Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

io9.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 153 posts

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

#31

Post by tokenadult »

s_baby wrote: post #20
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?

I had Ukraine in mind as one outstanding example. For some parts of the territory Japan invaded, too, the local people thought at first that maybe the invaders would be better rulers than their previous rulers.

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

#32

Post by ahomescu1 »

mseebach wrote: post #4

The secret of the Inca's great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. 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. Isn't this just a variant of feudalism?

It also sounds a lot like communism.

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

#33

Post by dhughes »

user9756 wrote: post #28
zeteo wrote: post #10

The extent to which the Incas did it is remarkable, but historically civil engineering had little to do with markets. The ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Persians etc. pretty much built their infrastructure and monumental buildings with drafted, unpaid labor. The French monarchy, one of the most advanced states in the world, relied on the corvée to build roads up until 1789 [1]. The decisive turn in the situation took…

Actually I remember a documentary were it stated that the Persians paid men and women for their skills working on projects. I can't remember the name of the documentary (probably from the discovery channel). A quick google search - http://hsc.csu.edu.au/ancient_history/societies/near_east/pe... And - "Men, women and children worked in ancient Persia to support a diverse economy. Workers were paid in wine and grain, w…

> skilled laborers paid more than unskilled, and supervisors paid more than workers. Men were paid slightly more than women, but female supervisors were paid more than the men working under them. Young women received maternity leave and were paid money for each child they had."

It makes sense, people were paid for their ability to add to society. Men paid more possibly due to their greater strength; carry more, build more faster and women for having children.

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

#34

Post by chrismealy »

vijayboyapati wrote: post #14

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. T…

You mean feudalists.

It's been a long time since I've read any pre-Columbian history, but I seem to remember that in addition to infectious disease, a lot of the South American empires were easy to conquer because the subjects generally hated their rulers, and the Spanish had no trouble finding indigenous allies.

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

#35

Post by PavlovsCat »

dmix wrote: post #29
PavlovsCat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lost me at "Marxists". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism edit: this came out kinda snarky, sorry.. I found all of that very interesting and insightful, just not the very end of the ending.

It definitely didn't share Marx's original concepts of decentralized states and communal distribution. But almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution. So it's a fair statement, if taken as the commonly held meaning.

Well, I think the commonly held meaning is nonsense, and that it's commonly held doesn't really change that.

"almost every implementation of Marxism in recent history involved totalitarianism and ignored the part about decentralization of power post-revolution"

Then how are any of these an actual implementation of Marxism? There have been implementations of totalitarianism claiming the label of Marxism, sure. You might also said it got co-opted real quick, and that that still reaches into today, when people equate, say, Stalinism with Marxism. I wouldn't even want to guess the ratio of people having a negative opinion about Marx' ideas, and the people who read Marx.

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

#37

Post by zeteo »

user9756 wrote: post #28
zeteo wrote: post #10

The extent to which the Incas did it is remarkable, but historically civil engineering had little to do with markets. The ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Persians etc. pretty much built their infrastructure and monumental buildings with drafted, unpaid labor. The French monarchy, one of the most advanced states in the world, relied on the corvée to build roads up until 1789 [1]. The decisive turn in the situation took…

Actually I remember a documentary were it stated that the Persians paid men and women for their skills working on projects. I can't remember the name of the documentary (probably from the discovery channel). A quick google search - http://hsc.csu.edu.au/ancient_history/societies/near_east/pe... And - "Men, women and children worked in ancient Persia to support a diverse economy. Workers were paid in wine and grain, w…

>Workers were paid in wine and grain

That's not pay, it's logistics. Even on the worst forced labor projects they're still usually feeding the prisoners.

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

#38

Post by soperj »

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…

Just wondering about this: "World War II provides other examples of that principle" care to elaborate on that?

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

#39

Post by soperj »

freehunter wrote: post #25
s_baby wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I assume I have a limited knowledge of WWII history on that front, but from what I was taught in history class, the biggest deterrent of the Nazi invasion of the USSR was the weather. What we learned was that the Russians were invading Germany more than the Germans could invade Russia. Basically the Russians weren't fighting to keep the Nazis from invading, but were focused on a counter-invasion. I could very well be…

That sounds more like Napoleon's Russian excursion, than the Nazi one.

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

#40

Post by asdfdsa1234 »

tokenadult wrote: post #31
s_baby wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I had Ukraine in mind as one outstanding example. For some parts of the territory Japan invaded, too, the local people thought at first that maybe the invaders would be better rulers than their previous rulers.

Ukraine had just suffered a forced famine (Holodomor) that killed millions.
Post reply on HN