The Rational Optimist (47 page)

p. 155 ‘Field trials begin in Kenya in 2010 of drought-resistant and insect-resistant maize’. Muthaka, B. 2009. GM maize for local trials.
Daily Nation
(Nairobi), 17 June 2009.

p. 156 ‘For example, modern plant oils and plentiful red meat make for a diet low in omega-3 fatty acids’. Morris, C.E. and Sands, D. 2006. The breeder’s dilemma: resolving the natural conflict between crop production and human nutrition.
Nature Biotechnology
24: 1078-80.

p. 156 ‘The Indian activist Vandana Shiva’. Quoted in Avery, D.T. 2000. What do environmentalists have against golden rice? Center for Global Food Issues, http://www.cgfi.org/materials/articles/2000/mar_7_00.htm. See also www.goldenrice.org for more of the shocking story of opposition to this humanitarian project.

Chapter 5

p. 157 ‘Imports are Christmas morning; exports are January’s MasterCard bill.’ O’Rourke, P.J. 2007.
On The Wealth of Nations
. Atlantic Monthly Press.

p. 157 Death rates from water-related disease graph. Goklany, I. 2009.
Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development
. www.ejsd.org.

p. 158 ‘A modern combine harvester, driven by a single man, can reap enough wheat in a single day to make half a million loaves.’ Half a kilogram of flour per loaf, 3,500 kg per acre, eighty acres per day = 560,000 loaves per day. These are numbers my colleagues achieve on my own farm.

p. 158 ‘a distinctive ‘Ubaid’ style of pottery, clay sickles and house design’. Stein, G.J. and Ozbal, R. 2006. A tale of two Oikumenai: variation in the expansionary dynamics of ‘Ubaid’ and Uruk Mesopotamia. Pp. 356–70 in Stone, E. C. (ed.)
Settlement and Society: Ecology, Urbanism, Trade and Technology in Mesopotamia and Beyond
(Robert McC. Adams Festschrift). Los Angeles, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

p. 159 ‘in the words of the archaeologist Gil Stein’. Stein, G.J. and Ozbal, R. 2006. A tale of two Oikumenai: variation in the expansionary dynamics of ‘Ubaid’ and Uruk Mesopotamia. Pp. 356–70 in: Stone, E. C. (ed.)
Settlement and Society: Ecology, Urbanism, Trade and Technology in Mesopotamia and Beyond
(Robert McC. Adams Festschrift). Los Angeles, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

p. 160 ‘The message those tablets tell is that the market came long before the other appurtenances of civilisation.’ Basu, S., Dickhaut, J.W., Hecht, G., Towry, K.L. and Waymire, G.B. 2007. Recordkeeping alters economic history by promoting reciprocity.
PNAS
106:1009–14.

p. 161 ‘Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.’ Incidentally, I find it strange to recall that my education was utterly dominated by two stories: the Bible’s and Rome’s. Both were disappointing examples of history. One told the story of an obscure, violent and somewhat bigoted tribe and one of its later cults, who sat around gazing at their theological navels for a few thousand years while their fascinating neighbours – the Phoenicians, Philistines, Canaanites, Lydians and Greeks – invented respectively maritime trade, iron, the alphabet, coins and geometry. The other told the story of a barbarically violent people who founded one of the empires that institutionalised the plundering of its commercially minded neighbours, then went on to invent practically nothing in half a millennium and achieve an actual diminution in living standards for its citizens, very nearly extinguishing literacy as it died. I exaggerate, but there are more interesting figures in history than Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar.

p. 161 ‘Unlike hunter-gatherers or herders, farmers faced with taxes have to stay put and pay’. Carneiro, R.L. 1970. A theory of the origin of the state.
Science
169: 733–8.

p. 161 ‘in the words of two modern historians’. Moore, K. and Lewis, D. 2000. Foundations of Corporate Empire.
Financial Times
/Prentice Hall.

