How Many Workers Did It Take to Build the Great Pyramid of Giza?
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built circa 2600 BC and was the world’s tallest structure for nearly 4000 years. It consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks with a weight on the order of 6-7 million tons. How many people did it take to construct the Great Pyramid? Vaclav Smil in Numbers Don’t Lie gives an interesting method of calculation:
The Great Pyramid’s potential energy (what is required to lift the mass above ground level) is about 2.4 trillion joules. Calculating this is fairly easy: it is simply the product of the acceleration due to gravity, the pyramid’s mass, and its center of mass (a quarter of its height)…I am assuming a mean of 2.6 tons per cubic meter and hence a total mass of about 6.75 million tons.
People are able to convert about 20 percent of food energy into useful work, and for hard-working men that amounts to about 440 kilojoules a day. Lifting the stones would thus require about 5.5 million labor days (2.4 trillion/44000), or about 275,000 days a year during [a] 20 year period, and about 900 people could deliver that by working 10 hours a day for 300 days a year. A similar number might be needed to emplace the stones in the rising structure and then smooth the cladding blocks…And in order to cut 2.6 million cubic meters of stone in 20 years, the project would have required about 1,500 quarrymen working 300 days per year and producing 0.25 cubic meters of stone per capita…the grand total would then be some 3,300 workers. Even if we were to double that in order to account for designers, organizers and overseers etc. etc….the total would be still fewer than 7,000 workers.
…During the time of the pyramid’s construction, the total population of Egypt was 1.5-1.6 million people, and hence the deployed force of less than 10,000 would not have amounted to any extraordinary imposition on the country’s economy.
I was surprised at the low number and pleased at the unusual method of calculation. Archeological evidence from the nearby worker’s village suggests 4,000-5,000 on site workers, not including the quarrymen, transporters and designers and support staff. Thus, Smil’s calculation looks very good.
What other unusual calculations do you know?
The polity that is the UK
There is no doubt that the past 14 years has seen miserable progress on living standards. Real household disposable income per person has flatlined in the UK since the 2019 election, compared with roughly 2 per cent annual growth in most parliaments since the second world war. More interesting is the distribution of income changes over the past five years and the whole period the Conservatives have led government since 2010.
Despite a huge rise in food bank use and cuts to social security for working-age households, the surprise is that it is the poorest households that have done better than the rest of the UK.
Better is a relative measure, however. Taking detailed income data up to 2022-23 and updating this with known trends thereafter, the Resolution Foundation finds that only the bottom 20 per cent of the income distribution saw any real income gains in the latest parliament.
Here is more from Chris Giles at the FT. Samir Varma sends me this link about problems with British driving school and the resulting fees and queues. By the way, the SNP is likely to lose three-quarters of its seats in Scotland (FT). And how small a group of party voters will be necessary to mount a challenge to Reform Party leadership? Will there be a core?
Words from Ross Douthat
As a holiday meditation, consider that many of the things that fill people with understandable fear for our national future – polarization, extremism, radicalization, mutual incomprehension across cultural and moral and theological chasms – are also in their own way signs of national vitality. It’s good that so many people from so many different backgrounds still find the American future worth fighting over. It’s potentially good that freaks, weirdos and eccentrics have an increasing share in our politics alongside levelheaded moderates. It’s potentially good that far right and further left are both seeking reimaginings of the national narrative, incompatible as those imaginings may seem. We face a difficult situation in the world and a bad, late-imperial-seeming choice in November — but many of our derangements are also indicators of a heathy discontent with the comfortable decadence of developed societies. From multiple perspectives the American experiment appears at risk — but better to be at risk than to be settled, torpid, stagnant.
Maybe these are just the things you tell yourself when you’ve just had a fifth child. But I think there’s a good chance, a very good chance, that my children will inherit an America quite different from any of our past golden or silver ages, but still the best place to be born and live and flourish in this age of the world.
Here is the link.
Guyana fact of the day
Guyana bursts into the IMF’s 2024 top ten of countries by GDP per capita (PPP). Most are tax havens or oil states (as is Guyana). Singapore, Switzerland, and the USA are the only real economies out of the 16 here.
That is from @whyvert, here is the list.
Independence day assorted links
1. Charles Fain Lehman on marijuana legalization in NYC.
2. New Zealand YIMBY on the move.
3. Facts and speculations about Jackie Chan.
4. Federal judge temporarily blocks rule banning noncompete contracts. And what the FTC maybe should have done, but didn’t.
5. “To illustrate our methods, we systematically exploit data from more than 14 million high school yearbook pictures of graduating US seniors to analyze persistence and change in style. We document a striking convergence of male and female style characteristics.” Link here.
6. Scott Sumner movie reviews.
7. “Mr. Kressin’s home chapter has hosted an expert in menswear, who exhorted members to dress in a “classical American style,” and a screening and discussion of the 2003 naval adventure film “Master and Commander.”” NYT link.
