Kyle Harper

And we can think of the inputs to an economy are going to be capital, labor, and ideas.

And what the Romans – they've got people.

They have some investment.

But like they just –

They don't have technology.

They don't have ideas.

It's a late Iron Age civilization.

And I do think there's productivity growth, and that productivity growth comes from markets, from trade, where you get comparative advantage.

In Egypt, I'm really good at growing wheat.

You can make glass in Syria, and then we'll trade.

And the urbanization of the Roman world certainly facilitates that.

Cities are these sort of like hubs of productivity and exchange.

And there's some technology.

I mean the Romans – if you look really, really hard over like five or six centuries, there's certainly like economies of scale where the production process and manufacturing is sort of moved from artisanal to sort of industrial scale.

But there's not really – there's no takeoff because they don't have –

They don't have research and engineering that drives continuous productivity gains.

So I think they go like precociously far in a pre-industrial setting where you take trade really far.

They have good institutions in terms of –

There's strong property rights.

There's relatively reliable contract enforcement.