🎓 Discussion Qs on Wealth, Marriage, Education, & Inventors

The relationship between success and money, with side quests into Mason jars, Assyrian marriage contracts, and Imperial boarding schools.

I read a lot, and many of the annotations I write in my books are questions. Throughout the course of the year, I often find answers — I do a bit of research, or I ask some friends, or I fire off a post on Substack Notes asking whether anyone has seen fresh tea leaves or and kind commentators help me figure out things like why John Brown’s men used a sword that looks distinctly Roman.

But sometimes, the questions linger… and aren’t quite “big” enough to fill a whole essay. For Christmas, I’m letting myself gather them up here and hope they spark a (polite, please!) discussion.

On Money, Currency, Wealth, and Social Capital

I came across the idea that some social animals have wealth that is multi-generational and based on social alliances. This strikes me as a... very non-central example of what “wealth” means — and solving inequality in wolves is not something I can bring myself to care about — but I still found it thought-provoking for the same reasons I wrote about examples of historical examples of food as currency and the implications of moving between coinage and other forms of currency (like the purely digital).

I don’t think “political capital” in the large-group sense has the same fungibility as cold hard cash, but I also don’t think the researchers are insane to see a connection. Nepotism demonstrates that social capital is transferable, for example — and it can certainly be parlayed into financial remuneration.

Where do you think the line between “wealth” and “advantages” is?

On Having Wives in Multiple Ports

Bigamy wasn’t generally practiced in Assyria, but there was an exception when the groom was a prosperous Assyrian trader who traveled a lot. He’d marry a local woman — say, in Anatolia — then they’d have kids, he’d have a base to operate from in far-away but economically useful places. Then, when he retired (back to Assur and his primary wife), they’d divorce, she’d end up with the house and a bunch of money, and some of the kids would stay and some would go. She’d be free to remarry if she wanted (presumably she’d be younger than him, and possibly still of child-bearing age).

There are some funny stories about angry wives chasing their trader (autocorrect wanted to change this to “traitor”) husbands hither and yon but being ignored, but that wasn’t the norm. This is probably not why rich traders sometimes ended up with a “woman in every port” sort of situation but it does highlight what I think is a relatively interesting phenomenon. In our society, secret wives are pretty frowned upon, and afaik most polygamous societies don’t run different households. Traders and sailors are different though. The only fictional example I can think of offhand — from the Penric & Desdemona novellas by Lois Bujold, which are phenomenal — involves a trader who sails.

But he’s reasonably wealthy, and most sailors probably weren’t. So I’ve always kind of wondered how sailors ended up with multiple families — it doesn’t seem like a terribly remunerative profession. Prosperous traders like the ones in Assyria are another matter entirely.

In a marriage between locals in at least some cities, forever-marriage was much more common. Husband and wife would have held property jointly. But apparently Assyrian traders were rich enough to normalize an alternate sort of bigamous arrangement.

Does anybody have any other insight into whether these sorts of multi-family arrangements ever make economic sense (rather than just being about a guy with two families because he’s fallen in love with two women in a row and managed to not completely abandon the first family, or whatever)? I think this is the first time I’ve ever stumbled across an example that wasn’t a one-household harem situation, “screwup” or “sailor.”

On Training Elite Sons of Rival Cultures

The West has a habit of educating foreign elites — the concept has even made its way to TVTropes as “Majored in Western Hypocrisy.” Kremlin-connected children grew up in the very countries whose societies their parents claim to reject. Oligarchs send their kids to prep schools. It’s not just a Russian thing. Many West African political elites send their children to boarding schools and universities abroad, especially in the UK. Wealthy parents in China are paying as much as $63,000 a year to send their kids to school in Japan as China clamps down on Western education — which is to say, they used to send a lot more kids to Western schools.

This is not a new phenomenon, and it is hardly limited to the West. The Inca had a tendency to take sons from nearby elites and educate them into Incan culture. The Romans did so with German elite sons — I’m not sure how commonly it happened but Arminius is certainly the example that springs to mind...

Born in 18 or 17 BC in Germania, Arminius was the son of the Cheruscan chief Segimerus, who was allied with Rome... Arminius learned to speak Latin and joined the Roman military with his younger brother Flavus. He served in the Roman army between AD 1 and 6, and received a military education as well as Roman citizenship and the status of equite before returning to Germania. These experiences gave him knowledge of Roman politics and military tactics, which allowed him to successfully anticipate enemy battle maneuvers during his later campaigns against the Roman army

For those not familiar with his Wikipedia page, Arminius is responsible for one of Rome’s greatest defeats: the Battle of Teutoberg Forest, which sharply limited Roman expansion and is the topic of my favorite Harry Turtledove book: Give Me Back My Legions!

But it usually worked pretty well for the dominant nation.

Training subjugated elites as client-kings obviously backfired in Arminius’ case, but as far as I know his brother Flavus stayed pretty loyal to Rome, and the fact that going against Rome worked this time kinda implies that for most of the other Roman-education German elites, they didn’t end up proving themselves untrustworthy from the Roman perspective, at least in the vast majority of cases. They often became client-kings.

Seriously, this is not new. Back in ancient Egypt —

Thutmose III implemented a policy of seizing the sons of defeated kings to raise them in Egypt; these Egyptianized Syrians eventually returned to their home cities to become loyal vassal rulers. Thutmose III also utilized marriage as a means of cementing his control of the Levant; the tomb of three of his foreign wives indicates that he had several Syrian wives. Amenhotep III inherited a strong Egyptian empire, and under his rule Egypt was unquestionably the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the Near East.

Do you think this is a good use of “soft power”? Or ultimately dangerous and wasteful (in ways Arminius exemplifies). Obviously it’s possible to do great harm by kidnapping the children of families you’re oppressing, but might it also be unethical to refuse to train elite children of less powerful, neighboring states? Leaving aside ethics, is it an effective use of resources? Can it be mutually beneficial for both the hegemonic power and the rival states?

On Mason Jars & Incentivizing Inventions

My son is learning how to read, and this morning he asked me if my water jar said “Mason”—he recognized the word because it’s the name of a friend. He asked why they are called that, then asked if the inventor (John Landis Mason) had a family.

Mason had kids, 6 of whom survived to adulthood. Unfortunately, despite many children and several patents, including for items still used today -- literally, I just got homemade pressure-canned jam from a friend as a Christmas gift -- he struggled to monetize his patents, and ended up doing odd jobs like tinsmithing to try (and fail) to make ends meet.

He died impoverished in a tenement and was buried in an unmarked grave.

He’s definitely not the first guy I’ve ever come across to die penniless despite inventing critically important technology or creating an enduring piece of art. I know patents are meant to help incentivize inventions, but I kinda wish there was something else we could do instead — but I don’t have any good ideas for it.

Do you?