*Emergency Money*
The author is Tom Wilkinson, and the subtitle is Notgeld in the Image Economy of the German Inflation, 1914-1923. Notgeld, or emergency money, typically was privately issued to make up for the deficiencies of government money during that period.
It is hard to think of a book that is more “for me.” The book covers history, monetary economics, private currency issuance, and the artistic renderings put on the private notes. You can see plenty of desperation in those visuals, and clearly the 19th century seems like a long time ago. I read this one right away upon arrival.
You can buy it here. Here is a good short piece on the art.
An overly simple model of positive and negative contagion
When people feel bad and act badly, if only in rhetoric, they make others around them worse as well. That is a simple account of negative contagion of mood.
There is positive contagion too, but it is harder to pull off. If nine people tell you nice things, and one person serves up a somewhat credible insult, it is the insult that sticks with you.
Most social times are a relatively stable mix of positive and negative feelings, but sometimes the dynamics of negative contagion take over, and negativism leads to yet more negativism. Arguably this happened in Europe before WWI, and arguably it is happening in many countries today, including the United States. Very bad events, such as financial crises, also can trigger cycles of negative contagion.
This negative contagion is self-validating. If all the negative feelings, expressed collectively, in fact make outcomes worse, it will seem those negative feelings are justified. In this equilibrium the negative feelings about “opposing others” will be true, but still it would be better to avoid that equilibrium altogether.
A country can get out of a negative cycle either by winning a major war, or when a political entrepreneur comes along with enough oomph and reforms to shift the equilibrium, as Ronald Reagan did in America. Still, negative cycles are hard to break once you get into them. That said, over time things do start to become worse, so options for the positivity entrepreneurs do arise, at least if they can overcome coordination problems and get enough people to feel better.
Many thinkers and writers contribute to this equilibrium of negative feelings, most of all by writing about each other. Even if their substantive points are correct, their social marginal product usually is negative, though you can learn from them because they are competing to offer the most incisive critique.
If you can avoid being overwhelmed by the peer pressure of this negative dynamic, the private and social returns are high. You can just keep on going and build things. Yet few are able to resist the logic of Durkheim, no matter how ostensibly contrarian they may be. In fact the contrarians are often at greatest risk of being caught up in this, because they are so skilled in rejecting and also criticizing the claims of the opposing forces.
Happy Fourth of July!
Finland knows how to troll MR commentators
Perhaps that is why I like the country so much:
Ideally, Marianne Korkalainen’s high school in Rautavaara, a tiny town in eastern Finland, would enroll at least 20 new pupils each year. This autumn, her shrinking municipality will send her only about 12. But Ms Korkalainen, the head teacher, has a plan: she intends to invite half a dozen youngsters from poorer countries to help fill her empty seats. Eager adolescents from places such as Myanmar, Vietnam and Tanzania will swap their tropical cities for her snowy bolthole. They will receive a Finnish education, at Finnish taxpayers’ expense.
Here is more from The Economist. Finland soon will have a shrinking population, and worse yet:
By 2030 the country could have nearly 10% fewer children aged 4-18, according to eu projections. By 2040 their ranks might be smaller by a fifth. This spells trouble in particular for rural schools, which suffer both from having few births and from migration to the cities. Hundreds have shut their doors in recent decades. Some now offer local youngsters bungs, such as free driving lessons and small cash “scholarships”, in the hope of keeping them around.
There is even a Finnish start-up, Finest Future, that sells Finnish lessons to poorer students around the world, in the hope of preparing them for a Finnish taxpayer-subsidized education in Finland. The belief is that recruiting individuals this way is easier and more effective than trying to find good job candidates abroad and also train them in Finnish later on. Stuff the Kalevala down their throats!
Finland has a foreign-born population of about 9 percent, well below the Western European average. I don’t know if this schools policy is a good idea, but I do know most people are not good at thinking about it in cost-benefit terms.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Ken Opalo on the Kenyan protests.
2. Cultural policy in the French elections.
3. An abundance agenda for California, by Samuel Trachtman.
4. The Welsh are committing to making lying in politics illegal? Solve for the equilibrium.
5. Paul Graham has Bayesian reasons for predicting a rebellion.
6. Both crypto and LLMs are new kinds of computers, an oft-overlooked point.
What should I ask Nate Silver?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with Nate, based in part on his new and forthcoming book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (I have just started it, but so far it is very good, dealing with issues of poker and also risk-taking more generally).
Here is my previous Conversation with Nate Silver. And please note I am not looking to ask him about the election. So what should I ask?
Doggerels for Deplorables
From Doggerels for Deplorables by D.M. Charette, with inspiration from Marginal Revolution.
Hope III: Assortative Mating
I hear how you proclaim the fault
for unequal shares in wealth
arises from the greediness
rich enjoy at poor’s expense.
