My excellent Conversation with Kim Bowes

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.

Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim’s not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome’s unraveling, and much more.

Here is an excerpt with some economics:

COWEN: Say, when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they’re just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?

BOWES: They’re not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It’s just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they’re doing this. What I think is most interesting and what we’re all still wrestling with is, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver.

Then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care, and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs—that’s a little bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, and so people are willing to just suck it up and deal, and they keep using it.

There is inflation, and inflation, we can now tell, thanks to some great papyri from Egypt, trends upwards very slowly over the first century, the second century, the third century, but it’s not proportional to the amount of silver that’s being pulled out of the coins. People basically still have trust in their coinage, which really shows the degree to which the state has convinced people, simply by supporting ordinary people’s coin use, that the coins work and that they’re going to back their coins, even though they’re slightly pulling the silver out.

COWEN: Why was there so much decentralized money lending? You would think that banks would have economies of scale, offer better terms, just like I wouldn’t borrow money from my friends, I would go to the bank. Why doesn’t the Roman Empire evolve that way?

BOWES: The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a really big state that ought to do things that big states do. The Roman big state is really a mask for an empire of friends and family. You borrow money from friends and family. Banks, such as they exist, are really nothing more than friends and family, so even when you have actual banks, they tend to be largely constituted by a single family.

The difference that you’re making between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is much less clear-cut in a world in which the bank is your family, or the bank is a family that is friends of yours. It’s not that Romans don’t use banks, they do use banks. We can see the most often wealthier Romans using banks. It’s a lot harder to see the 90 percent using banks, and they seem to more often default to the immediate circle of people that they know, which again, it’s not such a huge distinction. In a world in which there’s no FDIC, in which the bank isn’t guaranteed and protected by the state in the way in which our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is much less clear.

Interesting and engaging throughout, definitely recommended.  You can buy Kim’s excellent book here.

Thursday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Kasparov analyzes the rise of Sindarov.

2. Podcast on Houellebecq’s Submission.  With transcript.

3. “A majority of Australian children under age 16 still use social media apps despite a ban implemented in December, according to new research.

Sixty-one percent of Australian children between the ages of 12 and 15 told researchers from a prominent UK foundation and an Australian youth research agency that they can still access accounts on major platforms just as they did before the ban was put in place.”  Link here.

4. “If anything, nationalists are fighting to reassure pro-EU voters. Marine Le Pen has softened her line on Brussels over the years to remain electorally competitive in France. Giorgia Meloni has mostly co-operated with the EU during her three-and-a-half surprising years as a hard-right Italian prime minister. Both will have watched events in Hungary over the weekend and felt themselves vindicated. Of all the varied reasons for Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat, the public’s desire to mend relations with the EU was prominent. The election winner Péter Magyar, no kind of liberal, and in fact a former Orbán man, favours a “return to Europe”.” (Ganesh in the FT)

5. Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia.  And a useful thread.

6. Alex Imas on the evolution of employment with AI.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, 1969-2025

by  Tyler Cowen

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics has been awarded annually since 1969. Who wins the prize is a topic of much interest and tracks the whole course of the academic discipline over the last 57 years. Explaining who wins the prize in any given year is a complex process, which involves the subtle endogeneity of the choice of the field and the individual(s) who should be honoured. Citations, track records, networks of past winners, institutional factors along with field rotation and Economic Prize Committee composition may all play a role. A dynamic sample involving a changing stock of would-be candidates along with a moving flow—both into and out of the sample—add complexities to the modelling. We find robust evidence that the Nobel Prize rotates in a semi-regular way between the fields of economics. Earlier awards were for a single paper, later ones for a body of work. Networks do not matter, but having a Nobel student or co-author does. There is some evidence that the personal preferences of Committee members had an effect on either field or individual winner. The Committee’s decisions changed after Lindbeck retired.

That is from a new paper by Peter J. Dolton and Richard S.J. Tol.  Via Niclas Berggren.

The Raphael show at the NYC Met

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is self-recommending if there ever was such a thing.  What I found so striking is how many mini-exhibits were embedded in the broader show.  Those include:

1. The early large pieces from Colonna and Castello — how many of you are going to get there to see them in situ?

2. A mini-exhibit of works from Perugino, Raphael’s teacher and mentor, and a wonderful painter in his own right.

3. A small set of knockout Leonardo drawings.

4. Two Roman sculptures that showed some background influences behind Raphael’s work.

5. Three full-size “derivations” based upon the Vatican tapestries, from 16th century Flemish studios.

6. Plenty of light-sensitive drawings, which are not displayed much or are held in very scattered locales.

It is rare to have so much original content in a single exhibit, and of such high quality, and unrelated to previous exhibits one might have seen.  This was an event.

The Alba Madonna, in DC’s National Gallery, still strikes me as Raphael’s best creation.

My main beef: the opening panel of explanation for the show was just plain, flat out stupid, and started by referring to Raphael as “One of the most important influencers of all time…”, followed by nothing of any substance.

