The greatest mystery of the Inca Empire was its strange economy (2012)

A comment from a Peruvian friend of mine, who I passed the article onto:<p>&quot;This is incredibly misleading. There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners. The vast majority of people were a form of slave and trapped in basically a completely rigorous caste system. They were a mix of India and NK, ruled by a Mao &quot;god&quot; Inca who had total control of everything. The article gets right that people had to pay tax as labor but in some cases also as a percentage of the food they gathered, and a non-trivial percentage was stored in &quot;tambos&quot; (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambo_(Incan_structure)" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tambo_(Incan_structure)</a>) to support the military and state-controlled trading routes.<p>OTOH the Spanish monarchy was totally evil, purposefully wiping out millions of people and creating basically what amounts of royal satraps in the new world from which to extract cheap&#x2F;free labor and tons of gold and other wealth.<p>That said, the Incas were also primitive--no real written language and barely a minimum system for tracking amounts and numbers (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Quipu</a>).<p>I took 12 years of Peruvian history and it wasn&#x27;t until recently that I realized how utterly terrible the Incas were. They were proto Marxists.&quot;

The extent to which the Incas did it is remarkable, but historically civil engineering had little to do with markets. The ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Persians etc. pretty much built their infrastructure and monumental buildings with drafted, unpaid labor. The French monarchy, one of the most advanced states in the world, relied on the <i>corvée</i> to build roads up until 1789 [1]. The decisive turn in the situation took place in Holland around the 16th century, when Dutch cities discovered they could build canals and recoup costs by charging moderate usage fees. This system of financing civil engineering, adapted to e.g. turnpikes and later railroads, increasingly became widespread, and displaced earlier arrangements in Western countries during the 18th and 19th centuries. So what would be truly surprising is if the Incas <i>had</i> done it with money.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvee#France" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Corvee#France</a>

&quot;This io9 flashback previously ran in January 2012.&quot;<p>This note on the submitted article prompted me to look for earlier discussion of the Inca empire through the HN Search tool. This article appears not to have been submitted before, but we have had other discussions here about the Inca empire and its conquest by the Spanish.<p>The submitted article correctly notes that the history of the Inca empire is fragmentary because of a severe lack of written sources. Archeology is a poor substitute for history (relying on actual written records from the time studied) because it is hard to figure out what people were thinking. The rather rapid conquest of the Inca empire by a badly outnumbered group of Spanish explorers surely relied most on the epidemic diseases that the Spaniards inadvertently brought with them, but it appears to have relied as well on dissatisfaction with Inca rule on the part of many Inca subjects. People don&#x27;t fight hard against invaders if their &quot;home&quot; rulers are dictators--World War II provides other examples of that principle. Maybe the greatest mystery of the Inca empire is that it lasted any length of time at all. The empire collapsed rapidly once a new, tiny group of potential rulers arrived. South America&#x27;s Andean territories soon became viceroyalties of Spain, far away.

The book _1491_ is a great read to learn more about what the Americas were like before the European arrival. Recent archaeology is finding that the societies in the Americas were way more complex and interconnected than most of us understand. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum...</a>

<i>The secret of the Inca&#x27;s great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life.<p>Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society.</i><p>Isn&#x27;t this just a variant of feudalism?

Reading this, it doesn&#x27;t sound all that different from Serfdom in Europe. Essentially, people were tied to the land, and in return the noble provided protection.<p>The main difference seems to be the centrality of supply distribution. With serfdom, the serfs were basically required to work for the lord&#x2F;noble and then had to also do their own food growing&#x2F;production to survive. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Serfdom</a>)<p>Having a central authority ensuring no-one starves and everyone had all the essentials allowed for much better specialization and efficiency. Other cultures evolved into similar specialization via trade and offered distributed societies. The Inca-style state would have similar limitations to Soviet Union, where all goods that were not produced within its boundaries were virtually unattainable by the common people.<p>This also stifled innovation in areas that the state was not focusing on. Just look at the Soviet consumer car manufacturing sector - an automatic transmission was virtually unheard of until 90s imports started pouring in.

