The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [80]
The discovery of rich silver ores at Laurion in Attica in the 480s BC propelled the experimental democracy at Athens to the status of a regional economic superpower, not least by allowing it to finance a navy with which to defeat the Persians; but Athens too was primus inter pares. The Greek world depended crucially on finding gains from trade: grain from the Crimea, saffron from Libya and metals from Sicily swapped for olive oil from the Aegean itself. Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveries. Pythagoras probably got his theorem from a student of Thales the Milesian who learnt geometry on trade excursions to Egypt. We would never have heard of Pericles, Socrates or Aeschylus had there not been tens of thousands of slaves toiling underground at Laurion and tens of thousands of customers for Athenian goods all over the Mediterranean.
Yet as soon as Greece was unified into an empire by a thug – Philip of Macedon in 338 BC – it lost its edge. Had his son Alexander’s empire lasted, it would undoubtedly have become as commercially and intellectually inert as its Persian predecessor. But because the empire fragmented on Alexander’s death, parts of it were reborn as independent city states that lived off trade, most notably Alexandria in Egypt, which reached a third of a million people living in a state of famous wealth under the comparatively benign rule of the book-collecting Ptolemy III. That wealth was based on new roads to bring cash crops of cotton, wine, grain and papyrus within reach of the river Nile for export.
This is not to say that democratic city states are the only places where economic progress can occur, but it is to discern a pattern. Plainly, there is something beneficial to the growth of the division of labour when governments are limited (though not so weak that there is widespread piracy), republican or fragmented. The chief reason is surely that strong governments are, by definition, monopolies and monopolies always grow complacent, stagnant and self-serving. Monarchs love monopolies because where they cannot keep them to themselves, they can sell them, grant them to favourites and tax them. They also fall for the perpetual fallacy that they can make business work more efficiently if they plan it rather than allow and encourage it to evolve. The scientist and historian Terence Kealey points out that entrepreneurs are rational and if they find that wealth can more easily be stolen than created, then they will steal it: ‘Humanity’s great battle over the last 10,000 years has been the battle against monopoly.’
This is not disproved by the success of two empires from around the beginning of the Christian era: both Rome and India realised the benefits of economic unification before they managed to endure the disasters of political unification. The Mauryan empire in India seems to have harvested the prosperity of the Ganges valley to combine an imperial monarchy with expanding trade. It was ruled at its zenith in 250 BC by Asoka, a warrior who turned into a Buddhist pacifist once he had won (funny, that) and was as economically benign a head of state as you could wish. He built roads and waterways to encourage the movement of goods, established a common currency and opened maritime trade routes with China, south-east Asia and the Middle East, sparking an export-led boom in which cotton and silk textiles played a prominent part. Trade was carried on almost entirely by private firms (sreni) of a recognisably corporate kind; taxation, though extensive, was fairly administered. There were remarkable scientific advances, not least the invention of zero and the decimal system and the accurate calculation of pi. Asoka’s empire disintegrated before it had become totalitarian, and its legacy was impressive: for the next few centuries the Indian subcontinent was both