Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Athaway. The virus situation
Speaker 1: in the US is extremely bad right now, but I
Speaker 1: feel hopeful that this we're on the last wave, that
Speaker 1: thanks to the vaccine, that the light there is some
Speaker 1: light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah. So we're
Speaker 1: recording this in mid December, and I think the US
Speaker 1: caseload keeps going up. It keeps going up in other
Speaker 1: places as well, So I think Europe Germany just posted
Speaker 1: its highest caseload on record. Um in Hong Kong, we
Speaker 1: have a fourth wave as well. I guess with winter
Speaker 1: setting in in many parts of the world, temperature obviously
Speaker 1: has an impact, and we're seeing cases and also sat
Speaker 1: DUTs go up as well. Can I say something, though
Speaker 1: you might here, I have I have something to say,
Speaker 1: which is I read all these stories about like Hong
Speaker 1: Kong is under a new wave or Hong Kong is
Speaker 1: under lockdown, but I gotta say like it does not
Speaker 1: seem anything like the same scale here and when I
Speaker 1: look at say your Instagram photos, not that you're out partying,
Speaker 1: but it does not seem as bad by strategy even close,
Speaker 1: Like it seems like your definition of a wave is
Speaker 1: not our definition of a wave. Yeah, our definition of
Speaker 1: a wave, and this is our biggest ever wave. It's
Speaker 1: about a hundred new cases per day, so really a
Speaker 1: fraction of what you're seeing in other countries. And our
Speaker 1: lockdowns are kind of weird and different because, for instance, um,
Speaker 1: you're allowed to eat in a restaurant, but they all
Speaker 1: close at six pm and it's only two people per table,
Speaker 1: so you can go out, and of course you can.
Speaker 1: You can still. This is what I quite like about
Speaker 1: Hong Kong. You can still get drinks and just dreat
Speaker 1: them outside after six pm, and because weather is quite
Speaker 1: mild here, it's fairly enjoyable to do that. But you're
Speaker 1: still supposed to do it in groups of a maximum
Speaker 1: of people. There's literally nothing like our waves. And people
Speaker 1: are still doing boat parties right well, they cracked down
Speaker 1: on those, so it's set up a hot line. They
Speaker 1: set up a hotline so that people could report if
Speaker 1: they spotted someone holding a they're called jump parties here.
Speaker 1: If if people decide to hold a jump party because
Speaker 1: they can't hold a party in a restaurant or a bar,
Speaker 1: they hire a boat, they go out to sea, and
Speaker 1: everyone drinks and swims and sunbathes. Now there's a hotline
Speaker 1: so you can report that behavior. You're not supposed to
Speaker 1: do it, all right, anyway, This is a big digression,
Speaker 1: but I just wanted to get this off my chest
Speaker 1: that what you like Hong Kong, isn't it it's worst
Speaker 1: wave yet, that it's like it's they look, it's all relative. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: that's my point. It's relative to us. It's it's not
Speaker 1: like anyway. So that of course raises questions. At the
Speaker 1: end of the coronavirus crisis, COVID is inside. That of
Speaker 1: course raises questions about what the post crisis world, the
Speaker 1: post COVID world looks like, right, And I think this
Speaker 1: is something that we've touched on in a few episodes now.
Speaker 1: But one of the big questions is exactly what it
Speaker 1: means for the labor market, whether we start to see
Speaker 1: maybe wages pick up again, maybe we start to see
Speaker 1: workers demand other benefits like work from home, because they've
Speaker 1: all been so used to it over the past twelve
Speaker 1: months or so. Big discussion point, right, So, there have
Speaker 1: been some articles that I've seen from time to time
Speaker 1: talking about a past pandemic in which that was it
Speaker 1: was much worse than this one. And uh, there these are.
Speaker 1: There was like at the end of the Black Death
Speaker 1: in the mid Dreds, there was actually a pretty big
Speaker 1: spike in wages because there was a labor shortage. This
Speaker 1: is not anywhere near on uh as sort of deadly.
Speaker 1: It's extremely bad, but it's not Black Death pandemic levels,
Speaker 1: so we're probably not going to get some massive labor shortage.
Speaker 1: But I but but even still, like, I'm sorry curious
Speaker 1: about this time because none of these things I've read
Speaker 1: totally satisfying. Because on the one hand, yes, I understand
Speaker 1: there's there's a labor shortage, but on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you think there would be this sort of like big
Speaker 1: broad impairment to the economy. So it's not totally clear
Speaker 1: to me why wages went up. So even though I
Speaker 1: doubt it's that applicable to now, I am still very
Speaker 1: curious to understand what really happened when that, for your
Speaker 1: pandemic came to an end. It's a really interesting question
Speaker 1: because the economic impact of the Black Death is sort
Speaker 1: of famous for leading to the end of feudalism, so
Speaker 1: supposedly there was such a big supply shock to labor.
Speaker 1: I mean, England lost half its population, and that wages
Speaker 1: started to go up, and surfs who used to be
Speaker 1: completely at the will, working at the will of a lord,
Speaker 1: started to demand rights, and eventually you have the sort
Speaker 1: of end of the feudal system. I think a lot
Speaker 1: of your confusion probably comes from a misunderstanding of that
Speaker 1: particular economy, or you're thinking about it like the modern economy.
Speaker 1: I have to say I've been reading Pillars of the
Speaker 1: Earth recently, so I feel I am now an expert
Speaker 1: on medieval economies. I am very excited about this particular episode.
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be a fun one. And
Speaker 1: even if the analogy between the plague of the Middle
Speaker 1: Ages and the pandemic now is a little bit off,
Speaker 1: it's still a really interesting point in time, and I
Speaker 1: think it's worth talking about very big tonal shift in
Speaker 1: this interview from US joking about junk boat parties to
Speaker 1: half the population of England dying in a plague. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: here we are, it was long ago. It was long ago.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I'm very excited about our guests. Maybe I'll
Speaker 1: just listen to you and our guest talk. I'm very
Speaker 1: excited about our guest. We're gonna be speaking with Patrick Wyman.
