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97. The Polymath by Waqas Ahmed

Education Bookcast

CHAPTER

The Rich Athens Hypothesis

The Greeks of that period were quite rich compared to other civilizations. They actually had quite a lot of money. That might go some way to explaining why they had this intellectual flowering, because they had enough money so they could sit on their bum and walk around and think clever thoughts. And increasingly, I feel like this may be a much more important factor than I previously realized in terms of intellectual history. It's true in Song China, as he's talking about now, because it's true. Central Asia was really, really rich for a really long time, even though it's very far away from Western Europe.

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