Muqaddimah

know so Laffer curve Arthur Laffer is not the first one to have discussed that relationship Marx is not the first one to have a labor theory of value Adam Smith is not the first guy to have explain the law of supply and demand.

It's Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century North African scholar who developed very clearly each of those concepts in his book, Al-Muqaddimah.

And I think that's mind-blowing because you realize that the ideas that have built the economics as a discipline have actually are not from Europe or the US at all.

And I think that helps to show that ideas have come from many different places and that gives a bit of confidence that solutions to today's problems might also come from many different places.

His more traditionalist contemporaries might have chalked up these misfortunes to the divine will of the omnipotent Allah, but to Ibn Khaldun, the presence of God did not explain the causalities of history.

It was during his refuge in Algeria that he would distill the secular trends he believed governed the rise and fall of states and put them on the pages of what would become his most famous work, the Muqaddimah.

The book's central idea was so novel and groundbreaking that it survives to the present day, where it takes the more farcical form of history, moving through cycles of hard times producing hard men who will invariably dominate weaker ones, initiating new golden ages of prosperity.

The Berber and Arab tribes of North Africa were Ibn Khaldun's hard men.

More recently, in the 1200s, another nomadic people, the Mongols, had caused a traumatic disruption of that same civilization.

In accounts of Baghdad's destruction by Hulagu Khan in 1258, the Tigris River was said to have run black with the ink from the city's destroyed manuscripts and red with the blood of its inhabitants.

A quarter of a century after drafting the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun would meet another great nomadic warlord, Tamerlane, and spend weeks in his camp outside Damascus, trying to convince him to spare the city of the kind of treatment that had befallen Baghdad.

Supposedly, the two had many thoughtful conversations, and Tamerlane regarded Ibn Khaldun with the utmost respect.

Yeah

... uh, one of the, one of the aqual that I came across, akhi, which I was, I have to be honest, is very interesting, yeah, is Ibn Khaldun, what he says in Muqaddimah, in his, uh, the introduction.

Mm-hmm.

Which is translated into English, actually.