You Won’t Believe These 5 Times Peter Leeson Applied Rational Choice Frameworks To Unusual Topics

Milton Friedman famously owned a car with the number plate MVPQ. However as far as we know he never went so far as to get an economics tattoo. One man who did take that next step was Peter Leeson, a professor at George Mason University, who marked his biceps with supply and demand curves aged 17. Here are 5 reasons Peter Leeson is one of the niftiest economists writing today.

1) Trials by Ordeal

Most people look at trials by ordeal and dismiss them as a primitive superstition. Not Peter Leeson! He argues that ordeals created a separating equilibrium to correctly distinguish between the guilty and innocent. If the guilty feared conviction by ordeal they would be unwilling to risk going through with the ordeal but the innocent believed God would exonerate them. Given this separation the priest could rig the trial and correctly find the accused innocent, upon observing their willingness to go through with the ordeal. This explains why ordeals were not used for non-believers and why most accused criminals succeeded in apparently impossible tasks!

Ordeals: superstition or separating equilibrium?

2) Human Sacrifice

Human sacrifice seems so brutish and horrific that it couldn’t possibly be explained by the decisions of rational utility maximising agents. Or could it? Imagine you are a tribe fearing attack by your neighbours. In order to avoid attack you need to convince your enemies that you are not worth raiding. You could demonstrate your destruction of wealth by burning crops but this could be faked – you could burn a small layer of valuable crops that cover up low value waste. The logical solution? Buy slaves at high prices from others and kill them in a huge festival to demonstrate that you aren’t worth robbing!

Defending property rights?

3) Pirates

Despite being lawless rogues pirates developed highly sophisticated systems of governance. Pirate codes acted as constitutions and constrained the power of captains. What’s more interesting is that the distribution of booty was often highly equal, with captains frequently only getting twice as much as the lowest ranked pirates as compared with four to six times as much in the merchant marine. This helped to avoid costly potential conflict on board and ensured a greater degree of homogeneity in desired retirement timing, leading to higher effort in battle by crews.

An-arrgh-chy?

4) Longbows

For more than 150 years the English had a monopoly on the use of the longbow in war. Longbows were cheaper to manufacture than crossbows but relied upon large numbers of trained archers to be successful. English kings banned activities that might compete with archery training, built up a culture around shooting and even required merchants to import a given number of bow staves on each shipment. Why didn’t France and Scotland do this? They were too politically unstable and so their rulers chose to avoid adopting a weapon ideal for use in a rebellion against them.

District 12: A tragic combination of a low factor endowments and weak, extractive institutions

5) Animal Trials

The medieval church tried weevils, grasshoppers and rats as legal persons in France, Italy and Switzerland. Were they crazy? Nope, Leeson answers, just doing as any other rational profit-maximising agent would. The church had an incentive to maximise belief in supernatural sanctions to encourage people to pay their tithes in full. Vermin usually disappear naturally and the church exploited this by delaying trials to make it appear that God dispensed justice. By optimising trial length it was possible to maximise agents’ posterior beliefs in God’s power. This explains why trials were so frequently delayed by the defence lawyers for vermin and why time series analysis suggests that these kangaroo courts were used more frequently at times of high rates of heresy as measured by the incidence of witch trials.

The witness getting gorilled