This exhibit needs no endorsement from me, but ultimately it did not elevate Raphael into the tier of my very very favorite painters.  He is at the top for beauty and charm, but very few of his paintings confound me in say the way that a top Leonardo or Velazquez might.  Perhaps the Castiglione portrait from the Louvre would qualify there, but the others not.  His was nonetheless a remarkable achievement, and this is very likely the best view of it you will get in this lifetime.

It was crowded, but on a Monday not intolerable and I had good views of the art works most of the time.

Rescind Davis Bacon

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Davis-Bacon Act requires that workers on federally funded construction projects be paid at least the “prevailing wage” for their trade in the local area.

Mike Schmidt, Director of the CHIPS Program Office, has an excellent piece on how Davis-Bacon impacted the CHIPS program. My initial understanding was that it simply required paying construction workers more—an unnecessary transfer from taxpayers to a politically favored group, but not one that would impede efficiency. I was wrong.

Start with the complexity. Davis-Bacon’s prevailing wage isn’t a simple minimum wage: plumbers are not electricians are not fitters, and the required rate varies by locale. The Department of Labor maintains a list of more than 130,000 (!) wage rates to implement it.

That’s complicated enough. But it gets worse. Some firms building fabs used their own employees rather than contractors—and Davis-Bacon applies regardless but it covers only the portion of time an employee spends on “construction” work:

[A]pplying Davis-Bacon to company employees rather than contractors proved to be a big hurdle. Davis-Bacon required tracking every hour each employee spent on covered construction activities — by trade classification, with a different prevailing wage applying to each — and paying a wage differential for that portion of their work as distinct from fab operations work or non-Davis-Bacon construction work. The company also relied heavily on profit-sharing (where a portion of employees’ pay was tied to the firm’s profits) and Davis-Bacon’s guaranteed wage floor was difficult to reconcile with a pay structure that was inherently variable. Moreover, Davis-Bacon has a statutory requirement to pay wages weekly, meaning the company would need to change its payroll systems for a portion of the pay for a portion of its workforce.

Thus, DB required that two salaried employee with equal salaries and profit-sharing plans be paid differentially depending on whether one of them did “construction” work. This created internal strife.

Davis-Bacon was passed in 1931, when a carpenter was a carpenter. How does it apply to building a semiconductor factory?

The construction tasks involved in building and modernizing semiconductor fabs don’t always map cleanly onto DOL’s Davis-Bacon classifications, so applicants must go through a construction plan line-by-line to determine which rate applies to which activity. In traditional Davis-Bacon contexts this is less burdensome because contractors know the system and have processes in place. But semiconductor construction was a novel application, and all of our applicants — and most of their contractors — were navigating Davis-Bacon for the first time.

For large recipients, the administrative cost of this work was real but manageable relative to project scale: they could hire consultants, procure software systems, and build internal compliance capacity….

Perhaps the biggest fiasco involved timing. The government wanted firms to move quickly and encouraged them to break ground before the Act’s rules were finalized. But when Davis-Bacon was added to the Act it required that the firms pay the prevailing wage *retroactively*:

The financial and operational implications of retroactive application were significant. A leading-edge project might have 10,000–12,000 construction workers on site at peak, with a rotating workforce totaling perhaps 30,000 individuals over the project’s life. Working through 300-plus subcontractors across multiple tiers, retroactive application could require identifying wages paid to 20,000 workers who had already cycled off the project, determining what each worker should have been paid under Davis-Bacon, and paying the difference — resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in additional cost.

The retroactive pay exposes the law’s true nature. Firms and workers had already struck voluntary agreements; the work was done, the wages paid. No one can pretend this has anything to do with incentives. Workers received a pure windfall (“DB Christmas!”) for one reason only: “construction workers” are a politically favored class. Janitors and scientists got nothing extra.

Moreover, a large fraction of the cost wasn’t the higher wages at all—it was compliance. Firms likely spent as much reworking payroll systems and hunting down thousands of former workers in this Byzantine classification system as they spent on the wage premiums themselves. Every dollar transferred to workers may have cost firms—and ultimately taxpayers—two dollars or more. A very leaky bucket indeed.

If the Trump administration is serious about cutting regulatory costs and reviving industrial competitiveness, Davis-Bacon is an obvious target. It delivers little to workers, plenty to lawyers and consultants, and a bill to taxpayers for both. Rescind it.

The Venetian empire and the Mongols (modeling Marco Polo)

by  Tyler Cowen in

In contrast, the Polo brothers who went to Asia, Niccolo the elder and Matteo the elder, amassed wealth both in tangible and intangible assets.  It was Marco “the voyager” who benefited most from the family business, both as the heir to substantial portions of the family estate, and as a shrewd and cautious — and perhaps tight-fisted — private investor.  His will and inventory of his assets reveal a considerable amount of cash, real estate, and valuables.  Marco Polo traveled for business even after he returned to Venice, but not for long.  After 1300, although he continued to invest in various enterprises, it appears that Marco stayed in Venice.  Perhaps this was due to his advancing age (he turned fifty in 1304), although his energy was most likely taken up by overseeing his interests and local investments, and abo ve all in publicity for his book.  He commissioned numerous copies to be distributed to powerful and influential people.

