Talk:Price revolution
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I don't think you did disagree, David -- just vastly improved an extended stub! Since I'm not thrilled by economic history, I certainly don't mind someone much more interested doing the revising -- hope it wasn't all that awful, though. I just wanted to contribute something new, and this was off the top of my head. JHK
It was just the downplaying of the urbanisation aspect I was thinking about - it is a fascinating topic: I'll add a bit on geopolitical impacts (including English erm... appropriation of Spanish booty) later when I've formed a better idea of the related economic implications. DP
I'd like to note that we are experiencing a rather strange price revolution with the vast decreases in prices of many industrial goods . The relative price of of things not easily or appropriately mass produced eg law, education, etc is causing some strange and perhaps dangerous imbalances. Oth the ease of production of wealth has created a surplus of labour which may be deployed for bizarre and largely unproductive ends.
Marx wrote in Capital, with great eloquence and dispair, on the enclosure of the commons, the primitive formation of capital, the birth of the proletariate etc. The enclosure ( as a verb ) relates to privatization and changes in the established nature of title .
Further there are those who attribute the collapse of the Roman Empire to the slow loss of specie to luxury imports and backbreaking imperial taxes to maintain bread and circus's for the dispossed ( by competion with patrician owned slave farms subsequent to the Punic victory ) Italians over several hundred years and a concominant price revolution. Thus the rise of fuedalism, the 'fascist' version of 'christianity' etc.
There doesn't seem to be an article on the enclosure movement.
Thanks for the article. Wblakesx
[edit] more people = higher prices?!
- Demographic factors also contributed fundamentally to upward pressure on prices, with the revival (from around the third quarter of the 15th century) of European population growth after the century of depopulation and demographic stagnation that had followed the Black Death.
I think that sentence is a bit confusing. A priori, and certainly fundamentally, population growth does not contribute to higher prices. In fact, since the currencies we're talking about here were silver-based (fractional-reserve banking not having been introduced) and had a slow and probably nearly constant circulation velocity, you'd expect deflation, in the absence of new silver (which is excluded from the discussion in that paragraph).
In this case, there are certainly other factors that have to be included: settlement structures limited the available arable land; adjusting the economy to a larger population might have resulted in extra cost. However, I would think it's impossible to discern those comparatively minor factors after all those years, most data having been lost.
I'll remove "fundamentally" now, but I'm not sure I'm smart enough to salvage anything from the rest of the paragraph.
RandomP 23:27, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
