A Recipe for Measuring Economic Recessions in Bronze Age China

Free college thesis or research idea. Anybody can take this, since I probably won’t ever get the resources to do this in my lifetime.

Ingredients:

- 1 data set (we’ll call it “Data Set A”) full of all known records of Bronze Age vessels casted in China. Any materials from clay to bronze. Each record should have an approximate dating of the vessel, a photograph of the vessel, and preferably some way of separating the engraved details from the casted ones (I don’t know whether or not Bronze Age craftsmen did engravings)

- 1 data set (let’s call it “Data Set B”) timing the amount of time it requires to produce different styles of vessels. Basically, a research team IRL would need to reenact the casting/sculpting of Bronze Age vessels and create replicas. They should do them in all sorts of different styles and different eras, and calculate the amount of time it takes to produce each style. It should also be accompanied with a 3D scan of the Bronze Age vessel, and maybe a metric representing the “complexity” (Fractal dimension might be a good metric here) to see “how much time it takes to produce one vessel of such-and-such complexity”. We’ll call that metric the “difficulty metric”. The amount of time it takes to develop the mold for casts is the fixed capital (in terms of socially necessary labor time) and the time it takes to create the vessel with the mold is the (marginal? Maybe?) circulating capital.

Steps:

I. For each record in Data Set A:

1. Run an AI 3D model generator (like Meshy.AI) to get a rough geometry of the real historical vessel

2. Compute the difficulty metric of producing that vessel (the recommended example was computing Fractal dimension)

3. Cross reference the computed difficulty metric from Data Set A to the difficulty metric in Data Set B to get the socially necessary labor time (SNLT) for that vessel. Store the SNLT back in Data Set A, so you now have an SNLT for each vessel in the archeological record.

II. Then, for each ACCOUNTING PERIOD (i.e. each Decade, Month, Year, or whatever time-period is chosen) in Data Set A

1. Perform calculations to get the circulating capital cost requirement for each vessel in that period.

2. Then, take the average of that circulating capital cost for all vessels in that period

3. You now have time series data for every period's average labor-time put into Bronze Age vessels. You could graph it the same way you graph a ticker in the stock market. It’s like having annual GDP data of the real economy.