The last paragraph is a reference to Cato the Elder.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est</a><p>"As a third and final action point, I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed."
And speaking of Cato and economic complexity:<p><i>As his income grew, Cato also became a regular investor in commercial lending. Although a law from 218 BC banned senators from engaging directly in commercial shipping, Cato formed partnerships of fifty investors that backed the commercial operations of fifty ships. He fronted all of the initial capital and then lent money to investors that they could each use to buy a share in the enterprise. Cato himself entrusted one share to a freed slave who acted as his agent. He then profited from the trading activities as well as the interest on these loans, while following the letter of the law and limiting his direct exposure in case the cargo was lost.</i>
I'll just leave this here: I think the destruction of Carthage was a great catastrophe. Both for the world from a humanitarian perspective and for Rome which squandered a lot of economic generativity.
If Rome had stayed a local power, could a divided Mediterranean have been even more dynamic than a unified empire? Perhaps rivalry between regional powers would have inspired greater human achievement. There certainly would have been wars, but not necessarily more than those the Roman Empire actually fought.
And now, Moskva delenda est.
Russia has been embarrassingly bad at conquering Ukraine, but it's truly incredible how thoroughly their talking points have conquered conservatives in the USA. They frame anything other than complete capitulation to Russian invasion as crazed aggression against Russia, as if Russia didn't send its conquering army out of its borders and couldn't withdraw that army at any time and be left alone.
><i>"They frame anything other than complete capitulation to Russian invasion as crazed aggression against Russia..."</i><p>This has been common among many groups for a long time; I recall the GWB administration proposing a missile interceptor system based in Eastern Europe in the mid-oughts, and Democratic Party members in congress opposed it as 'provocative'. The (Liberal) Canadian government of the time opposed that as well as the Alaska based 'shield' as being 'aggressive'.<p>I suspect this has something to do with (politically self-identified) disempowered groups generally wanting to 'shoot down' initiatives, but the Trump administration seems to have a different motivation.
Think about what you can see on a political level and now think what you don't see towards children education where Trump started his work in 2017
I'm curious if that third factor is just geography
Carthago delenda est.
They really do a lot to correct for bias, but is it enough?<p>I would suspect that a prosperous and thereby complex economy also has more resource to discover or document inscriptions. While they talk about researcher bias, they do not really mitigate this.<p>And yes, I searched the article and the extensive additional material.<p>Still a valuable contribution.
So they estimate economic complexity by the number of discovered Latin documents or inscriptions. Wasn't Greek prevalent in the East?
Which is why the title explicitly names the Western Roman Empire, and the article briefly discusses data issues with Greek inscriptions near the end.
No, based on the professions named within the inscriptions. If a province has relatively many professions that are rare for the WRE, then it's considered more complex. See the paper for the actual estimates, the map in the article does not show the complexity estimation
Wanted to read more on this
For current info see <a href="https://oec.world/" rel="nofollow">https://oec.world/</a><p><a href="https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/" rel="nofollow">https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/</a>
Server died already?
impressive
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