Speaker 1: He's a historian. He's also a podcaster, the host of
Speaker 1: the Tides of History podcast and also an author. He
Speaker 1: has a book coming out about credit and finance and
Speaker 1: the fire. So basically the perfect odd lots guest for
Speaker 1: this topic for this time. Patrick, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for joining us. Hey, thank you so much for having me,
Speaker 1: you know, first time caller, a longtime listener. Awesome, love
Speaker 1: to hear it. So where dona get started? How would
Speaker 1: you characterize the pre Black Death economy in Europe? Tracy
Speaker 1: talked about the feudal system, but I kind of have
Speaker 1: some vague idea of what that means. But how did
Speaker 1: the economy work pre crisis? Okay, So there are a
Speaker 1: couple of aspects to bear in mind when thinking about
Speaker 1: the pre plague economy, and one is kind of the
Speaker 1: broad context. Where is thinking about feudalism whatever exactly that's
Speaker 1: supposed to mean. That's something specialists debate in this field.
Speaker 1: Not that there's anything specialists don't debate, but basically, a
Speaker 1: system in which, uh, the a property owning class has
Speaker 1: tenant farmers working their land for them, who are not
Speaker 1: free to come and go as they please, and who
Speaker 1: owe the landlord labor services. So not just that they
Speaker 1: pay the landlord rent um, they also owe the landlord
Speaker 1: service on the land that the the landholder does not
Speaker 1: lease out, the called the domain land on in a
Speaker 1: state that the that these poor that these poor serfs
Speaker 1: who again not free to go come and go as
Speaker 1: they please, their semi free at best, um that they
Speaker 1: have to work the lord's land. They have to clear
Speaker 1: out ditches, they have to plant crops, they have to
Speaker 1: harvest crops. You have to do stuff like that. The idea,
Speaker 1: the basic narrative of the Black Death is that it
Speaker 1: makes that system less tenable because uh, these formerly in served,
Speaker 1: formerly semi free people now do not have to do
Speaker 1: that labor service. They can just run off, They can
Speaker 1: go they and go somewhere else. They can go to
Speaker 1: a town, they can get a job working in a
Speaker 1: trade something like that. Um. So that's the kind of
Speaker 1: the broad long term shift that people talk about with
Speaker 1: the Black Death and its impact on the European economy.
Speaker 1: The Black Death comes at the end of what we
Speaker 1: call the commercial revolution. So the couple of century period
Speaker 1: leading up to the Black Death sees an enormous expansion
Speaker 1: of the European economy. It's the period in which most
Speaker 1: of the tools that were familiar with that kind of
Speaker 1: define a an advanced economy, things like widespread access to credit, um,
Speaker 1: high levels of international trade, resident merchants who are capable
Speaker 1: of doing business over long distances, the kind. That's the
Speaker 1: time when these things all across Europe are coming into play. Now.
Speaker 1: The reason for that is fundamentally demographic, that this is
Speaker 1: a period when the climate is really good. Um, crop
Speaker 1: yields are good, so there's a population boom, there's new
Speaker 1: land clear new land comes under cultivation. These lords are
Speaker 1: able to extract lots of labor, dues and rents from
Speaker 1: their tenants because there are a lot of tenants and
Speaker 1: there's not that much land. So if you control the land,
Speaker 1: you could you can get a lot from it. Now,
Speaker 1: by the time the Black Death rolls around in the
Speaker 1: middle of the fourteenth century, that expansion is over. The
Speaker 1: economy has peaked. It's already in a little bit of
Speaker 1: decline by the time the plague hits. So the largest
Speaker 1: firms in Europe prior to the Black Death. What are
Speaker 1: called the super companies, These which are mostly based on
Speaker 1: Florence Um and are involved in a whole host of
Speaker 1: activities all over the continent. The super companies have already
Speaker 1: gone bankrupt by the time the Black Death hits, So
Speaker 1: the economy is already in trouble when the Black Death hits,
Speaker 1: and then you get this enormous wave of mass death
Speaker 1: before we get into that, could you maybe, so you've
Speaker 1: laid out the I guess the labor side of the
Speaker 1: economy very very well, can you talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about like the demand side, what exactly where people producing
Speaker 1: at that time and what was driving the economy, because
Speaker 1: I think this is going to feed in later to
Speaker 1: answering Joe's question. Yeah, so it's almost entirely an agricultural economy.
Speaker 1: You we can write really interesting things about the cloth trade,
Speaker 1: about the long distance trade, luxury goods, and it's not
Speaker 1: that those things don't matter. They do matter for for
Speaker 1: reasons that I think will probably end up coming back
Speaker 1: to over the course. It's over the course of our
Speaker 1: chat today, but it's primarily an agricultural economy, depending on
Speaker 1: the region you're talking about. There is no region in
Speaker 1: Western Europe specifically that has more than twenty at most
Speaker 1: thirty percent of the population living in towns. Everybody lives
Speaker 1: in the countryside. Almost everybody who lives in the countryside
Speaker 1: is involved in agricultural labor in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 1: So there is way. It's not that the economy is simple.
Speaker 1: There is wage labor. There are local, regional, and international
Speaker 1: trade routes. Um there is a trade in agricultural produce
Speaker 1: that goes over long distances that uses sometimes quite sophisticated
Speaker 1: commercial tools to do that, application of credit accounting techniques,
Speaker 1: things like that. But it is primarily an agricultural economy,
Speaker 1: and so the that's by the population increase and bringing
Speaker 1: new land under cultivation matters so much. The more people
Speaker 1: you have, the more agricultural produce you're you're putting out there.
