alt Hacker NewsTerrible article title and framing. This is just about a QJE article, the QJE by the way is famous for being a little more out there. The article takes a standard gravity equation from economic geography and finds that it fits well to a dataset they created from Bronze Age slates. In general the gravity equation is one of the successes from economics so this isn’t super surprising, but it is welcome and notable. That’s pretty much it.
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Also, a gravity-like model makes even more sense in ancient times which were really constrained by distances, unlike modern economies for which this is more true for goods than services (although there are gravity effects for services, too). In a 100% goods economy, with information itself traveling at the speed of a man or a horse, everything becomes gravity-like.
(We've since changed the URL from https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/ancient-clay-tablets-sho... to the paper itself.)