Since 1830, technology has cut the American workweek from 69 hours to 38 while raising real income per person roughly 20-fold.
u/eternviking — 12 days ago
r/EconomicHistory
In 1822 a Scottish soldier sold London a country that didn't exist.
Gregor MacGregor came back from the South American wars with a land grant for a strip of Honduran swamp. Worthless as territory. So he turned it into the Kingdom of Poyais instead, and gave it everything a country needs: a capital, a cathedral, a bank, a constitution, a flag, an anthem, a currency. He made himself Cazique, Prince of the Poyers. He had a 355 page guidebook written, credited to an army officer who didn't exist.
Then he floated a £200,000 loan on the London market at par, and it sold. He came back for £300,000 more, and that sold too.
He also sold the land itself. Thirty acres for a few shillings, to Scottish farmers and clerks who sold everything they had in Britain to buy it. About 250 of them got on ships. What they found at the Black River was swamp, jungle and malaria. They tried to build the colony anyway. More than half of them died.
Nobody was ever tried for it. MacGregor was in Paris by then, trying to float another £300,000 of Poyaisian debt. The French arrested him, tried him, and acquitted him. He died in Caracas in 1845 on a Venezuelan army pension, perfectly respectable.
The part that sticks with me is that all of it was checkable at the time. Nobody checked. London was flush with money after Napoleon, Colombian and Chilean bonds had just made people rich, and the market badly wanted another New World country to lend to. MacGregor didn't outsmart anyone. He just showed up with the story they were already waiting for.
Investors lost around £1.3 million. The surviving bonds now sell for thousands.
Read the full story here: Online article
u/scripophilyhub — 9 days ago
Ptolemaic Economy
This papyrus gives an interesting picture of how gold circulated within the Ptolemaic monetary system. Demetrios tells Apollonios that he has followed his instructions concerning the gold he received and processed, but then turns to a problem involving local and trichrysa gold coins brought by outsiders, merchants, and others dealing with money. Old and worn (ἀποτετριμμένωι) gold was apparently no longer being accepted, leaving people with gold that remained “idle” (ἀργὸν) and causing them financial losses.
Demetrios also points out that this was not only a problem for individuals: if gold could not be brought into circulation, the king’s revenues could suffer as well. He asks whom he should report the matter to and refers to an anaphora and a prostagma, giving us a glimpse of the administrative process behind these monetary decisions. His suggestion that more gold should be brought in from outside, and that the king’s money should remain “good and new” (καλὸν καὶ καινὸν), is especially interesting in the context of the Ptolemaic state’s efforts to regulate the quality and circulation of money. The letter also shows how much of this business depended on ordinary communication between officials: some matters, Demetrios says, he does not put into writing and will explain when Apollonios arrives. It is a small document, but it shows quite clearly how questions of gold, allage, royal revenue, and everyday administration could meet in practice.
u/deniz_aydiner — 11 days ago