Speaker 1: The more the economy grows, the more surplus there is
Speaker 1: for lords to extract, which they can then use for
Speaker 1: things like long distance trade and luxury goods. I think
Speaker 1: this is like a key element here. So the consumption
Speaker 1: of all of this agricultural production was exported, and so
Speaker 1: the lords would export it elsewhere in exchange for something
Speaker 1: not in agriculture. Well either or or they would extract
Speaker 1: cash rents from their tenants, and they would use the
Speaker 1: and and they would use the combination of that. And yeah,
Speaker 1: sure maybe if you're so, you're the lord of a
Speaker 1: manner near London Um, you whatever surplus you grow from
Speaker 1: your land, maybe you sell that too, and maybe you
Speaker 1: sell that to merchants who are who are doing business
Speaker 1: in London um. And then you have the benefit of
Speaker 1: like all of your tenants are also paying you cash
Speaker 1: rent for their for for being on their land. So
Speaker 1: you've just got it's a good time to be a
Speaker 1: lord if you're a lord before the plague and like
Speaker 1: the thirteen thirties thirteen forties, great time to own land,
Speaker 1: great time to be extracting rents. Just out of curiosity,
Speaker 1: how big what kind of city was London at the time.
Speaker 1: So London is the biggest city in England, but it's
Speaker 1: not a big city by global standards. In fact, there
Speaker 1: are no real big cities by global standards in the
Speaker 1: In the fourteenth century in Europe, um Europe is kind
Speaker 1: of a backwater. It's not as much of a backwater
Speaker 1: as it becomes in like the mid fifteenth century. But
Speaker 1: you know, London has fifty thousand people, sixty thousand people
Speaker 1: at most. Paris has sixty thousand to a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: um and those are the the big cities. The biggest
Speaker 1: cities are places like Um still constant, not so much
Speaker 1: Constantinople anymore after the after the Crusader conquest at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the thirteenth century, but places like Baghdad again
Speaker 1: probably declined a little bit after the Mongol conquest. But
Speaker 1: cities in Central Asia, South Asia, definitely, in uh definitely
Speaker 1: in China were dramatically larger. Also, some places in the
Speaker 1: New World were dramatically larger than European cities at this point.
Speaker 1: So in thirt um, I think that's when the plague
Speaker 1: actually arrived in England. At the time, it has something
Speaker 1: like five million people in total, fifty thousand in London,
Speaker 1: as you just mentioned. By the end of it, I
Speaker 1: think the population is something like half of that. Can
Speaker 1: you describe exactly what the impact was of the Black
Speaker 1: Death on I guess let's focus on on England at
Speaker 1: the moment, but I'm curious about the rest of Europe
Speaker 1: as well. Okay, so it's the death toll is regionally variable,
Speaker 1: but high basically, so trying to do medieval demography is
Speaker 1: hard because you're there's never just like a list of
Speaker 1: people who live in a particular place and you can say, Ah,
Speaker 1: this person died at this particular time, this many people
Speaker 1: died in the plague. So you're left to reconstruct demography
Speaker 1: on the basis of tax records, UM, records of land holding, UM,
Speaker 1: sometimes legal records. Basically they're not giving you the stuff
Speaker 1: you want to tell, like how many people live in
Speaker 1: a particular place at point A and how many place
Speaker 1: live at point B. What's the likely death rate? The
Speaker 1: better the data is for the period around the Black Death.
Speaker 1: I think it's notable that the higher the death rate
Speaker 1: looks so when the data is not especially like, the
Speaker 1: more direct the relationship between the demographic data and the
Speaker 1: actual population, the fewer kind of proxies that you have
Speaker 1: to work through to figure out how many people live
Speaker 1: in a place, the higher the death toll looks. So
Speaker 1: where our data is best, in places like savoy Um,
Speaker 1: northern Italy, some parts of England, the death toll looks
Speaker 1: like it's forty. In places where the data isn't as good,
Speaker 1: it looks like it's more like thirty. But how much
Speaker 1: of that is an artifact of the sources that we're
Speaker 1: working with and how much of it is actually reflective
Speaker 1: of regional variation and death toll is hard to say,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I mean, I think it's safe to say
Speaker 1: forty is a good kind is a good kind of
Speaker 1: low end number and potentially much higher. But the key
Speaker 1: point about death toll when we're talking about the Black
Speaker 1: Death is it's not just that people die. It's not
Speaker 1: that the plague comes once, it's that it keeps coming back.
Speaker 1: So the fundamental shift that the plague puts into place,
Speaker 1: and which continues throughout the rest of the fifteenth century,
Speaker 1: is a shift to what a demographer will call a
Speaker 1: high mortality regime. So you still have high fertility, people
Speaker 1: are still having lots of babies, but the death rate
Speaker 1: is just high enough that it prevents the population from rebounding.
Speaker 1: So it's not just that you have a one time
Speaker 1: demographic shock. It's that people die. They keep dying, and
Speaker 1: they keep dying, so you don't get like, even in
Speaker 1: a pre modern society where population growth rates are really
Speaker 1: pretty low compared to what we're used to in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, twenty one century. Um, you would still expect
Speaker 1: if you have a sudden abundance of land and resources
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of a mass mortality event, for populations
Speaker 1: to rebound fairly quickly. That doesn't happen after the plague.
Speaker 1: And that's the key demographic fact of it. That's what
Speaker 1: shapes the labor markets, not just in the middle of
Speaker 1: the fourteenth century, but into theteenth century and beyond. See.
Speaker 1: Now I've been reading Forever Amber as well, so I
Speaker 1: feel I am also an expert on plague in the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century in England. But yeah, you're you're absolutely right,
Speaker 1: Like the plague keeps coming back. And just on that point,
Speaker 1: what one of the things that you learn, I guess
Speaker 1: from historical fiction is the plague. You know, it doesn't
Speaker 1: just cause people to die in a sort of similar
Speaker 1: way to what we're seeing now with pandemic lockdowns. It
Speaker 1: causes big chunks of the economy, or it seemed like
Speaker 1: it to kind of come to a standstill because no
Speaker 1: one wants to go out of their house. They're not
Speaker 1: exactly sure how the plague is actually spread. They have
Speaker 1: family members who are dying back at home who might
Speaker 1: be you know, locked in a room somewhere. What what
Speaker 1: does it actually look like when plague hits a town
Speaker 1: in the Middle Ages, what tends to happen? So you
Speaker 1: do get quarantines. Um. So Milan quite famously mostly avoided
Speaker 1: the first terrible wave of the plague, the one that
Speaker 1: caused so much death and destruction cross northern Italy, because
Speaker 1: they basically bricked up any plague cases in their houses.
