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Notes -
I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
I suspect the reason free markets took so long to catch on is that the most valuable commodity in human history does not respond particularly well to free markets - namely, annual staple crops.
An ideal free market good is fungible and does not spoil, easy to transport, and has flexible supply and demand. Excess goods on the market can be absorbed through lower prices and reduced production, while deficiencies spur increased production through higher prices, resulting in rapid recalibration towards efficient prices for the good.
Staple crops are obviously not like this at all. They spoil fairly rapidly if overproduced (mostly through pests eating them), and excess food is worthless at any price - a person can really only carry so much fat on them. Meanwhile, underproduction is a literal life-and-death affair, and bringing the goods to market a few months late is going to be less profitable, because everyone involved is dead. To reap crops you need to sow them well in advance, and even when you do, you really have very little control over what is produced (good year? Bad year? Who knows?). Even with all that in mind, most people are self-producing anyway, so the “market” would only be skilled labor and up, which is what, under 10% of the population? Finally, they’re really not efficient to transport on anything but a boat, and even then it’s somewhat risky and therefore expensive business.
So the right model for staple crops is a lot less free market and a lot more risk mitigation. Most of that risk mitigation is decentralized, but central authorities were very interested in helping out, like the Roman dole or the Egyptian granaries. Either way, there’s more demand for theory on agriculture, harvests, and models of good and bad kingship than for free markets, and that’s exactly what we get for most of history.
It’s only once advances in European sail coincide with the durable products of flexible industrial manufacturing to create new centers of value that the free market becomes a more relevant abstraction, and just at that point, the theory emerges to explain why merchant powers are dominating the old land-bound interests. C’est la vie. (I’m sure the spice trade factors in too.)
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