All Intensive Purposes

Blogs are wonderful things. Thanks to Brad DeLong's blog (and an e-mail to him from Ben Weiss, a curator at MIT's rare books library), I now know about medieval libraries:

In the early Middle Ages libraries really were the province of "kings, sovereign princes, and abbots", but there was a steady increase in both literacy and the number of books in circulation during the later Middle Ages. This was especially true in cities: notably in Northern Italy, but also in France and what would become Germany. By the late fourteenth century, a bureaucrat with literary tastes like Machiavelli would almost certainly have had personal copies of a large number of his favorite books, and, if he were wealthy enough, possibly even a little study (a "studiolo") in which to read them.

Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the book trade underwent a dramatic shift as the primary center of manuscript copying moved from monastic houses to commercial scriptoria, often in university towns. (Richard and Mary Rouse have written a very important, if slightly exhausting, two-volume history of the commercial book trade in Paris: Manuscripts and their makers: commercial book producers in medieval Paris, 1200-1500 (Turnhout, 2000).) This was both fostered by and, in turn, fostered an increase in demand for personal copies of university texts. In Paris, as in places like Vienna, Padova, and Krakow, there was an active market in both new and used manuscripts, and, in addition, many scholars (especially in Italy) copied texts out themselves.

But perhaps the most important piece of evidence of the increasing demand for books before Gutenberg is the invention of printing itself. Gutenberg was not just experimenting for the sake of experiment. He was responding to, if not an explicit demand, to a perceived opportunity. It's important to remember that the printing press was not devote to making a new type of object --- early printed books are exactly the same in form and layout to manuscripts --- but to make more of a commodity that already existed.

The information was out there before, but it is more accessible now, and this sort of conversation among experts happens so much more easily.

And the rest of us get to watch. DeLong's prior post, to which Weiss was responding, ended with this anecdote:

I remember... it must have been 1984, some evening, when I was sitting in one of the cushy chairs in the middle of the NBER's third-floor offices. Larry Summers was coming in while Paul Krugman was going out. And they stopped each other.

"Paul," said Larry.

"Yes?" said Paul.

"In our basic model, the U.S. is running a trade deficit because demand is greater than production, and especially because demand for non-tradeables is high, and so workers are pulled out of jobs making tradeables into jobs making non-tradeables, and so domestic production of tradeables is insufficient to satisfy demand, and so we import," said Larry.

"So?" said Paul.

"Why, then, are workers in tradeable-goods industries in the Midwest experiencing this not as being pulled into higher-wage jobs in the non-tradeables sector, but as being pushed by foreign competition into lower-wage jobs in the non-tradeables sector?" said Larry.

And they were off. For a good half hour or so they argued the issues back and forth. More graduate students gathered to watch what was a fascinating pickup debate and discussion about just why there were so many losers from the trade deficits of the 1980s, when the first-cut full-employment model suggested that it should have been win-win.

You have to be in the right place at the right time to get the peak intellectual experience of watching two minds of such extraordinary caliber together wrestle with each other and with important problems. Actually, you don't. You just have to pick up the right book.

Or you can type the right url. (And it took many years for books to become as cheap as they are now, but computers have become commoditized much faster.)