Speaker 1: They just they they're like, okay, tough luck. You're stuck
Speaker 1: in there, You're gonna die. So Milan emerged from the
Speaker 1: plague in pretty good shape as a as a city,
Speaker 1: with its population still almost entirely intact in that first wave. Now,
Speaker 1: plague does show up in Milan afterwards, so it's not
Speaker 1: like they escaped forever. But there are things. I mean,
Speaker 1: medieval people did not have germ theory, so they did
Speaker 1: not understand what was causing um this stuff. But they
Speaker 1: did understand that there was a correlation between personal contact
Speaker 1: and the spread of disease. So they did try and
Speaker 1: avoid contact with other people. They did try and stay isolated. Um,
Speaker 1: they did, and they did have some sense that that's
Speaker 1: how that the disease was being spread in that fashion.
Speaker 1: It's not entirely clear. Even today, we still know less
Speaker 1: about how the Black Death was transmitted than we wish
Speaker 1: we did. There are still debates about this. Scholars still
Speaker 1: do not agree on every aspect of it. Abou, whether
Speaker 1: it's bubonic or pneumonic plague, what role various vectors of
Speaker 1: transmission played, whether it's fleas on rats, whether it's human fleas,
Speaker 1: whether it's primarily airborne. Um, there are lots of debates
Speaker 1: about this. But anyway, Um, yeah, so so lots of
Speaker 1: economic activity does grind to a hall and there you
Speaker 1: read primary source accounts where it's like crops are left
Speaker 1: to whether and die in fields. Um, cattle are running
Speaker 1: around starving because nobody's feeding them. People are people are
Speaker 1: dying in their houses. The I mean, it's funny you
Speaker 1: mentioned that the junk parties. I couldn't help but think
Speaker 1: of Boccaccio's Decameron. So one of the great literary works
Speaker 1: of the Middle Ages is this, dude, Boccaccio and the
Speaker 1: Cameron is this series of stories that are all like
Speaker 1: the kind of the central premise of it is that
Speaker 1: they're all hanging out at a country house outside Florence
Speaker 1: while the plague is happening, and they're just amusing each
Speaker 1: other by telling each other stories. So they too had
Speaker 1: junk parties, just you know, at a nice villa and
Speaker 1: a nice Tuscan villa instead of out on a junk
Speaker 1: I guess I'm actually it's still curious just about the
Speaker 1: functioning of society. You mentioned like okay, crops were left
Speaker 1: to row. There were stories of animals that were starving.
Speaker 1: From the perspective of these feudal lords, how did their
Speaker 1: lives change? How did they try to get by and operate?
Speaker 1: I mean, uh, what did they do? So lords, as
Speaker 1: best we can tell, the higher up you were in society,
Speaker 1: the better off you were when it came to actually
Speaker 1: dying of the plague. But in the sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not. Some thing's never change. Um. After the plague,
Speaker 1: landlords suddenly see their leverage over their tenants dramatically decreased.
Speaker 1: So it's both a supply shock to the labor market,
Speaker 1: but it's also it's also a demand shock. The thing is,
Speaker 1: the demand shock is nowhere near as severe as the
Speaker 1: supply shock is. Because I mentioned that population growth a
Speaker 1: little while ago, I mentioned that there are all of
Speaker 1: these kind of landless tenant farmers. Now all of the sudden,
Speaker 1: lots of people have died. There are nearly as many
Speaker 1: people who need to eat agricultural produce as there were
Speaker 1: a couple of years beforehand. Um, So suddenly there's there's
Speaker 1: a lot more land available you don't need. The price
Speaker 1: of land drops dramatically, the price of rents falls dramatically,
Speaker 1: and the price of labor goes way way up. So
Speaker 1: if you're a landlord who wants to get your peasants
Speaker 1: out there to come to come clear out a ditch
Speaker 1: for you, they're not gonna do it. They're gonna go
Speaker 1: and they're they're going to find their own little patch
Speaker 1: of land. They're going to go to a town to
Speaker 1: work for wages. There. There are all sorts of things.
Speaker 1: This is when we see some of the first laws
Speaker 1: trying to restrict the price of labor. We see these
Speaker 1: in England in the thirteen fifties. Um that they were
Speaker 1: just couldn't enforce them because you know, the labor what
Speaker 1: the labor markets we're going to do is what the
Speaker 1: labor markets were gonna do. When you have a shortage
Speaker 1: of labor and still exceptionally high amounts of demand because
Speaker 1: people still have to eat. You still need to pay
Speaker 1: for agricultural labor, to harvest crops, to care for livestock,
Speaker 1: to do all that stuff. It's just that they're not
Speaker 1: going to do it for what they would have done
Speaker 1: it when there were twice as many people. Right. So
Speaker 1: I saw the text of at least one of these laws,
Speaker 1: and it was something like you can't pay a laborer
Speaker 1: or a farmer more than you would have done like
Speaker 1: last year or in like an average over the past
Speaker 1: five years or something like that. So it was pretty
Speaker 1: like pretty explicit what they were trying to do here.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to press you on one point. So
Speaker 1: we talked about how the economy is mostly agricultural at
Speaker 1: this point, there's all this land available. How did that
Speaker 1: feed into productivity at the time, because I imagine when
Speaker 1: you had a higher population earlier on, everyone was trying
Speaker 1: to get as much as they could out of the land.
Speaker 1: They were probably farming land that wasn't entirely ideal. And
Speaker 1: now you can kind of pick and choose, right, and
Speaker 1: maybe productivity goes up. Yeah, So it's it's that's a
Speaker 1: really interesting and a really good point. And so what
Speaker 1: happens is the marginal land that had been like like
Speaker 1: a drained swamp or kind of rocky hillsides. All of
Speaker 1: that land had been in used to grow cereal crops,
Speaker 1: because that's when to give you that's what's going to
Speaker 1: give you the most calories per acre um. If you've
Speaker 1: got to feed a lot people, what you gotta do
Speaker 1: is you gotta grow wheat. So diets before the plague
Speaker 1: were exceptionally dependent on on wheat um as you can expect,
Speaker 1: like that's not a great diet for people to have.
