Adam Smith (1723 \u2013 1790) who wrote \u201cThe Wealth of Nations\u201d is still revered today for his views on capitalism.\u00a0 He disagreed with Bacon\u2019s model (based on the evidence of innovation in his own time) and his model can be outlined as:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Adam-Smith-Model-2.png\")
<\/p>\n
That Adam Smith is right and Francis Bacon is wrong is the premise of this book.\u00a0 Kealey also gives some details about Bacon\u2019s life that pretty conclusively prove that Bacon was the biggest tool of the Elizabethan era. \u00a0As Attorney General under Elizabeth I he apparently personally supervised the torture of defendants to elicit confessions.\u00a0 He also back-stabbed his own patron Robert Earl of Essex when it was convenient.\u00a0 Now your knowledge of classic Hollywood films of the thirties will remind you that Bette Davis and Errol Flynn were the eponymous stars of “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.” \u00a0Donald Crisp played Francis Bacon in this epic and history has obviously pronounced its verdict against Bacon with this casting. \u00a0So, I will say no more.<\/p>\n
The last topic for this first post is the Chapter entitled, \u201cResearch and Development in Antiquity.\u201d\u00a0 I am sort of an antiquities fan.\u00a0 All things roman and greek are of interest to me.\u00a0 So I was surprised to find that this chapter opened my eyes to a way of looking at the difference between ancient and modern life.\u00a0 I had often wondered that such intelligent and inquisitive peoples as the Greeks and Romans never moved past primitive muscle powered methods of life into something more dynamic like steam power.\u00a0 After all, Alexandrian science of Ptolemaic Egypt had used steam power to propel toys for the king\u2019s court.\u00a0 Why had they never made the leap to using it to power more useful engines for industry or commerce?\u00a0 I found the answer here.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t apply it because nobody wanted the application.\u00a0 The Macedonian kings of Egypt and the Roman emperors after them employed these geniuses like Archimedes to build toys (or at best design war engines).\u00a0 These royal patrons assembled the brightest minds of the age and lavishly funded their researches into everything from pure mathematical study to astronomy, physics and medicine.\u00a0 They sponsored this research out of love of knowledge and vanity to out-compete their rival kingdoms. \u00a0But practical commercial applications were not desired. \u00a0Designing manufacturing improvements would merely displace slaves who tilled the fields and rowed the galleys and dug in the mines.\u00a0 The king and emperor had more than enough slaves to make him as rich as anyone (even a god\/emperor) could want to be.<\/p>\n
This chapter demonstrated that technological innovation only occurred away from empires.\u00a0 So, the earlier small city states of Phoenicia and old Greece were a hot bed of innovation.\u00a0 Here were found merchant cities that traded with all the corners of the Mediterranean and invented the convenient alphabet rather than the sacred hieroglyphics and coined gold and silver as a way of spurring trade.\u00a0 Ship building and navigation were important technologies and other innovations were learned from all corners of the sea.\u00a0 The use of iron, improvements in the plow were learned during their trading activities.\u00a0 And they were capitalistic states.\u00a0 They were in the poorest of farming lands and they survived (and greatly prospered) by trade.\u00a0 But as soon as Greece discovered its strength and consolidated into larger states and expanded into the larger world, slave labor became the answer to all its problems.\u00a0 And once Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, the template for how an empire would be run was established.\u00a0 From that point it was basically the same system as all the Fertile Crescent empires that had come before and innovation was a problem not a solution.\u00a0 Plow your field, give a third to the temple, a third to the King and hope the new barbarians don\u2019t burn the town down when they come through. \u00a0\u00a0The Romans followed the same pattern.\u00a0 Early independence and innovation (although much less ambitious than the Greeks) followed by imperial control of all facets of life with precious little need for innovation because of the realities of a slave labor economy.<\/p>\n
I will quote from the last two paragraphs of the chapter to summarize.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe empire collapsed not for a lack of Hellenistic science \u2013 there was plenty of that \u2013 but because it abandoned capitalism.\u00a0 It was a plunder empire not a market empire.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fall of the Graeco-Roman hegemony teaches that the government funding of academic science will not generate useful technology in the absence of an appropriate capitalist economy.\u201d<\/p>\n
This guy Kealey is pretty smart.\u00a0 He answered something that\u2019s puzzled me for many years. \u00a0Why those intelligent folks never invented the steam engine. \u00a0It also shows the fallacy of that Star Trek episode \u201cBread and Circuses.\u201d\u00a0 The Romans would never have had automobiles.\u00a0 But they would have had TV eventually.\u00a0 It would keep the slaves happy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now, during the week I toil on the engineering plantation so when I\u2019m released from bondage every Friday the last thing I want to do<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,5,237,6],"tags":[68,144,147,145,146],"class_list":["post-866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-current-events","category-reviews","category-trump","tag-book-review","tag-economics","tag-government-funding","tag-innovation","tag-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n