And:

However, Marco had great difficulty leaving the empire.  The Polos required the khan’s consent not only to be given official leave, but above all to have adequate protection.  As Marco recounts, despite thee riches they had accumulated, they were not free to leave.  By then, the khan had also grown old, and they were concerned that he might die, leaving their fate in the hands of his successor, who may not have granted the necessary permits.  Marco’s account reveals that the three Polos had a subservient relationship with the khan, as they were in the khan’s service and depended on him.  He continually rejected their pleas to return to Venice, as he “loved them too much” and could not accept the idea that they should leave him.

That is all from the new and noteworthy Venice and the Mongols: The Eurasian Exchange that Transformed the Medieval World, by Nicola di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici.

Are we underestimating youth well-being?

by  Tyler Cowen

Although there is growing evidence that the subjective wellbeing among the young declined in recent years, the evidence is not consistent across surveys. We examine the relationship between age and various measures of wellbeing and illbeing across three major surveys – the Gallup World Poll (GWP, Global Minds (GM) and the Global Flourishing Survey (GFS). The GWP is conducted via face-to-face and telephone surveys; GM surveys are web-based; and GFS uses both telephone and web-based surveys. We focus on 23 countries appearing in all three surveys. The clearest evidence that wellbeing rises with age and illbeing declines with age comes from the web-based surveys in both GM and GFS. The age profiles look very different when surveys are conducted by telephone: the higher rates of illbeing among the young are far less apparent in these surveys. Because survey mode is not randomly assigned, we cannot be sure differences in age profiles of wellbeing and illbeing are causally affected by survey mode. Selection into survey mode, both across and within country, plus differential non-response by survey across the age range, may be playing a role. However, the evidence indicates very different age patterns in wellbeing and illbeing emerge across different survey modes.

That is from a new NBER working paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson.

That was then, this is now

by  Tyler Cowen in

But despite the pitiful state into which the country had descended, the major outside powers, Russian and the Ottoman Empire, did not intervene as they had in 1722-1725.  It was partly that they were busy elsewhere, and surely also that the outcome of their previous attempts had not encouraged them to repeat the experiment.

That is from Michael Axworthy’s A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, a good general introduction to the history of the country.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Where is it dangerous to be a pedestrian in NYC? And city-owned grocery stores for NYC? (NYT)

2. Is Mississippi running out of liquor?

3. Four classic Chinese texts and their relevance.

4. Redux post from 1/28.

5. Seb Krier.

6. The penguin-tracking culture that is Kyoto, Japan.

7. The Economist will be using bylines and putting people in front of the camera (NYT).

8. Marginal Literary Revolution.

9. New Rebecca Lowe and Henry Oliver podcast.

Moonsteading

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Charles Miller, a space entrepreneur and head of the Trump transition team on NASA, has a good piece proposing a Lunar Development Authority:

I propose the development of an international Lunar Development Authority (LDA), chartered and led by the United States, that would serve as a quasi-governmental regulator. The base on the Moon would be managed as a master-planned infrastructure development project, with NASA as the key strategic partner, emphasizing commercial methods and an investor mindset to drive economic viability in both the near and long term. The LDA would prioritize development of lunar resources to lower costs and serve customers, and treat the United States government and the governments of our allies as anchor tenant customers. The LDA would leverage public-private partnerships and cooperation among both governmental and private industry tenants from many countries to finance and develop lunar infrastructure in a commercial manner.

The model is New York’s famous Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which imposed a simple, legible order on what was then mostly undeveloped land. The plan coordinated future development around a grid with standardized lots and clearly demarcated spaces for public and private infrastructure. Miller proposes a similar sequence for the Moon: first survey, standards, shared infrastructure, and a governing authority; then private tenants, resource extraction, construction, and finance.

The main legal obstacle is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which paired a ban on weapons of mass destruction in space with “anti-colonial” restrictions on national appropriation. The OST, however, doesn’t prohibit economic activity per se—the target was national land grabs, not commercial development. The more recent Artemis Accords address this directly:

The ability to extract and utilize resources on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids is critical to support safe and sustainable space exploration and development.

The Artemis Accords reinforce that space resource extraction and utilization can and should be executed in a manner that complies with the Outer Space Treaty and in support of safe and sustainable space activities.

The Homesteading Act granted title rights in return for development. The likely path forward on the moon reverses that sequence, development first, title later. Ownership of extracted resources is already widely accepted, next will come toleration of exclusive operational zones, then long-duration concessions, then transferable development rights around fixed infrastructure.

The OST may delay ordinary land markets, but it cannot repeal the deeper economic fact that settlement happens only when builders can keep enough of what they create. TANSTAAFL.