Speaker 1: And I think there's probably some correlation between death rates
Speaker 1: in the plague and the fact that they were eating
Speaker 1: a diet that was almost certainly not optimal for for
Speaker 1: strengthening your immune system. There. So there's that aspect to it.
Speaker 1: As the plague roars through, as people die, you can
Speaker 1: let this marginal land go out of wheat cultivation. You
Speaker 1: don't need to suddenly, you don't need to use this
Speaker 1: rocky land or this Martian land for that. You can
Speaker 1: use it for other things. And what they end up
Speaker 1: using a lot of this formerly marginal land for is
Speaker 1: stock raising, is for pasture land for sheep, for cattle
Speaker 1: um diets get better as after the plague, because you
Speaker 1: have more land that you can be grazing the You
Speaker 1: can be grazing these animals on you can keep the
Speaker 1: meat on the hoof. Um, you can you see any
Speaker 1: kind of Definitely in England, you see an expansion of
Speaker 1: the of the wool economy even beyond what it had
Speaker 1: been before. English wool had already been in high demand.
Speaker 1: That was one of the main sources of of financing
Speaker 1: for the English government prior to the plague was was
Speaker 1: the wolf staple. But after the plague, Uh, it becomes
Speaker 1: even more important. You get UH. In some regions of Europe,
Speaker 1: you get production moving out into the countryside because suddenly
Speaker 1: not every single peasant has to be working in the fields.
Speaker 1: You can have more specialization of labor. Uh, you can
Speaker 1: have a more craft production. You can see this. There
Speaker 1: are some regional studies that point to the specific way
Speaker 1: in which economies change after the plague, and basically it's
Speaker 1: almost always um in the direction of peasants have Peasants
Speaker 1: can do more things. Um. They don't just have to
Speaker 1: grow wheat, they can raise stock, they can do crafts. Uh.
Speaker 1: They basically they have a lot more economic opportunity, and
Speaker 1: they're much more likely to be able to own their
Speaker 1: own land or at the very least least their own
Speaker 1: land instead of working is um, instead of working as
Speaker 1: low paid tenant laborers. Let me let me ask you, so,
Speaker 1: you know, like when when this virus eventually is gone,
Speaker 1: Like I have in my head, like I'm gonna fly
Speaker 1: to El Paso and rent a car and drive to
Speaker 1: Vegas and go to a casino for a couple of days.
Speaker 1: And you know, I have this whole fantasy. I'll probably
Speaker 1: never get around to it because I have kids, so
Speaker 1: it's probably never gonna happen, but like I like, you know,
Speaker 1: like I imagine it will. Did you know the Black
Speaker 1: Death was like far longer, far worse, uh, in terms
Speaker 1: of just the sheer, like you know, the seeing half
Speaker 1: the people you know die? Did people have a party
Speaker 1: at the end? Was there like signs of like sort
Speaker 1: of like jubilation and new behaviors and people doing fun
Speaker 1: things because this awful period had come to an end.
Speaker 1: This is the pent up demand theory versus are people
Speaker 1: going to be saving forever because they're worried there's pandemic? Yeah? No,
Speaker 1: there was. There was a huge kind of burst of
Speaker 1: consumption after the Black Death, an enormous burst of it.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of anxiety, especially among churchmen in
Speaker 1: the second half of the fourteenth century, about all the
Speaker 1: conspicuous consum action that people are doing. So part of
Speaker 1: it is pent up demand, but part of it is
Speaker 1: also lots of people die. There are lots of inheritances,
Speaker 1: so there's lots of money coming to people who may
Speaker 1: not have had as much money to spend before, who
Speaker 1: are suddenly like, if I could die in the plague
Speaker 1: next week, You're you're damn right, I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: pay for this and this amazing piece of art. Like
Speaker 1: there's good reason to think that kind of the flourishing
Speaker 1: of early Renaissance art um. The demand for that came
Speaker 1: from Penta came from people who were like, Okay, we
Speaker 1: have all these resources, let's spend them on something. The
Speaker 1: way to do that is now we're going to compete
Speaker 1: with our fellow, you know, rich Florentine merchants by paying
Speaker 1: for art um. So there's a kind of a material
Speaker 1: context to that specific aspect that I would imagine people
Speaker 1: are probably fairly familiar with that comes out of the
Speaker 1: that comes out of the plague. And one of the
Speaker 1: interesting things about this to to to get into the
Speaker 1: to get into the monetary aspects of it, is around
Speaker 1: the time of the plague, you don't have that much
Speaker 1: actual money and circulation, and you're getting to the point
Speaker 1: where there's almost a shortage of of coin for people
Speaker 1: to use to carry out transactions. The plague kind of
Speaker 1: buys Europe about sixty five or seventy years before that
Speaker 1: becomes a problem again because suddenly the amount of coin
Speaker 1: in circulation per person is dramatically higher. Um. If half
Speaker 1: the population is dead, you don't have nearly as much
Speaker 1: of a shortage. The bully and famine comes again, and
Speaker 1: that's another really important thing for kind of shaping the
Speaker 1: post the post plague world in the early modern economy afterward. Um,
Speaker 1: but at least at that point, suddenly the European economy
Speaker 1: is no longer cash poor. It's actually almost flushed with cash. Actually,
Speaker 1: that reminds me we haven't really spoken about this yet,
Speaker 1: but what did inflation look like in the aftermath of
Speaker 1: the plague. That's a really good question. Um, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure I have a really good answer to it. Off
Speaker 1: the top of my head. Um, all of those things
Speaker 1: that I mentioned are factors that play into it. There's
Speaker 1: still there is not as much of a trade deficit
Speaker 1: between Europe and the East as there had been fifty
Speaker 1: or sixty years before. There's not as my bully in leaving.
