Lack of technological progress in late Roman Empire

[Eleatic Guest]

I have two question relating to M. Finley: Technical Innovation and Progress in the Ancient World. One thing is sure, he disses the economy of the Romans and Greeks and their 'rentier' mindset with the same passion and zeal a Reaganist would diss the Soviet system.

The first concers his definition of productivity:

Why did neither the Ptolemies nor the Sicilian tyrants nor the Roman emperors systematically (or even spasmodically) turn their engineers to the search for higher productivity, at least in those sectors of the economy which produced the royal revenues? Whatever the answer, it was not lack of capital (or lack of authority). Funds, manpower and technical skills were made available (and wasted) in vast and ever increasing amounts for roads, public buildings, water supply, drainage and other amenities, but not for production.

Now why does Finley think that measures to improve infrastructure are intrinsically less productive than measures to improve agriculture? Does he follow here a conventional economic wisdom, which I may have missed, or what?

My second question relates to his assertion that the level of the ancient banking system and of professional organization was so rudimentary that private capital could not have found its way to the promotion and utililization of technological innovations:

Wherever one turns in industry and commerce, the picture is the same and always negative: one of failure to take steps to overcome the limits of individual cash resources. There were no proper credit instruments - no negotiable paper, no book clearance, no credit payments. The desperate search of the 'modernizers' among economic historians of antiquity for something which they can hold up with pride against, say, fifteenth-century Toulouse or Lubeck, is sufficient proof. Barring some odd and dubious text here or there, the best they can produce is the giro system for corn payments in Hellenistic Egypt. There was money-lending in plenty, but it was concentrated on small usurious loans to peasants or consumers, and in large borrowings to enable men to meet the political or other conventional expenditures of the upper classes. Only the bottomry loan was in any sense productive, and it was invariably restricted in amount and usurious in rate, as much an insurance measure spreading the high risks of seaborne traffic as a proper credit instrument. Similarly in the field of business organization: there were no long-term partnerships or corporations, no brokers or agents, no guilds - again with the occasional and unimportant exception. In short, both the organizational and the operational devices were lacking for the mobilization of private capital resources.

Is he still correct here after another 40 years of research? Certainly, there was no ancient David Ricardo, but was the banking sector and business organization really that unsophisticated?