the decline of their political rights, economic growth
likewise declined.
A remarkable thing about new technologies in the
Roman period is that their creation and spread seem to
have been driven by the state. This is good news, until the
government decides that it is not interested in technological
development—an all-too-common occurrence due to the
fear of creative destruction. The great Roman writer Pliny
the Elder relates the following story. During the reign of the
emperor Tiberius, a man invented
unbreakable glass and
went to the emperor anticipating that he would get a great
reward. He demonstrated his invention, and Tiberius asked
him if he had told anyone else about it. When the man
replied no, Tiberius had the man dragged away and killed,
“lest gold be reduced to the value of mud.” There are two
interesting things about this story. First, the man went to
Tiberius in the first place for a reward, rather than setting
himself up in business and making a profit by selling the
glass. This shows the role of the Roman government in
controlling technology. Second, Tiberius was happy to
destroy the innovation because
of the adverse economic
effects it would have had. This is the fear of the economic
effects of creative destruction.
There is also direct evidence from the period of the
Empire of the fear of the political consequences of creative
destruction. Suetonius tells how the emperor Vespasian,
who ruled between
AD
69 and 79, was approached by a
man who had invented a device for transporting columns to
the Capitol, the citadel of Rome, at a relatively small cost.
Columns were large, heavy, and very difficult to transport.
Moving them to Rome from the mines where they were
made involved the labor of thousands of people,
at great
expense to the government. Vespasian did not kill the man,
but he also refused to use the innovation, declaring, “How
will it be possible for me to feed the populace?” Again an
inventor came to the government. Perhaps this was more
natural than with the unbreakable glass, as the Roman
government was most heavily involved with column mining
and transportation. Again the innovation was turned down
because of the threat of creative destruction, not so much
because of its economic impact, but because of fear of
political creative destruction. Vespasian was concerned
that unless he kept the people
happy and under control it
would be politically destabilizing. The Roman plebeians
had to be kept busy and pliant, so it was good to have jobs
to give them, such as moving columns about. This
complemented the bread and circuses, which were also
dispensed for free to keep the population content. It is
perhaps telling that both of these examples came soon
after the collapse of the Republic. The Roman emperors
had far more power to block change than the Roman rulers
during the Republic.
Another important reason for the lack of technological
innovation was the prevalence of slavery. As the territories
Romans
controlled expanded, vast numbers were
enslaved, often being brought back to Italy to work on large
estates. Many citizens in Rome did not need to work: they
lived off the handouts from the government. Where was
innovation to come from? We have argued that innovation
comes from new people with new ideas, developing new
solutions to old problems. In Rome the people doing the
producing were slaves and, later, semi-servile
coloni
with
few
incentives to innovate, since it was their masters, not
they, who stood to benefit from any innovation. As we will
see many times in this book, economies based on the
repression of labor and systems such as slavery and
serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the
ancient world to the modern era. In the United States, for
example, the northern states took part in the Industrial
Revolution, not the South. Of
course slavery and serfdom
created huge wealth for those who owned the slaves and
controlled the serfs, but it did not create technological
innovation or prosperity for society.
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