But if you go through white papers [7,8]
you’ll notice one more factor
when you marry in your class
you increase the income gap.
Now let me call upon you all
who declare as liberal
to regard the bigger picture
when deciding on your future:
Seek outside of your career
ask out the single cashier
skip out on the grad event
hit the bar beside the plant
don’t inquire on film noir
learn to spot a muscle car
pass up on that back-stage tour
plant yourself in the bleachers.
So to decrease income division
you’ll marry someone not envisioned
but since you’re not a hypocrite
I’m certain you’ll be fine with it.
Addendum: Here is me on assortative mating in the economics profession and here is much more.
What I’ve been reading
Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition. Lengthy and dense, but full of good material and written with extreme indeed almost unbelievable clarity. The historicists are these days the underdiscussed approach in the history of German thought. Have you ever wondered why Justus Möser was important, and why he focused on the history of Osnabrück? Or how Leopold Ranke saw his work as an answer to Hegel? How about the difference between Dilthey and Rickert? If nothing else, this book is also excellent background for grasping the development of Austrian School methodology in economics. After reading it, I did proceed to order further books by the same author.
Celine Dietziker and Lukas Gruntz, Aalto in Detail: A Catalogue of Components. I hadn’t realized just how much he was a “micro architect.” This book, for instance, has a fantastic collection of different photos of stairs he designed. There is a chapter “Handrails,” “Door Handles,” and also “Drainage.” This is a book for me.
Zeke Hernandez, The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers, delivers exactly what its title promises.
Neil Taylor, Estonia: A Modern History, is by far the best history I have found on that country. It also has a rave blurb from Robert Service.
Arthur Brown Ruhl, New Masters of the Baltic, a travel book from 1921. If you visit any place, you always should try to read a much earlier travel book on said place. Fantastic for perspective, indefensible but nonetheless insightful generalizations, and these books give you a sense for just how contingent history can be. Who was “the good guys” was often more up for grabs than you might have thought.
Then there are bits like this: “I asked if they thought that Latvia would be able to keep her independence when Russia was herself again. Yes, they said, they did; if the non-Russian border peoples got together in a defensive alliance, old Russia would have some trouble in coercing them. But they would like to ask me a question. Did the Allies, who had encouraged them to declare their independence, really believe in it? Or were they merely being used because the Allies thought their own soldiers too good to send against the Bolsheviks?”
New Zealand also is shifting toward the Right
The Ardern era is well and truly over. The National-led coalition that took office in November has set about undoing many of her government’s initiatives. It is following a playbook not unlike “Project 25,” the second-term “battle plan” promoted by pro-Trump think tanks designed to concentrate power in the executive branch and unravel efforts to slow global warming.
It is reversing a ban on oil and gas drilling, and is proposing a “fast-track” for big projects, including mines, that bypasses environmental checks. It has cut climate programs and jobs, scrapped electric vehicle subsidies, abandoned plans for one of the world’s largest marine sanctuaries and set aside a world-leading cow “burp” tax as it questions the science on methane, a potent greenhouse gas...
During coalition talks, [ACT leader] Seymour won concessions for American-style charter schools; a “three strikes” law extending prison terms for repeat offenders; and a deal to rewrite the country’s Arms Act, revisiting a ban on military-style rifles after a 2019 mass shooting. He is pushing for a referendum on New Zealand’s founding document with Indigenous Maori that opponents warn will be divisive.
Here is much more from Rachel Pannett.
Tuesday assorted links
1. A case study of how RAND Corporation succeeded.
2. Beware the phrase “cheap labor” (me for Bloomberg).
3. Can EdTech supersede Neil Stephenson’s notion of the primer?
4. On the Presidential immunity decision.
5. Cass Sunstein on Loper Bright.
6. Greece is moving to a six-day work week? With qualifications of course.
7. More on dollarization in Panama. On its intellectual origins, including through Chicago.
An event study of sorts
Big, sudden changes in election probabilities are unusual in American politics, though it seems we just had one. Here are some results, as reported in the FT:
US closed higher in the first session of the second half of the year, even as Treasury yields hit multi-week highs.
Strong gains in the technology sector helped the benchmark S&P 500 add 0.3 per cent despite almost three quarters of the index’s constituents declining on the day. The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.8 per cent, with every Magnificent Seven tech group finishing higher.
Treasuries sold off as traders weighed higher odds of Donald Trump being elected as US president later this year. The yield on the 10-year bond jumped 0.14 percentage points to 4.48 per cent, its highest level in a month.
“There are several investment implications of Trump back in the White House,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Capital. “[Most notable would be] a higher-for-longer Fed, as monetary policymakers increase the likelihood that the corporate tax cuts will be extended next year.”
The immediate S&P 500 reaction was modestly positive too, about half a percentage point up.