How Agricultural Revolutions Actually Happen
Why better farming techniques succeed or fail depends more on institutions and labor markets than on the innovations themselves
Why Serfdom Persisted for Centuries When Freedom Seemed Obviously Better
How transaction costs, risk sharing, and institutional lock-in made bound labor economically rational for everyone involved
Why Technological Breakthroughs Don't Automatically Transform Economies
Invention is the easy part—the real transformation happens in institutions, infrastructure, and political struggle.
Why Cities Exist and How They Change Economies
Physical proximity generates productivity gains that explain urban concentration and economic transformation
How Credit Systems Evolved From Personal Trust to Anonymous Markets
From lending to your neighbor to financing strangers across oceans—how institutions replaced personal trust with paper promises
The Long History of Economic Inequality and What Determined Its Changes
Why catastrophe has historically reduced wealth concentration while peace and stability tend to increase it
The Economic Logic Behind Historical Marriage Patterns
How delayed marriage and nuclear families in Western Europe created savings patterns and labor markets that drove centuries of economic divergence
The Hidden Economic Revolution Before the Industrial Revolution
Before factories transformed production, a quieter revolution in household labor and consumption created the economic foundations that made industrialization possible.
How Epidemic Disease Reshaped Social Hierarchies
Why the same medieval plague freed peasants in the West while enslaving them in the East—and what that reveals about how power structures change.
Why Guilds Controlled Medieval Economies and Why They Eventually Failed
Medieval guilds weren't just monopolies—they solved critical coordination problems until technological and institutional change made their solutions obsolete.
The Unexpected Origins of Modern Property Rights
How peasants, lords, merchants, and tax-hungry states accidentally invented the property system you now take for granted.
How Trade Routes Shaped Social Development
Long-distance commerce didn't just move goods—it restructured societies, transmitted institutions, and created the unequal geography of development that persists today.
The Economics of Slavery: Why It Persisted and What Ended It
Understanding how profitable exploitation ends requires examining power, interests, and structural conditions—not comforting stories about moral awakening.