p. 162 ‘As Sir Mortimer Wheeler wrote in his autobiography’. Quoted by Sally Greene in 1981, introduction to illustrated edition of
Man Makes Himself
. Childe, V. Gordon. 1956. Pitman Publishing.

p. 162 ‘the archaeologist Shereen Ratnagar concluded’. Ratnagar, S. 2004.
Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age.
Oxford University Press India.

p. 162 ‘great wealth of the Indus cities was generated by trade’. Possehl, G.L. 2002.
The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective.
Rowman AltaMira.

p. 162 ‘the so-called Norte Chico civilisation’. Haas, J. and Creamer, W. 2006. Crucible of Andean civilization: The Peruvian coast from 3000 to 1800
BC
.
Current Anthropology
47:745–75.

pp. 163–4 ‘Intensification of trade came first’. The Chinese case remains unexplored here for the simple reason that the key moment in China, the Longshan culture, remains too poorly known, especially in terms of how much trade occurred.

p. 165 ‘silver-based prices, which fluctuated freely’. Aubet, M.E. 2001.
The Phoenicians and the West
. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.

p. 165 ‘the Uruk word for high priest is the same as the word for accountant’. Childe, V.G. 1956/1981.
Man Makes Himself
. Moonraker Press.

p. 165 ‘merchants from Ashur operated in “karum” enclaves’. Moore, K. and Lewis, D. 2000.
Foundations of Corporate Empire
. Pearson.

p. 165 ‘The profit margin was 100 per cent on tin and 200 per cent on textiles’. Chanda, N. 2007.
Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalisation
. Yale University Press.

p. 166 ‘Such merchants “did not devote themselves to trading in copper and wool because Assyria needed them, but because that trade was a means of obtaining more gold and silver”.’ Aubet, M.E. 2001.
The Phoenicians and the West
. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.

p. 167 ‘a different Phoenician invention, the bireme galley’. Holst, S. 2006.
Phoenicians: Lebanon’s Epic Heritage
. Sierra Sunrise Publishing.

p. 168 ‘“Homer” displays a relentlessly negative attitude to Phoenician traders’. Aubet, M.E. 2001.
The Phoenicians and the West
. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.

p. 168 ‘Tyrian traders founded Gadir, present-day Cadiz, around 750
BC
’. Aubet, M.E. 2001.
The Phoenicians and the West
. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.

p. 169 ‘said a Montagnais trapper to a French missionary in seventeenth-century Canada’. Brook, T. 2008.
Vermeer’s Hat
. Profile Books.

p. 169 ‘When HMS
Dolphin
’s sailors found that a twenty-penny iron nail could buy a sexual encounter on Tahiti in 1767’. Bolyanatz, A. H. 2004.
Pacific Romanticism: Tahiti and the European Imagination
. Greenwood Publishing Group.

p. 170 ‘advanced by David Hume’. This argument goes back to David Hume’s
History of Great Britain
, and has been pursued recently by Douglass North.

p. 170 ‘Miletus, the most successful of the Ionian Greek cities, sat “like a bloated spider” at the junction of four trade routes’. Cunliffe, B. 2001.
The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek
. Penguin.

p. 172 ‘Humanity’s great battle over the last 10,000 years has been the battle against monopoly.’ Kealey, T. 2008.
Sex, Science and Profits
. Random House.

p. 172 ‘The Mauryan empire in India’. Khanna, V. S. 2005.
The Economic History of the Corporate Form in Ancient India
(1 November 2005). Social Sciences Research Network.

p. 173 ‘without question the economic superpower of the day’. Maddison, A. 2006.
The World Economy
. OECD Publishing.

p. 173 ‘wrote Thomas Carney’. Carney, T.F. 1975.
The Shape of the Past
. Coronado Press.

p. 174 ‘Ostia was a trading city as surely as Hong Kong is today’. Moore, K. and Lewis, D. 2000.
Foundations of Corporate Empire
. Pearson.

p. 174 ‘Rome’s continuing prosperity once the republic became an empire may be down at least partly to the “discovery” of India’. Chanda, N. 2007.
Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalisation
. Yale University Press.

