Why swords are so expensive?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Given the number of technologies that Romans were evidently advanced in, wouldn't it be simpler and arguably more accurate to state that at the height of the Late Republic, Rome achieved TL3?

Arguably. On the other hand, a lot of advanced Roman nature was clearly on the order of prototypes rather than widely used mature technologies, which is the criterion for determining TLs. They had distillation, but it was rudimentary distillation. They had waterwheels, but they only used them sporadically. They had gears, but they were terrible gears. And, of course, they didn't have many of the other diagnostic features of TL3 such as the broken arch, the magnetic compass, and various bits of agricultural technology.

[gilbertocarlos]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Historically swords were very high class weapons. Making one requires not only gathering a large proportion of metal but forging it without weaknesses; an anomaly in the metalurgy causes a fracture.

Swords have to be made to carve through, not only flesh but armor. Or at least be able to bang against armor without being damaged. They are not like saxes and the like which are improvised weapons that are made for brushcutting, or like axes which requires a small amount of metal by comparison.

At the same time, swords became more common through the centuries, and gladii were obviously mass produced. They weren't the same as the sort of thing a nobleman would have but they allowed the advantages of swords to be extended through the ranks.

The point of my question isn't the price of swords per se, but why the sudden jump of price from long knife to shortsword.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Pretty much. It's not as visible at low tech as at high, but production cost per unit is generally higher when you're making fewer units at any tech level.

That argument only holds up if you have market-wide internal economies of scale, which is to say a natural monopoly. The long-run supply curve for a competitive industry is a horizontal straight line tangent to the minimum of the firm long-run average cost curve. I think that if you want to claim that swords are expensive because of sub-optimal scale of production you would have to go at least to an explanation in terms of monopolistic competition, and that probably means invoking transport costs or barriers to trade. Such a market model, depending on special circumstances, would not be suitable to a general-purpose game, one that might be called on to model such circumstances as in which sword blades were mass-produced at e.g. Ferrara or Bilbao and widely exported. There you would expect swords to be made at efficient scale.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by swampthing

The key you left out is that lower demand at a given supply level should lower prices.

Only in the short run. In the long run firms leave the industry, reducing supply and raising prices until the price is again equal to the minimum of firm long-run average cost. Unless you have monopoly, of course.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

As for the water wheel not being fast enough to turn a grinding wheel ... isn't that just a matter of gearing?

At low tech, for applications involving high speed and low power, I think it is probably better to use a belt drive with a large-diameter drive wheel and a smaller driven wheel. Have we an engineer in the house?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

That argument only holds up if you have market-wide internal economies of scale, which is to say a natural monopoly. The long-run supply curve for a competitive industry is a horizontal straight line tangent to the minimum of the firm long-run average cost curve. I think that if you want to claim that swords are expensive because of sub-optimal scale of production you would have to go at least to an explanation in terms of monopolistic competition, and that probably means invoking transport costs or barriers to trade. Such a market model, depending on special circumstances, would not be suitable to a general-purpose game, one that might be called on to model such circumstances as in which sword blades were mass-produced at e.g. Ferrara or Bilbao and widely exported. There you would expect swords to be made at efficient scale.

Does that really work, even for that specialized a circumstance under low-tech conditions? The very fact that those swords were widely exported seems to argue that they were generally perceived by the market as having a quality difference from other swords. Aren't quality differences one of the sources for monopolistic competition?

My intuitive model of perfect competition is, like, a hundred thousand rice farmers, all on a small scale; any one of them can triple their output, or competely quit growing rice, and not affect the price of rice. I find it hard to see swordsmithing as working that way. Either you have a bunch of individual armourers, each producing individual swords of varied quality; or you have one big mass production facility producing lots of standardized swords—but probably with so high a volume that they're at least monopolistically competitive, if not oligopolistic. Or that's how I would think it would work. I'm willing to be refuted from historical records.

Bill Stoddar

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Bruno

A water wheel might be more useful to power a hammer and save the smith some physical effort there

Or save him from employing a worker to swing the heavy sledge. You get a similar thing with powered bellows: they don't make the forge produce more, but they do reduce its labour requirement.

The economics here are driven by the relative prices of capital (stonework, timber framing, wheel and bellows etc.) and labour. You need expensive labour and cheap materials and energy for mechanisation to be economic.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Brett

That argument only holds up if you have market-wide internal economies of scale, which is to say a natural monopoly.

No, it holds true if you have economies of scale that affect the differences in scale you're talking about. In many cases, businesses have a natural size and it doesn't make sense to scale up past that point (usually because of transport costs, counting tariffs as a transport cost), but the very fact that swordmaking was highly concentrated in a few cities tells us that significant economies of scale applied. As far as competition goes, it's pretty much never a benefit for sellers -- it's a benefit for buyers.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Does that really work, even for that specialized a circumstance under low-tech conditions? The very fact that those swords were widely exported seems to argue that they were generally perceived by the market as having a quality difference from other swords.

Either that, or they were cheaper. To put it as Smith would have done, they were cheaper in the same degree of quality.

My intuitive model of perfect competition is, like, a hundred thousand rice farmers, all on a small scale; any one of them can triple their output, or competely quit growing rice, and not affect the price of rice.

That's not quite right, since as you recall the account of long-run equilibrium in a perfectly competitive market goes like this: if the price is below the minimum of LRAC, firms will run at a loss (covering variable costs but not fixed costs), leaving the industry one by one, with the industry SRAC curve rising (or rather, moving to the left) as firms exit. Equilibrium is restored when the price returns to the long-run equilibrium. That account is not compatible with the price not changing as firms cease production.

In perfect competition there ends up being a large number of identical firms each producing items at the same price and the same minimum cost. There is an equilibrium number of firms in the market, at least in the long run. The theory of why that is so relies on the assumption that if a firm went out of business the price would rise, but only slightly.

It's better to think of it in terms of the total market demand being very large compared with the practical output of any single firm. So a single rice farmer who offered rice even infinitesimally cheaper than the market price would be able to sell so much of it that some other consideration would impose a limit before the extent of the market did.

I find it hard to see swordsmithing as working that way. Either you have a bunch of individual armourers, each producing individual swords of varied quality; or you have one big mass production facility producing lots of standardized swords—but probably with so high a volume that they're at least monopolistically competitive, if not oligopolistic. Or that's how I would think it would work. I'm willing to be refuted from historical records.

In fact we find that at Milan, Ferrara, Bilbao, Solingen, Sheffield etc. there was not a single huge factory, but multiple small factories under different masters in some degree of competition. Certainly not perfect competition—that is a didactic fiction like a line in Euclid—but probably not full collusion either. (I don't have to tell you about the instability of collusive arrangements).

The question remains whether the degree of competition was low enough that the industry supply curve was significantly upward-sloping. I don't have direct evidence to hand, but that seems unlikely to me in view of the limits placed by competition in international trade and the price ceiling imposed by competition from local armourers (albeit they were inefficient).

In any case, I find it hard to see how there should be such a difference between the market for knives and the market for swords as to account for a large price difference between the two. These are tradeable commodities, with markets as large as Western Europe—China imported tens of thousands of blades from Japan. I would be very surprised if the extent of the market turned out to be smaller than the minimum-cost output of a mediaeval firm. You have to envision all the swordsmiths in Europe being in competition to some degree, and in that situation I find it quite plausible that a single one could neither glut the market, nor significantly reduce

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

Either than, or they were cheaper. To put it as Smith would have done, they were cheaper in the same degree of quality.

Given how much transportation costs added to the price of commodities, I think you'd need a lot of "cheaper" to justify carrying them even a few hundred miles.

Bill Stoddard