Science Advances to Death

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Adam: You confess that you've been working on this for 17 years, which is consistent again with this previous episode of Adam. Now Shiani where where a lot of times, again I think unbeknownst to normal people, the idea that peer review takes a long time is just kind of shocking. So I think that 17 years was the paper was rejected. They suggest, I mean 10 years was just work before first submitted. But eventually it got published so it was at some point you presented this paper in an academic workshopYou went to another university from your own, you started his own perhaps but eventually you started sharing this work. And of course the people whose work was challenged by

Since at least Adam Smith, the common wisdom has been that the transition from hunter-gathering to farming allowed the creation of the State. Farming, so went the theory, led to agricultural surplus, and that surplus is the prerequisite for taxation and a State. But economist Omer Moav of the University of Warwick and Reichman University argues that it wasn't farming but the farming of a particular kind of crop (but not others) that led to hierarchy and the State. Moav explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts storability is the key dimension that allows for taxation and a State. The conversation includes a discussion of why it's important to understand the past and the challenges of confirming or refuting theories about history.