p. 176 ‘The predatory expansion of the Carolingian Franks in the eighth century’. Kohn, M. 2008. How and why economies develop and grow: lessons from preindustrial Europe and China. Unpublished manuscript.

p. 177 ‘A dhow that sank off Belitung in Indonesia in
AD
826’. Flecker, M. 2001. A 9th-century Arab or Indian shipwreck in Indonesian waters.
International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
29:199–217.

p. 177 ‘Once the priesthood tightened its grip’. Norberg, J. 2006.
When Man Created the World
. Published in Swedish as
När människan skapade världen
. Timbro.

p. 178 ‘Maghribi traders developed their own rules of contract enforcement and punishment by ostracism’. Greif, A. 2006.
Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 178 ‘a Pisan trader living in north Africa, Fibonacci’. Ferguson, N. 2008.
The Ascent of Money.
Allen Lane.

p. 178 ‘Genoa’s trade with North Africa doubled after an agreement for the protection of merchants was reached’. Chanda, N. 2007.
Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalisation
. Yale University Press.

p. 179 ‘by 1500 Italy’s GDP per capita was 60 per cent higher than the European average’. Maddison, A. 2006.
The World Economy
. OECD Publishing.

p. 179 ‘As late as 1600, European trade with Asia, dominated because of transport costs by luxuries such as spices, was only half the value of the inter-regional European trade in cattle alone’. Kohn, M. 2008. How and why economies develop and grow: lessons from preindustrial Europe and China. Unpublished manuscript.

p. 180 ‘According to Angus Maddison’s estimates’. Maddison, A. 2006.
The World Economy
. OECD Publishing.

p. 181 ‘One of the paradoxical features of modern China is the weakness of a central, would-be authoritarian government.’ Fukuyama, F. 2008.
Los Angeles Times
, 29 April 2008.

p. 181 ‘multi-spindle cotton wheels, hydraulic trip hammers, as well as umbrellas, matches, toothbrushes and playing cards’. Baumol, W. 2002.
The Free-market Innovation Machine
. Princeton University Press.

p. 181 ‘The Black Death’. Durand, J. 1960. The population statistics of China, A.D. 2–1953.
Population Studies
13:209–56.

p. 182 ‘serfdom was effectively restored’. Findlay, R. and O’Rourke, K.H. 2007.
Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy
. Princeton University Press.

p. 182 ‘as Peter Turchin argues following the lead of the medieval geographer Ibn Khaldun’. Turchin, P. 2003.
Historical Dynamics
. Princeton University Press.

p. 182 ‘most clever people still call for government to run more things’. Note that this is also true of the financial crisis of 2008: government mismanagement of housing policy, interest rates and exchange rates bears just as big a responsibility as corporate mismanagement of risk. I wish there was space to expand upon this point, but see the writings of Northcote Parkinson, Mancur Olson, Gordon Tullock and Deepak Lal. It is strange to me that most people assume companies will be imperfect (as they are), but then assume that government agencies will be perfect, which they are not.

p. 182 ‘Not only did the Ming emperors nationalise much of industry and trade, creating state monopolies in salt, iron, tea, alcohol, foreign trade and education’. Landes, D. 1998.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
. Little, Brown.

p. 183 ‘As Etienne Balazs put it’. Balazs, E. quoted in Landes, D. 1998.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
. Little, Brown.

p. 183 ‘The behaviour of Hongwu, the first of the Ming emperors’. Brook, T. 1998.
The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China
. University of California Press.

p. 183 ‘a large Spanish galleon stuffed with silver’. Brook, T. 2008.
Vermeer’s Hat
. Profile Books.

p. 184 ‘said Lactantius’. Quoted in Harper, F.A. 1955. Roots of economic understanding.
The Freeman
vol. 5, issue 11. http://www.thefreeman online.org/columns/roots-of-economic-understanding. pp. 184–5 ‘The man in question, Johann Friedrich Bottger’. Gleason, J. 1998.
The Arcanum
. Bantam Press.