Speaker 1: There is just the fact that there isn't nearly as
Speaker 1: much of a shortage of coin kind of reduced the
Speaker 1: need for non coin tools to pay for money to
Speaker 1: pay for things there was just but in the long
Speaker 1: term you end up with the development of a lot
Speaker 1: of tools, um like book transfers, things like that allow
Speaker 1: you to function without as much money. The the effect
Speaker 1: that has on the money supply, it's it's a question
Speaker 1: I'm not super familiar with. Well, we real quickly, what's
Speaker 1: book transfers? Okay, So book transfers are when you both
Speaker 1: when when you and the person you're doing business with
Speaker 1: both have an account with the same with the same
Speaker 1: bank of or even um what they didn't what they
Speaker 1: didn't in like Bruges, which was kind of the center
Speaker 1: of trade in Northern Europe at this point, Um, it
Speaker 1: was a hostile owners who kept these who basically kept
Speaker 1: accounts and everybody had credit with the with the hosteler,
Speaker 1: which you could do um in venice. You go to
Speaker 1: the rialto um you and the you and the person
Speaker 1: that you're in a businessmen sure with both have accounts
Speaker 1: with the same banker. You just move the money from
Speaker 1: his account to your account, or from your account to
Speaker 1: his account, so no actual cash has changed hands, but
Speaker 1: you've got a transaction. It's one of the things that
Speaker 1: it's one of the innovations that allows you to speed
Speaker 1: up the velocity of money in later medieval Europe without
Speaker 1: any sort of increase in the actual amount of coin
Speaker 1: in circulation, or even a decrease in the amount of
Speaker 1: coin in circulation. So we started out this conversation talking
Speaker 1: about how pandemic experiences tend to be quite relative, and
Speaker 1: you know, one place might have a very different experience
Speaker 1: to the other. I'm curious when it comes to medieval Europe.
Speaker 1: My understanding is after the Black Death, England sort of
Speaker 1: set set on this this road of eliminating serfdom and
Speaker 1: moving towards something that looks a little bit more like
Speaker 1: a modern capitalist system where laborers were sort of free
Speaker 1: to go from one thing to the other that didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily happen in other parts of Europe, even though they
Speaker 1: went through the Black Death as well. Why do we
Speaker 1: think that happened. Why did England seem to have this
Speaker 1: economic trend accelerated in a way that maybe other places didn't.
Speaker 1: So this is the This is a thing that economic
Speaker 1: historians have argued about a very great deal. Um, if
Speaker 1: anybody knows Pseudo Erasmus on Twitter, he's the king of
Speaker 1: talking about the late medieval economy and the and the
Speaker 1: rise of capitalism there, it's a whole thing. Um, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a whole series of debates. So what what
Speaker 1: I would say is that prior to the sixteenth century,
Speaker 1: it's very hard to talk about capitalism as a system
Speaker 1: anywhere other than maybe the biggest cities of the Low countries,
Speaker 1: the merchants of London, northern Italy, you know, merchants in Barcelona,
Speaker 1: places like that, um, southern Germany to the Hansa. So
Speaker 1: basically you could you have there are capitalists, There are
Speaker 1: definitely people who are trying to use their money in
Speaker 1: productive ways. But the some of the baseline concepts that
Speaker 1: we asociate with capitalism, basically that everything is that that
Speaker 1: everything is a has a monetary value. Um that land
Speaker 1: is a commodity that can be that has a monetary
Speaker 1: value and can be transferred from person to person. They
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily working with these same kind of baseline assumptions,
Speaker 1: so I'm a little uncomfortable with applying that term to it.
Speaker 1: But with that set, with that caveat out of the way,
Speaker 1: I gotta do that. I gotta do the specialist historian
Speaker 1: thing real quick. Um, with that caveat out of the way,
Speaker 1: I think that England was especially well suited to take
Speaker 1: advantage of more intense interregional distribution in the later Middle Ages.
Speaker 1: So you different regions after the Middle Ages because you
Speaker 1: have or after the Black Death, because you have this
Speaker 1: enormous drop in population. And again, not everybody needs to
Speaker 1: be uh not everybody needs to be farming wheat anymore.
Speaker 1: You can, you can have more specialization. England is really
Speaker 1: well suited to expand its wool production. UM. The cloth
Speaker 1: market is the cloth markets in the low countries where
Speaker 1: where they're mostly are turning um wooll into finished cloth
Speaker 1: for export. Some will also goes to uh Some will
Speaker 1: also goes directly to Italy to be woven there and
Speaker 1: then exported England is really well suited to take advantage
Speaker 1: of this, and because everything is in close proximity to London,
Speaker 1: which is a financial center. It's right on the North Sea.
Speaker 1: London is very tightly connected to the commercial centers of
Speaker 1: the Low Countries, which are some of the most commercially
Speaker 1: advanced places in Europe. There's a geographic aspect to it
Speaker 1: where London where England is just really well suited to
Speaker 1: take advantage of these things, and it has a legal
Speaker 1: system that protects property rights, which is helpful. There's some
Speaker 1: demographic things going on, one of them being that UH
Speaker 1: women in in England tend to have much later ages
Speaker 1: at first marriage, so there so there are more UH
Speaker 1: female wage earners in the economy um which is which
Speaker 1: is a sign of its dynamism. Even before marrying and
Speaker 1: starting a household. Women in England, the Low Countries, to
Speaker 1: some extent northern Germany are are much more likely to
Speaker 1: be participants in a wage based market economy than they
Speaker 1: were elsewhere in Europe, so that that aspect plays into it.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of things happening. It's hard, it's really
Speaker 1: hard to separate out any individual thing. But if I
Speaker 1: had to point to one. I think it would be
Speaker 1: some combination of lots of wage earners a a monetized economy.
