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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)

#101

Post by PavlovsCat »

Tycho wrote: post #72
PavlovsCat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mig…

Well, some people view those sorts of totalitarian states as the inevitable outcome of trying to build a nation on Marx's ideas.

You could say the same about the Sermon on the Mount, and many other things as well. IMHO there is a difference between "totalitarian" and "all-encompassing".

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

#102

Post by kylebgorman »

mpyne wrote: post #81
asdfdsa1234 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't pass the sniff test. Slaughtering a few thousand stunned pigs would be exhausting. Killing that many people who are trying to kill you? Not gonna happen.

Especially given the types of firearms available to conquistadors of the age. They weren't crew-served weapons, or machine guns, or even breech-loaded rifles. If you were lucky it was a flintlock, and even with that you're not going to be firing very frequently or accurately.

They were basically the knights of legend, in plate mail from head to foot with swords and lances.

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

#103

Post by jdmichal »

dsizzle wrote: post #92
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key point is that they didn't have money at all .

The story of Atahualpa’s Ransom ( http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/theconquestofperu/p... ) -- the king offered a ransom of gold -- seems to cast doubt on the claim the Incans didn't have money.

First, it depends on whether the gold was considered a currency. If it was just another good, then it's really just a bartering -- life for some good, which in this case happens to be gold.

Second, that story is post-conquistador. It is in fact the Spanish who are demanding the gold and silver, which is of course what the Spanish used for currency. So it's really an observation on the Spanish, not the Incans.

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

#104

Post by soperj »

ahomescu1 wrote: post #94
soperj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems a best a very bad caricature of what happened in the Soviet Union. What's happening in Communist China now?

What makes you say it's a "very bad caricature"? All the stories I've read and heard (from my relatives and friends in Romania) paint a very bleak picture of what life was like then. I was 4 years old in '89, but I heard a lot form my parents. Essentially they were prisoners in their own country, and the higher layers of the party practically owned all of it.

Life may have been bleak, but that's not what you were saying. You're taking anecdotes from one part of the Soviet Union and applying it to the whole thing. Would you say that Russians are immeasurably better off now than during Communism?

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

#105

Post by wpietri »

dsizzle wrote: post #92
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key point is that they didn't have money at all .

The story of Atahualpa’s Ransom ( http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/theconquestofperu/p... ) -- the king offered a ransom of gold -- seems to cast doubt on the claim the Incans didn't have money.

Why's that? It's clear they recognized various things as valuable. And that the Spanish told them they wanted gold.

But money is special: it's a unit by which all economic value is measured, and it's universally swappable for any other kind of value.

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

#106

Post by ahomescu1 »

soperj wrote: post #104
ahomescu1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say it's a "very bad caricature"? All the stories I've read and heard (from my relatives and friends in Romania) paint a very bleak picture of what life was like then. I was 4 years old in '89, but I heard a lot form my parents. Essentially they were prisoners in their own country, and the higher layers of the party practically owned all of it.

Life may have been bleak, but that's not what you were saying. You're taking anecdotes from one part of the Soviet Union and applying it to the whole thing. Would you say that Russians are immeasurably better off now than during Communism?

Can't speak about Russia, but other countries are much better off. Poland and Estonia come to mind right now. Also, I haven't heard any contradicting anecdotes from other parts of the Communist bloc. Life seems to have been mostly the same everywhere.

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

#107

Post by unhe »

LOL. I dont think is such a mystery. Civilizations dont need money. Although it may seem like an aberration nowadays, it is quite logic to think money isnt necessary. If governments were able to provide jobs in exchange for food, housing, medication, etc... then governments would solve all of their problems from hunger, poverty, and even crime or inequality... but hey, nobody in this world wants to be equal to another person. We always want to have more and more power over others.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

moxie wrote: post #65
chrismealy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Inca were easy to conquer because they had no steel and no horses. The Spanish were so unimaginably horrible that I can't imagine their presence having anything other than a uniting effect. The book "The Last Days Of The Inca" describe a scene were ~20 armored conquistadors are in a town that's surrounded by mountains on all sides. The Incas managed to call in enough people that the hillsides were all completely…

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> OTOH the Spanish monarchy was totally evil, purposefully wiping out millions of people

As far as I know viruses imported from Europe to America wiped millions of people, not the Spanish themselves. It's well known that Pisaro's forces were minimal in the New World and the fights usually just involved a few hundred or thousands men. Viruses, OTOH, did wipe millions of people, and this was widely reported and observed in many tales of the New World.

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

#110

Post by ekianjo »

mercurial wrote: post #43
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…

> Basically the Russians weren't fighting to keep the Nazis from invading, but were focused on a counter-invasion. The thesis of Icebreaker [1], a controversial history book by an ex-GRU officer, is that Stalin was planning an invasion of Germany right when Operation Barbarossa happened. However, his interpretation is disputed by most historians. What is certain is that the Red Army was caught with its pants down and…

> Contrast this with the dismal performance of French and British troops during the Battle of France.

Contrast this with the millions of people who died in Germany and Japan because of that determination (or should I say their rulers' determination!), without avoiding the final outcome at all. The French government understood very fast they were completely behind and were going to lose and they did the right thing to avoid a massacre which would have prevented nothing.

And besides, in Germany and Japan people were forced into fighting until the end (even teenagers in Germany), it's not like it was the "nation in arms" or something. Nobody wants to lose their life on purpose.

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