One Thousand and One Conjectures

Joins the bunching estimators of modern public finance — the kink analysis that detects tax brackets as piles of taxpayers stacked exactly at the threshold — to the Chinese examination system. If jinshi degrees simply tracked the geography of talent and schooling,…

Joins the economics of crime — Gary Becker's principle that offenses rise when their returns rise and legitimate wages fall — to the Deir el-Medina archives of the royal tomb-builders. The workmen were paid in grain, and the ostraca record their ration…

Joins the concentration indices of industrial organization — the tools economists use to tell competitive markets from managed ones — to Indus glyptic. Stamp seals were the emblems of whoever ran Indus commerce, and if their animal motifs were the competing badges…

Joins modern campaign geography to Pompeian electoral epigraphy. Political scientists mapping yard signs and canvassing find both decay with distance from the candidate's home, because campaigns run on the candidate's own network of neighbours, clients, and friends, and that network is spatially…

Priority queueing theory has a textbook pathology: give one class of customers near-absolute priority and their waiting times stay compact while low-priority waits blow up into a heavy tail. This conjecture finds that pathology in the Heian court's promotion ladder as recorded…

Petitions on papyrus often carry two dates: the day the aggrieved party submitted the complaint and the day an official subscribed the answer. This conjecture joins that humble interval to the grand narrative of Roman imperial crisis: petition-answering was a queue served…

Demotic — the everyday Egyptian script with a thousand-year notarial tradition behind it — stops being used for contracts early in Roman rule, and the standard picture blames a slow decline of Egyptian literacy. This conjecture joins the disappearance instead to an…

Contracts in Roman Egypt stipulate cash penalties for default, and this conjecture joins those clauses to monetary expectations: a penalty prices a breach that may occur years in the future, so in a depreciating currency, notaries and creditors should pad penalty-to-principal ratios…

This conjecture joins the chronology of English famines to the typology of English charters. In subsistence crises smallholders sell land to eat, and the buyer of a desperate seller insists on parchment precisely because hungry men's kin come back to court later;…

In a personal monarchy, beneficiaries feared their rights lapsed with the grantor's last breath, so each accession triggered a rush to have old grants confirmed. This conjecture turns that rush into a gauge: confirmations as a share of chancery output should spike…