Polo was there by a peculiar combination of barbarians and plague. It was hit much harder than the rest of China and was totally depopulated. When China revived as an economy, it was a long way away from the coal, so it had a wood-based iron industry, for example on the Yangtze, which was impossibly far from the coal mines in the far northwest.

The north of England happened to have a coal field that was near the surface and near navigable water. Remember, you cannot transport anything by bulk in the 18th century unless it’s within a very short distance of water. It happened to have a huge demand on its doorstep too.

The fossil fuel industry itself did not get much more efficient. A miner in the early 20th century is using a pony and a lamp and a pick ax like he was in the 18th century, and the product he’s producing is not a lot cheaper. But it’s not more expensive, and it’s hugely larger in volume.

reason: What institutional environment favors progress?

Ridley: It’s very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you’ve got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. That’s what happens in west Asia around 50,000 years ago: the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.

The only institution that really counts is trust, if you like. And something’s got to allow that to build. Property rights are just another expression of trust, aren’t they? I trust you to deliver this property to me. I trust somebody else to allow me to keep this property if I acquire it from you.

But human beings are spectacularly good at destroying trust-generating institutions. They do this through three creatures: chiefs, thieves, and priests.

Chiefs think, “I’m in charge, I own everything, I’m taking over, I’m going to tell everyone how to do it, and I’m going to confiscate property whenever I feel like it.” That’s what happens again and again in the Bronze Age. You get a perfectly good trading diaspora and somebody turns it into an empire.

A classic example is the Chinese retreat in the 1400s, 1500s. China got rich and technologically sophisticated around the year 1000 A.D. That’s when it’s working at its best.

Interestingly, it’s just come out of a period when it’s not unified. Once you’re unified, people keep imposing monopolies and saying there’s only one way of doing things and you’ve got to do it this way. Whereas when you’re fragmented, as Europe remained throughout this period, people can move from one polity to another until they find one they like.

If you want a recipe for how to shut down an economy, just read what the early Ming emperors did. They nationalized foreign trade. They forbade population movements within the country, so villagers weren’t allowed to migrate to towns. They forbade merchants from trading on their own account without specific permission to do specific things. You had to actually register your inventories with the imperial bureaucrats every month, that kind of thing. And they did the usual idiotic thing of building walls, invading Vietnam.

Thieves—one of the reasons for the growth of the Arab civilization in the seventh and eighth centuries must be the fact that the Red Sea was increasingly infested with pirates. It became increasingly difficult to trade with India. Byzantium was having a real problem doing it, and the Arabs had come up with a great new technology for crossing the desert called the camel train. So the rule of law to prevent thievery is also important; but the rule of too much law, to allow chiefs to take everything, is equally a risk.

Priests—well, I must admit I don’t think one can necessarily blame religion for shutting down trust, trade, and exchange. But there’s little doubt that it didn’t help in the Middle Ages, surely. I won’t go further than that.

reason: They did try to adjust prices in the marketplace. Whether that actually had an effect I don’t know.

Ridley: Usury laws and that sort of thing. That’s exactly right.

Comments

|1.7.09 @ 1:10PM|#

He says, "Priests-well, I must admit I don't think one can necessarily blame religion for shutting down trust, trade, and exchange. But there's little doubt that it didn't help in the Middle Ages, surely. I won't go further than that."

So... he just used the word 'priests' in the title of his book because it made the title look better and a bit catchier-sounding? And maybe because it's OK to smear the priest class these days?

That's really crass.

Franklin Harris|1.7.09 @ 1:26PM|#

No. If Ridley had wanted to smear priests, he would have used the synonym "boy-buggering frauds."

|1.7.09 @ 1:42PM|#

I think the "Hit & Run" article is titled "Chiefs, Thieves and Priests", not Ridley's book(s).

|1.7.09 @ 1:45PM|#

Kris is right.

|1.7.09 @ 4:11PM|#

Sorry, I thought 'boy-buggering fraud' was a synonym for 'Massachusettes Congressman'.

My apologies to Mr. Ridley. I guess Mr. Bailey is the one who is crass for grouping thieves, priests and a crappy football team from Kansas City.

BlueBook|1.7.09 @ 7:43PM|#

I think chiefs, thieves and priests all have the same impact on an economy, they just go about it in different ways.

