Re:Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)
by rwmj on Saturday October 29, 2016 @10:42AM
(#12824137)
So maybe the thing to invent is banking?
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Re:Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)
by lkrubner on Saturday October 29, 2016 @05:17PM
(#12826442)
If you lend someone money, how would you get them to repay you? If you want to become a banker, then you need to sign contracts. You need an independent judiciary that will offer fair and impartial hearings. Above all else, you need equality before the law: the legal immunity of the nobility needs to be suspended. If someone fails to repay you, then you need to be able to take them to court.
Re:Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)
by Houshalter on Saturday October 29, 2016 @11:04AM
(#12824229)
Christians prohibited loans and banking. Jews were able to practice it though.
Re:Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)
by jeff_petersen on Saturday October 29, 2016 @04:58PM
(#12826337)
IIRC Christians prohibited charging interest on loans (usury), not banking per se. I suppose a bank could be operated by Christians that simply accepted deposits and charged a sum for safekeeping with no loans whatsoever. I don't know that anything like that ever happened in practice, however, since anybody with enough money to require safekeeping in a vault probably had their own vault.
Likewise an interest free loan would be permissible, though there wouldn't be great incentives to offer them except to family members, for example.
Re:Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)
by lmm on Saturday October 29, 2016 @06:24PM
(#12826791)
What happened in the Islamic world was partnerships instead. If a merchant wanted to make a trade expedition funded by a banker, they'd set up the expedition as a partnership with the banker providing the funds and the merchant doing the work, splitting the profits, in a way that's economically equivalent to lending money at interest. Similarly, insurance syndicates tended to be organised as a bunch of merchants getting together and agreeing to pool a certain amount of funds that would be used to repay any of their losses.
(It works up to a point, but it's hard to scale. You can emulate a loan contract between two parties, but you can't have a bond market because the "loans" aren't tradeable)