Luís M. A. Bettencourt

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816 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Luís M. A. Bettencourt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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in the 1500s.

And of course, pre-Columbian people had cities.

And so the idea is that this is sort of an independent experiment because the people that came to the Americas did not have cities.

That's the idea.

They were hunter-gatherers.

So they invented cities.

independently.

They couldn't have copied them from Eurasia or Africa.

So basically, we had a colleague called Scott Ortman, who's an archaeologist, anthropologist.

He had a very good survey of the cities of Mexico before they got built up by Mexico City and so on.

And so we tested that idea.

And again, we get the same number.

What is interesting.

So I should qualify that in that it's easier to measure spatial things because they live there.

They're in archaeology.

But we struggle to find what are the equivalent of GDP or wages.

Partly actually because the Aztecs didn't have money proper.

They used cocoa beans and cloth and so on.

So what the heck were they doing?

But remember that we think that this is actually expressing general social capacity and rhythms of things.

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