Paul Cooper

speaker

254 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 5 Jun

Paul Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · How Civilizations Die - with Paul Cooper · 5 Jun 2026 podcast

This means that the Spartan army is never able to leave the city for very long.

It's never able to stop defending from these constant threatened rebellions from this hell-up class.

So this is one example in which inequality becomes a great weakening agent in a society, preventing them from engaging in long-term planning, from feeding their population without immense resentment building.

And there are many examples throughout history of this.

Yeah, the Han Dynasty in China is a fascinating example.

There's an increasing concentration of power in the imperial palace in Luoyang.

And

The two great power blocks inside the palace are the eunuch attendants and the dowager empresses, the mothers of both the emperor and previous emperors who have passed on.

Their power and prestige depended completely on their sons, their progeny, and how close they were to the imperial throne.

So this meant a constant jockeying for power among these rivals.

Dowagers would poison the sons of other empresses in order to get them off the throne and get their son just one step closer to inheriting it.

In this way, the imperial palace of China ran red with blood.

Eunuchs served in the palace because...

Essentially, this was the place where the emperor lived with his women.

And, I mean, A, it was thought to be safer to castrate these men in order to prevent them from entangling themselves with palace women, shall we say.

But it was also a way of ensuring that they would have no aspiration for the throne.

It was thought that someone who was unable to have children would have less desire to topple the emperor, do a palace coup.

But what we see in these centuries is a power contest between the dowager empresses and the eunuchs, with the emperor being essentially a puppet, a kind of game piece that's being passed between them.

And for this reason, the emperor was very often a child.

The emperor Shan was actually a six-month-old baby who was crowned emperor while still in his crib.

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