David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, describes himself as “an academic economist who teaches at a law school and has never taken a course for credit in either field.”
He’s a great source of historical tidbits, paricularly ones involving legal and economic issues, like this Athenian Puzzle:
The ancient Athenians had a very straightforward approach to the problem of funding government expenditures. If you were one of the richest Athenians, every other year you had to pay for something—sponsor Athens’ team at the Olympics, pay all (later part) of the cost of the one of the triremes in the Athenian fleet, or the like.If you were selected for such a task—called a liturgy—there were two ways of getting out of it. One was to show that you had already been assigned a liturgy for this year or had done one in the previous year. The other was to show that there was another Athenian, richer than you, who had not been assigned a liturgy either this year or last — and who should therefore do yours.
That raised an obvious problem. In a society without an IRS, without accounting, without modern banking and financial records, how do you prove that another Athenian is richer than you are?
I will give one hint to the answer: It was obviously invented, not by an accountant, but by an economist. Possibly a mad economist.
The answer is someting called antidosis, but you’ll have to read the comments in the original post to find out what that means.