Interview
a16z Podcast | The Why Behind the Weird
- Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University and author of Just Out, WTF: An Economic Tour of the Weird, argues that historical behaviors appearing irrational are often rational responses to specific environmental constraints and incentives.
- Leeson frames belief, superstition, and scientific falsehoods as "technologies" used historically to generate social outcomes where physical technology was unavailable.
- Renaissance-era ecclesiastic courts in Italy, France, and Switzerland prosecuted insects and rodents (rats, crickets, locusts) for violating farmers' property rights as a final resort pest control method.
- Over a 250-year period, hundreds of vermin trials lasted weeks to months, appointing defense lawyers to represent the pests and granting continuances for reasons such as cat interference or pregnancy.
- The Church utilized vermin trials to reinforce its authority and ensure tithe compliance by proving it could invoke "divine punishment" (excommunication/anathema) against pests plaguing farmers.
- The Church manipulated the timeline of vermin trials to ensure pests eventually migrated away naturally, allowing the institution to claim credit for "divine" intervention and bolstering farmers' belief in the Church's power to punish tithe evaders.
- Medieval judicial ordeals (9th–13th centuries) were primarily used for ordinary crimes like theft and murder rather than witchcraft, serving as a fact-finding mechanism in eras lacking streetlights and witnesses.
- The "Judicium Dei" (Judgment of God) ordeal required the accused to retrieve a stone from boiling water; the majority were exonerated due to a self-selection mechanism driven by belief in divine intervention.
- Guilty parties typically confessed to avoid the physical pain of boiling, while innocent parties underwent the ordeal believing God would prevent injury, allowing priests to infer innocence from the willingness to proceed.
- Priests actively manipulated the temperature of the water in ordeals (e.g., adding cold water) to ensure innocent defendants were not harmed, a practice reconciled by the belief that their manipulation was divinely guided.
- Witchcraft trials differed fundamentally from judicial ordeals by relying on torture to extract confessions rather than determining facts, lacking the "innocence-preserving" mechanism of ordeals.
- Modern polygraph tests function as a contemporary form of superstition; while scientifically rejected, they influence incentives because law enforcement uses them to pressure suspects into confessing if they fear being detected.
- Early 18th-century Caribbean pirates operated under written constitutions that functioned as employment contracts and social insurance plans, granting specific payouts for lost appendages or eyes.
- Pirate constitutions included mechanisms to constrain the power of captains and quartermasters, allowing crews to democratically vote out leaders who overstepped their defined authority.
- Leeson notes that the consistency of pirate constitutional templates across different ships suggests a universal economic logic for resolving cooperation problems among stateless groups.