Speaker 1: Much more fully than in other places in Europe. People
Speaker 1: were thinking in England in terms of the monetary value,
Speaker 1: of the abstract monetary value of things. Um, they weren't
Speaker 1: necessarily using the most advanced accounting practices, but kind of
Speaker 1: the mental tools were there. If that makes any sort
Speaker 1: of sense. That so even even a peasant is thinking
Speaker 1: in terms of how much is how much is my
Speaker 1: labor worth? How much is if even if I'm trading
Speaker 1: one commodity for another, where you were doing so with
Speaker 1: a monetary standard in mind. So we're converting this thing's
Speaker 1: value to a to a monetary standard as we make
Speaker 1: this barter transaction. But I think that's really important is
Speaker 1: just like even at the village level, there was lots
Speaker 1: of credit available in England. Um, that's true all over Europe,
Speaker 1: that they're kind of informal systems for providing credit to people,
Speaker 1: but that was especially true in England. We have lots
Speaker 1: of really good evidence for it that you could take
Speaker 1: out a loan on your land and you could use
Speaker 1: that money for productive investment. That's a thing that existed
Speaker 1: in England not necessarily as common elsewhere. UM. So I'm
Speaker 1: kind of I'm loth to point to a single factor,
Speaker 1: but I think all of those things put together, UM
Speaker 1: mattered a great deal. The distribution networks get much more
Speaker 1: intense in the later Middle Ages, with more regional specialization
Speaker 1: you have, even if the actual volumes of goods moving
Speaker 1: are not as UM are not as high as they
Speaker 1: were prior to the plague, I think more people were
Speaker 1: participating in those kinds of UM regional and long distance
Speaker 1: exchange networks. I think that matters a lot. I think
Speaker 1: more people were more closely tied into kind of broader,
Speaker 1: broader systems of exchange. UM. I'm not sure if that's
Speaker 1: a good answer, but it I think it's a little
Speaker 1: bit of everything. I think all of those things matter
Speaker 1: to some degree. So you describe all of these sort
Speaker 1: of things that came about in the post plague world,
Speaker 1: post plague economy, many of them pretty good, uh, Greater
Speaker 1: sophistication of money, more productivity, so forth. I don't draw
Speaker 1: like too many like comparisons are too hard lines between
Speaker 1: then and now. But one of the things that I
Speaker 1: feel about COVID and this crisis, is that a lot
Speaker 1: of pre crisis trends just got like supercharged and accelerated,
Speaker 1: like we're compressing five or ten years of history into
Speaker 1: six months. And you see it with the rise of
Speaker 1: tele teleworking and telehealth and e commerce and other just
Speaker 1: all things, and asset values flying to the moon, and
Speaker 1: in just rates plunging and interstate tax competition that was
Speaker 1: already a thing pre crisis really accelerating with all the
Speaker 1: people leaving California supposedly to go to Texas. And so
Speaker 1: I'm curious, like to what extent can we say that
Speaker 1: with the Black Death, that that had an accelerant effect
Speaker 1: of things that would have happened eventually or maybe things
Speaker 1: that were trending in that direction. And did that also
Speaker 1: of the effect of I guess, uh, rapidly pulling forth,
Speaker 1: pulling forward history that was inevitably on its path to
Speaker 1: unfolding at a slower pace. Yeah, I would not say inevitably,
Speaker 1: but those trend lines were definitely in place. So I
Speaker 1: mentioned that like the Florentines super companies had already gone
Speaker 1: bust by the time. By the time the Black Death happened,
Speaker 1: the economy was already trending downward that the peak of
Speaker 1: population had probably already been passed already. Um, the the
Speaker 1: landlord's ability to demand things from their tenants was already
Speaker 1: lower than it had been. There were more peasants rebellions
Speaker 1: already even before the Black Death than there had been before.
Speaker 1: So there's there's more unrest. Um that whether that system
Speaker 1: could have survived in the same way without the Black Death,
Speaker 1: I still think I still think peasants would have been
Speaker 1: better off in the long run even without that particular shock.
Speaker 1: And I mean I think you can see some of
Speaker 1: the same dynamics operating now. It's like when something like
Speaker 1: this happens, there's no going back. People are not going
Speaker 1: to forget the thing that happened. Like workers who have
Speaker 1: spent the last um, you know, nine months working from
Speaker 1: home and like doing it, are not going to forget
Speaker 1: that they like working from home. Um. People who have
Speaker 1: been able able to demand a small rise in wages
Speaker 1: are not going to forget that their that their wages
Speaker 1: went up. People who like me, moved states and uh
Speaker 1: and are not going to forget that they liked moving states. UM.
Speaker 1: Things like that. There's you know, the and the Black
Speaker 1: Death is is much the same that like if you
Speaker 1: come out of that as a laborer knowing that, like
Speaker 1: you can tell your landlord that you're not going to
Speaker 1: work for him, and what's he gonna do? Sick the
Speaker 1: bailiff on you. Well, you can punch the bailiff if
Speaker 1: he comes to get you. Like, you don't forget that
Speaker 1: that's happened. And I think that's the big thing, is
Speaker 1: that like once this once this stuff happens, it's then
Speaker 1: part of your collective experience. It's part of your expectations
Speaker 1: of how economic life is supposed to work in a
Speaker 1: way that it hadn't been before. And so that's the parallel,
Speaker 1: even if the inflection point itself is much different, is
Speaker 1: that there is no going back. You can't force people
Speaker 1: back into the box they were in beforehand, back into
Speaker 1: their ways of thinking beforehand. I think you're gonna see that,
Speaker 1: especially with state financing, fiscal stimulus. Uh, there's just there's
Speaker 1: no going back on those fronts, like as something a
Speaker 1: switch has flipped. Well, any other like sort of like
Speaker 1: last key thoughts, Patrick of like um points that you
Speaker 1: think people should really understand. I think there's no underestimating
Speaker 1: how important the Black Death is to to the later
Speaker 1: development of the European economy. Like, I think the labor
Speaker 1: shortage is the labor shortage that comes out of that
Speaker 1: the kind of addition of freedom that laborers have. It
Speaker 1: spurs things like an um increased emphasis on labor saving technologies.
