Kyle Harper

There's financial markets.

They have the most advanced financial markets in the world before the 17th or 18th century.

There's impersonal financial intermediation.

It's not like you have to know me and come ask me for a loan if you want to go build a ship and go trade something.

There are banks that take money from depositors.

And, you know, keep balances and then lend out to debtors who want to go and do entrepreneurial things.

So they have like so much potential, but there's just no – there's no spark.

You never see these sustained productivity increases.

And I would just say ultimately it's because the Romans don't have technology improvements that are really self-sustaining.

And the reason they don't have that is because they don't have science.

Their science sucks.

I'm offending some of my colleagues, I'm sure.

Galen is great.

Ptolemy is incredible.

I love plenty of the elders' encyclopedia.

But if you look in the big picture, the contribution that the Roman Empire makes to our knowledge of how nature works and then the applied technology that comes out of that –

is really pathetic for 500, 600 years.

And so they go as far as you can with Smithian advantages to market exchange and specialization, to banks and finance, but without the kind of creative destruction of new technologies that improve productivity.

You're eventually going to run out of improvements.

That's exactly what I was going to say.