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The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

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Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#11

Post by marcosdumay »

mathattack wrote: post #7
kirab wrote: post #2

Seems like a centralized economy does not have to be inefficient after all.

The article doesn't make many comments about efficiency. Achieving an empire through forced labor is different than doing it efficiently.

The hard to cultivate terrain where the Inca prospered already tells enough about efficiency.

Ayway, it's easier to organize efficiently an economy based on a dozen of stable products with well known necessities than it is to organize one on our times.

Also, an ecomomy being efficient does not make it a good one to live under.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#12

Post by eloisius »

Demiurge wrote: post #9
mathattack wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article doesn't make many comments about efficiency. Achieving an empire through forced labor is different than doing it efficiently.

Could you say labor is forced if you have a choice between starvation and labor? If such is the case, I wish I wasn't forced to work for money in this society and then exchange it for goods and seek out the most favorable deal.

There's a big difference between being compelled by the laws of nature and being forced by the bidding of another man.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#14

Post by vijayboyapati »

A comment from a Peruvian friend of mine, who I passed the article onto:

"This is incredibly misleading. There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners. The vast majority of people were a form of slave and trapped in basically a completely rigorous caste system. They were a mix of India and NK, ruled by a Mao "god" Inca who had total control of everything. The article gets right that people had to pay tax as labor but in some cases also as a percentage of the food they gathered, and a non-trivial percentage was stored in "tambos" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambo_(Incan_structure)) to support the military and state-controlled trading routes.

OTOH the Spanish monarchy was totally evil, purposefully wiping out millions of people and creating basically what amounts of royal satraps in the new world from which to extract cheap/free labor and tons of gold and other wealth.

That said, the Incas were also primitive--no real written language and barely a minimum system for tracking amounts and numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu).

I took 12 years of Peruvian history and it wasn't until recently that I realized how utterly terrible the Incas were. They were proto Marxists."

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#15

Post by rayiner »

eloisius wrote: post #12
Demiurge wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you say labor is forced if you have a choice between starvation and labor? If such is the case, I wish I wasn't forced to work for money in this society and then exchange it for goods and seek out the most favorable deal.

There's a big difference between being compelled by the laws of nature and being forced by the bidding of another man.

The situation with the Incas was that, without the force coordination necessary to conduct agriculture in the mountains, everyone would die. Where does that fall on the nature versus man spectrum?

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#16

Post by mikegagnon »

"Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life. Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society."

I find it fascinating that this article compares the labor system more to socialism than to slavery.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#17

Post by oarevalo »

tokenadult wrote: post #6

"This io9 flashback previously ran in January 2012." This note on the submitted article prompted me to look for earlier discussion of the Inca empire through the HN Search tool. This article appears not to have been submitted before, but we have had other discussions here about the Inca empire and its conquest by the Spanish. The submitted article correctly notes that the history of the Inca empire is fragmentary bec…

Actually, Pizarro took advantage that at the time of his arrival at Peru, the Inca's were in a somewhat state of civil war due to the two heirs (Huascar and Atahualpa) of the recently deceased Inca (Huayna Capac) fighting each other.

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#18

Post by eloisius »

rayiner wrote: post #15
eloisius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between being compelled by the laws of nature and being forced by the bidding of another man.

The situation with the Incas was that, without the force coordination necessary to conduct agriculture in the mountains, everyone would die. Where does that fall on the nature versus man spectrum?

Oh, no argument against that really. It still falls under the compelled by another man side of the spectrum, but I've long held the belief that collectivist forms of society were necessary in more primitive times.

Only with technological progress are we capable of stronger individualism.

I only mean to answer the question, "Could you say labor is forced if you have a choice between starvation and labor?"

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#19

Post by drothlis »

mikegagnon wrote: post #16

"Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life. Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society." I find it fascinating that this article compares the labor system more to socialism than to slavery.

It certainly wasn't socialism, but it wasn't exactly slavery either. The "labor tax" was 2 years of labour (out of your entire life).

Re: The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

#20

Post by s_baby »

tokenadult wrote: post #6

"This io9 flashback previously ran in January 2012." This note on the submitted article prompted me to look for earlier discussion of the Inca empire through the HN Search tool. This article appears not to have been submitted before, but we have had other discussions here about the Inca empire and its conquest by the Spanish. The submitted article correctly notes that the history of the Inca empire is fragmentary bec…

>People don't fight hard against invaders if their "home" rulers are dictators--World War II provides other examples of that principle.

You don't think the Russians fought hard?

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