Speaker 1: So I don't think that there's a world in which
Speaker 1: you have the printing press without the Black Death, because
Speaker 1: that's a labor saving technology, not just in the sense
Speaker 1: that um, that you have the the attempt to save
Speaker 1: labor on that, but also the financial mechanisms that make
Speaker 1: it possible for you to fund the development of a
Speaker 1: printing press. Like it's a super capital intensive process. It
Speaker 1: involves multiple layers of transactions, a whole lot of kind
Speaker 1: of delayed return expectations. UM. I don't think that that
Speaker 1: whole process, not even the desire to have the thing
Speaker 1: in the first place, would have existed without the Black Death,
Speaker 1: without this increase in kind of ways of thinking creatively
Speaker 1: about investment, UM, ways of moving money around, even in
Speaker 1: the absence of coinage. UM, I don't think that any
Speaker 1: of that stuff would have happened without it. So it's
Speaker 1: really the foundational event that gives you the early modern
Speaker 1: economy so even though in the in the short term
Speaker 1: there is a there is a net draw down in
Speaker 1: the European economy. The European economy is smaller after the
Speaker 1: Black Death. UM. Europe is more of a backwater in
Speaker 1: the fifteenth century than it is in the fourteenth that's
Speaker 1: like it's the end of eur Asia. Like nobody wants
Speaker 1: to go there. There's no they don't export anything that's
Speaker 1: worth anything. That's why it's you know, European ships um
Speaker 1: traveling elsewhere at the end of the fifteenth century, and
Speaker 1: not vice versa. It's because they're the ones who need
Speaker 1: to go find things of value. But what happens during
Speaker 1: this really rough period and also somebody didn't talk about
Speaker 1: the climate got worse, it got colder and more variable.
Speaker 1: Crop yields went down. Um, there's just incessant war in
Speaker 1: the later in the later fourteenth and into the fifteen centuries. UM,
Speaker 1: the Hundred Years War just being the best known of them.
Speaker 1: Like it's not a good time. But the tools that
Speaker 1: developed during this period, especially fiscal tools, UM. The things
Speaker 1: that states learned to do in large part in order
Speaker 1: to make war for longer and more efficiently. Um, there's
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of stuff that happens in this period
Speaker 1: that's almost like a product of scarcity um and having
Speaker 1: to think outside the previous economic box. That gives you
Speaker 1: a lot of the developments that we see around fire
Speaker 1: and afterwards, the things when we see, you know, quote
Speaker 1: unquote the rise of Europe, the emergence of a of
Speaker 1: a capitalist system um and eventually gives us the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 1: So the Black Death was good. I think if you
Speaker 1: made it through the Black Death and you could deal
Speaker 1: with the emotional fallout of half the people you know dying,
Speaker 1: you were you were likely to be better off in
Speaker 1: material terms than you were beforehand. It's bitch cool. It's
Speaker 1: almost seven years has passed instead, so we can. We can.
Speaker 1: It's not enough, it's not It's not too soon. Patrick,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on. This is a
Speaker 1: real treat and I just really appreciate you joining us. Hey,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for having me as an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of your show. I've learned so
Speaker 1: much about finance and the economy from listening to you guys.
Speaker 1: Thank you awesome. Well, we'll have to have you back
Speaker 1: after your book. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you. That was great. I I really did have
Speaker 1: a lot of like I was confused prior to this,
Speaker 1: Like I genuinely didn't understand exactly. But the explanation of
Speaker 1: this sort of uh supply side changes, the labor shortage,
Speaker 1: the productivity shock, the new demand from previous peasants who
Speaker 1: weren't having all of their all of their consumption I
Speaker 1: guess exploited or surplus exploited. I finally feel like he
Speaker 1: did such a great job putting it all together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he really did. And I thought the point he made
Speaker 1: towards the end about how a lot of this was well,
Speaker 1: you know, some of these trends or sort of on
Speaker 1: the way, but the idea that the experience, the unusual
Speaker 1: experience of the black death is sort of stuck in
Speaker 1: people's minds and made them realize what was possible. This
Speaker 1: idea of what you can ask for more money, or
Speaker 1: you can leave your lord and go work somewhere or
Speaker 1: else if you go far enough like that definitely has
Speaker 1: resonance in the COVID period, you know what I mean? Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And I was just gonna say it made me think
Speaker 1: like we might be underestimating the change. That's going to
Speaker 1: come out of COVID. I mean, like, you know, I
Speaker 1: think in many respects our lives will go back to
Speaker 1: something resembling normal. But it also seems like, you know,
Speaker 1: this has just been It's obviously this period has not
Speaker 1: been as deadly as the Black Death was by any stretch,
Speaker 1: but it's been a global disruption to virtually everyone's lives
Speaker 1: on the entire planet and somewhere another. For what's turning
Speaker 1: into a pretty extended period of time, it seems plausible
Speaker 1: that we aren't even like really can't even really grasp
Speaker 1: the sort of ripple effects that an episode like this
Speaker 1: will have. I think that's fair, although I do think
Speaker 1: you see some inklings of it. Your life. Your life
Speaker 1: hasn't changed, I know, because you guys don't really have it.
Speaker 1: But but for much of the world from outside Wait
Speaker 1: a second, Okay, I'm going to dispute that, but I'm
Speaker 1: going to dispute it offline, away from the Volens listeners.
Speaker 1: But I would say, you are seeing We've discussed this right,
Speaker 1: you are seeing inklings of some changes, especially in the US,
Speaker 1: where there isn't necessarily as strong as social safety net
Speaker 1: as in places like Europe. You don't have free medical
Speaker 1: care things like that. I think is the year where
Speaker 1: quite a few people are starting to call for additional
Speaker 1: government involvement in those sorts of things, in providing extra
Speaker 1: unemployment kind of fits, physical stimulus um, some sort of
Speaker 1: national healthcare whatever like you are seeing that in the US. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: I I feel like life is going to change. At
Speaker 1: least that's my feeling right now, December sixty three pm
Speaker 1: Eastern Time. If they're talking to Patrick Wyman, the life
Speaker 1: is get Okay, all right, we'll come back to the
Speaker 1: question and we'll have Patrick on again when he's great. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: shall we leave it there? Yep, let's say it there.
Speaker 1: This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Why Isn't All? You can
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter at The Stalwart. Follow our guests
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Patrick Underscore Wyman, and check out his
Speaker 1: podcast The Tides of History. Follow our producer Laura Carlson
Speaker 1: at Laura M. Carlson. Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast,
Speaker 1: Francesca Levie at franch Us, Get Today, and check out
Speaker 1: all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.