Another hypothesis, which is probably mostly wrong but still extremely interesting, is that put forth by Julian Jaynes: that the Incas, and most other early peoples, were not conscious (by Jaynes&#x27; very specific definition of &quot;conscious&quot;), but instead were unconscious agents guided by hallucinations, and that attempts to reason about them with modern models of volition and awareness are doomed.<p>See: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bicameralism_(psychology)</a>

I am not familiar enough with the Incan economy specifically to say whether this lack of internal markets claim is accurate. I do know that the Inca would not have to &quot;invent&quot; markets because there were preexisting markets in the Andean region. In &quot;Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms&quot; Frank Salomon describes pre-Incan trade in the region surrounding Quito. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Native-Lords-Quito-Age-Incas/dp/0521040493" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Native-Lords-Quito-Age-Incas&#x2F;dp&#x2F;052104...</a><p>They would also have been familiar with the primitive currency used by the groups they conquered. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe-monies" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Axe-monies</a><p>Granted, this was in the most recently conquered area of Incan expansion. The blood had hardly dried before the Spanish came but the subjects of the Inca would have been familiar with these concepts.<p>I also think that it wrong to talk about the descendants of these people as though they don&#x27;t exist any more. Indigenous culture is quite strong and in the Andes. There was a change in power but it wasn&#x27;t like turning out a light switch. Even the Inca, themselves, (who were really just a noble class) were able to self identify and organize a rebellion in the late 1700&#x27;s, 200 years after the initial conquest.

Mita (taxation by labor) is not that weird really. Think of the most basic form of exchange in a barter society. You show up to a market with potatoes you&#x27;ve grown and leave with bread, pots, etc.. Well, what if you don&#x27;t have potatoes and want bread? You could offer to chop wood for the baker. Work can be bartered just as easily as goods, and credit can be accrued. We do this all the time, even today. Say your sister helps you move. When she next moves, you&#x27;re going to feel like a scumbag if you&#x27;re not there to help her! Some campesino villages in Peru still barter labor this way on a rather large scale. Mita in such communities is a bit like a socially enforced volunteer spirit. People are socially obliged to do things for their community. The Inca empire just took that to a completely different scale!<p>The unusual thing about the Inca is that they preferred to tax labor even from those who produced goods. Potato farmers wouldn&#x27;t tithe potatoes. They&#x27;d spend some of their time working government lands that grew potatoes. The fact that farmers were feeding themselves and the state out of different fields probably had some rather interesting effects.

&quot;Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life. Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society.&quot;<p>I find it fascinating that this article compares the labor system more to socialism than to slavery.

Seems like a centralized economy does not have to be inefficient after all.

Centralized states that pretend to be egalitarian need terror so that the peons don&#x27;t forget to shore the line. Maybe that&#x27;s why the Inca&#x27;s had the habit of human sacrifices; (interesting, this seems to have been a common &#x27;feature&#x27; of both Aztec and Inca culture)<p>Also without the terror component the Soviet state became stagnant.

Perhaps not so strange if religion is taken into account, which the article completely neglects. People will do a great deal if they believe it is for a higher cause - and especially if sacrifice is an ingrained social imperative. Between the society living very close to the edge of survival (no matter how prosperous, they were one season from possible pervasive disaster so everyone&#x27;s contribution counts), and service to their gods going so far as human sacrifice (societal maintenance deemed so important <i>people</i> are ritualistically killed, instilling devotion to the system), people become quite content living in an abundant theocracy.

Not sure why, but this reminds me of youth work actions <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work_actions" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Youth_work_actions</a>

Guns, Germs &amp; Steel discusses the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire in some detail. Well worth a read.<p>More surprising to me than the lack of money is the fact that they did not have the wheel.

I believe the point is the &quot;missing&quot; markets. In the old world markets arise all over the place, using some form of currency, for example cigarettes in prisons, laundry detergent-driven drug market in the US etc.<p>Probably no Incan had gotten around to inventing the concept of token economies yet. I don&#x27;t actually believe this lack of markets benefited them. It must have been an awkward way to run a society with a couple of thousands of members.

It is not clear to me from the article and from the brief googling I did, how they came to the conclusion that there was no trading class? What evidence did they use to prove this absence? It seems to me the ruling class of any society works by trading with each other, in promises if not in currency. I don&#x27;t see how it could work any other way?

Perhaps they were rich in sanity. Unlike the 20th century. (Stalins, Hitlers, nuclear brinkmanship, massive pollution, tens of millions killed in war ...)<p>Sanity alone explains their remarkable success. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Money is a symptom.<p>That and (towards the end) a couple of kings who had <i>absolute</i> power. Like ... Stalin.

Just like the Federation