Kolohe|1.7.09 @ 8:12PM|#

"Chiefs, Thieves and Priests" would be a great name for the new book, though, if it covers the themes in this interview. If I was Ridley's publisher, I'd pay off Bailey for the rights to it.

What I'm still trying to get my head around, though, is the passage on how increasing population density leads to a reduction in the division of labor. Specifically this passage:

"at a certain point the population density gets too high for people to be able to generate a surplus of consumption income to support trade and specialization by others, and you have to go back to being self-sufficient."

I am not understanding how this works as an *economic* principle. Now, it makes perfect sense as a socio-political principle - namely, what he talks about in other parts of the interview regarding 'trust'. Once you get to a certain population, where your next meal comes from likely becomes more uncertain, causing you to retreat into self-sufficiency as an insurance policy. But I don't understand how his mechanism of 'insufficient surplus income' operates differently than straight up pre-industrial maluthusian mechanisms - a distinction he makes.

The only other quibble is that while the 'demand side' part is important to specialization and economic growth, he seems to entirely discount the 'supply side'. For instance in his 'mango slicer' parable, it would also have been likely for the man to invent a mango slicing machine if he's in a forest full of mangos - even if he and his town are the only ones that are going to use it. The benefit of globalization, is that, in theory at least, those Mango Machinists are able now to expand their comparative advantage into the entire world. (Incidently, describing this mechanism is how Krugman won his nobel prize)

Guy Montag|1.7.09 @ 10:20PM|#

Ron,

Why did Reason use a picture of you from 20 years ago for this story?

|1.8.09 @ 4:04AM|#

[Ridley]:... Priests-well, I must admit I don't think one can necessarily blame religion for shutting down trust, trade, and exchange. But there's little doubt that it didn't help in the Middle Ages, surely. I won't go further than that.

reason: They did try to adjust prices in the marketplace. Whether that actually had an effect I don't know.

Ridley: Usury laws and that sort of thing. That's exactly right.

What the ...? Yeah, that's just really bizarre. I can't figure out why "priests" were even mentioned, except that maybe somebody doesn't like them.

It's as if the title of the article were "Statism, Misinformation and Snakes" and ...

BAILEY: So the greatest threats to American liberty right now are statism, mis-education, and snakes, right? Explain.

RIDLEY: Right. See, a pervasive statist philosophy [blah, blah, explains persuasively].

And the fact that many Americans are poorly informed means that they don't understand how liberty works and [blah, blah, explains persuasively].

As for snakes ... well, I must admit, I don't think you can necessarily blame snakes for endangering American liberty. But they certainly aren't helping much, that's for sure. I won't go further than that.

BAILEY: Poisonous snakes do sometimes bite people who are pro-liberty. Whether that actually has any effect on the struggle for liberty, I don't know.

RIDLEY: Yes -- see, snake venom attacks the central nervous system, which makes it hard to think about liberty. That's exactly right.

****************************

It's just ... bizarre.

Guy Montag|1.8.09 @ 6:56AM|#

Stevo,

Snakes were probably featured on many early flags of independence because of this. Perhaps the Reason foundation will fund a research study?

BlueBook|1.8.09 @ 7:27PM|#

Snakes are far more totalitarian than is generally known, but the evidence of this is suppressed by the influential pro-ophidian lobby.

Jeremy|1.13.09 @ 4:24PM|#

Well, here on Reason it seems that you have to bash religion in equal proportion to thieves and totalitarians.

Usury laws? Wow, that's a stretch.

How exactly did the priesthood hurt the economy during the Middle Ages?

By establishing the university system?
By preserving nearly all of the ancient writings of the greeks and romans that we have today?
By preserving such technologies as irrigation, and writing?
By promoting the idea of an ordered universe that obeys laws of nature (which paved the way to the scientific method)?
By creating an international banking system (the Templars) that stretched from England to the Middle East?

Okay, we all know that Reason mag hates religion, but come on, at least when the title of your book blames Priests, along with Thieves, for the destruction of the economy, come up with at least ONE example. Even one as lame as usury laws.

Nathan Bowers|1.16.09 @ 9:14PM|#

Re: "Priests"

Monks that kept to themselves making beer and manuscripts were great, but the Church was mostly about transferring wealth and power to itself.

Today's Islamic extremist clerics count as priests and they certainly are on the wrong side of classical liberalism.

Religion + Power = Suck