Planet Money: Bloody, Miserable Medieval Economics
Update: 2020-07-22
Description
Drag out those leggings and chain mail armor, folks. We're going medieval, specifically the 12th and 13th centuries.
Before governments had regulators with suits and briefcases, says William and Mary history professor Philip Daileader, they had knights. The Lancelots of real life went around the kingdom forcing people to pay whatever the knights decided they owed. It was a brutal economic approach.
If you think the knights were tough, be thankful you never faced the guild system. It existed to eliminate competition and benefit producers at the expense of consumers. Craftspeople fought each other for control and tried to limit access to the market — at their own expense, it turned out.
Before governments had regulators with suits and briefcases, says William and Mary history professor Philip Daileader, they had knights. The Lancelots of real life went around the kingdom forcing people to pay whatever the knights decided they owed. It was a brutal economic approach.
If you think the knights were tough, be thankful you never faced the guild system. It existed to eliminate competition and benefit producers at the expense of consumers. Craftspeople fought each other for control and tried to limit access to the market — at their own expense, it turned out.
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