How Prosperous were the Romans?

[Viggen]

Fascinating paper from the Department of Economics (Oxford University) with plenty of graphs...

The paper compares the standard of living of labourers in the Roman Empire in 301 AD with the standard of living of labourers in Europe and Asia from the middle ages to the industrial revolution. Roman data are drawn from Diocletian's Price Edict. The real wage of Roman workers was like that of their counterparts in the lagging parts of Europe and much of Asia in the middle of the eighteenth century. Roman workers earned just enough to buy a minimal subsistence consumption basket. Real wages were considerably higher in the advanced parts of Europe in the eighteenth century, as they had been in Europe generally following the Black Death in 1348-9.

.

Conclusion: The real wage evidence supports a guardedly optimistic view of Roman living standards. Certainly, the Roman worker in Diocletian's time was doing about as well as most workers in eighteenth century Europe or Asia. One lesson that price history teaches, however, is that real wages fluctuated in the past. Indeed, Roman performance looks unimpressive in comparison with fifteenth century Europe when real wages were so high. In addition, generalizations are confounded by variation across space with workers in booming parts of the continent earningmuch more than their counterparts in more placid provinces. One suspects that the same wastrue of the Roman Empire. The next step in the research agenda should, therefore, be to useactual wages and prices (rather than legal maxima) to measure real wages in the Roman periodand to do this for different regions of the empire and different time periods. That investigationmight reveal as much variation as we observe in the early modern world and lead to a morecomplex assessment of Roman living standards.

http://www.economics...df/paper363.pdf

[Ursus]

I haven't read the whole piece (economics being as exciting to me as watching paint dry), but if the summary is true, then it seems to corroborate Peter Heather's beliefs that the later empire was not the impoverished mess some people suggest it was.

[GhostOfClayton]

The economics of necessity back this up. If food prices were too high, fewer basic labourers would be able to afford basic living costs, leading to fewer labourers, and so prices would be forced back down. If food prices went too low, there would be a corresponding downward pressure on labour wages until the balance point was met. This balance point would continue until more sophisticated markets arose (post Industrial Revolution), or extraordinary external conditions occurred (droughts, plagues, etc.) that would unbalance the system.

Edited February 7, 2011 by GhostOfClayton

[caldrail]

I think we need to be careful about judging living standards because their prices aren't necessarily equivalent to ours, and in any case, the average common labourer lived in circumstances that the modern day authorities would regard with horror, irrespective of what they could afford.

 

I don't actually believe most of them were all that well off at all. Rents were always high, lodging often jerry-built and rat-infested, with no running water, toilet, or cooking facilities. Since we don't have enough detail about their lifestyles, it's hard to judge accurately to what extent we could define them as comfortable. Also, there must have been a lot of variation. Some individuals have a talent for making money, others don't. In any case, we do know that large numbers were inceasingly drawn toward volunteering for the arena. It wasn't just the potential fame that persuaded them.

[Kosmo]

Interesting! The conclusions are not really surprising, in a static economy population increases push the lowest strata to the minimum level of survivability (and below).

The author notes that the biggest problem of the study is how real the wages and prices in the Edict of Diocletian are and I think that they are not very realistic.

Other problem is that the comparison with wages in modern periods is made also for silver and is very likely that silver was more expensive for romans (especially in the Late Empire that has lost Dacia and access to Armenia while Spain and Greece were partially depleted) then for early modern people (after Peru and Mexico started mass production but also had the Fugger mines in Austria and other areas in Central Europe)

The study is made about unskilled males and it is very possible that the social position of this category will be different in widely different societies especially because in the case of romans existed a massive group below them, the slaves, that probably pushed the price for unskilled labor very low. I also doubt that unskilled wage earning laborers were a numerically significant group in roman society so their fate does not tell us much about the economic level of the empire.

[Centurion-Macro]

I for one was surprised by this, but then again, I do not study the Later Roman Empire like I do the Republic and Early Empire.

 

Very interesting story, thank you

[Guaporense]

The wages in the price edict were lower than the real wages 300 years before. Also, they are wages in a price edict, they reflected not the actual conditions of the empire but the conditions that the emperors wished these prices to be. In effect, they wanted to reduce wages to stop inflation, that was the objective of this edict. So, one shouln't use these numbers thinking they represented the true average purchasing power of worker's wages, which were probably higher.

[Guaporense]

I haven't read the whole piece (economics being as exciting to me as watching paint dry), but if the summary is true, then it seems to corroborate Peter Heather's beliefs that the later empire was not the impoverished mess some people suggest it was.

 

Well, archaeological evidence suggests that the economic peak of the Roman Empire was during the reign of Augustus. One can even defend the thesis that by the second century AD the Empire was already economically weaker than before. By the fourth century, archaeological remains, specially data on the number of shipwrecks, suggests that the volume of trade in the mediterranean was way lower in the fourth century than in the firsts.

 

The archaeological evidence supports the idea that the economic peak of ancient classical civilization was during the first century:

 

Source: In Search for Roman Economic Growth, Walter Scheidel, 2008, Princeton/Stanford working papers on classics.

 

By the 4th century, the classical civilization apparently declined to the same levels of the 3dr century BCE.

 

The eastern started to decline even earlier, according to the author:

"Thus, the notion of one-off growth is consistent with the fact that the most recent survey of datable shipwrecks from the eastern Mediterranean finds that wrecks from the last three centuries BCE (n=57) are almost twice as numerous as those from the first three centuries CE (n=32), suggesting that growth stalled even earlier in the East.", page 25 of the paper. In the west growth stalled in the first centuries, in the east it stalled even earlier, according to the archaeological evidence.

 

Link for the paper: http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/060808.pdf

[Guaporense]

Interesting! The conclusions are not really surprising, in a static economy population increases push the lowest strata to the minimum level of survivability (and below).

 

That's the Malthusian trap. The theory advanced in the paper linked above this post is that Roman incomes may have been higher in the earlier centuries, but population grew and decreased per capita incomes, reducing wages.

 

The author notes that the biggest problem of the study is how real the wages and prices in the Edict of Diocletian are and I think that they are not very realistic.

 

Yes, I have verified that they are far lower than the purchasing power of wages in Pompey, for example.

 

Other problem is that the comparison with wages in modern periods is made also for silver and is very likely that silver was more expensive for romans (especially in the Late Empire that has lost Dacia and access to Armenia while Spain and Greece were partially depleted) then for early modern people (after Peru and Mexico started mass production but also had the Fugger mines in Austria and other areas in Central Europe)

 

True, comparing wages in terms of silver across time is useless as the purchasing power of silver varies greatly. Though comparing wages in terms of silver across cities and countries at the same time-frame may yield interesting information. Better is a index of wages in terms of wheat. However we don't have detailed information for the Roman Empire as whole, but we have Roman Egypt and wages there were quite low, we also have good data for Ancient Athens, and wages in Athens were apparently higher than in any other place in the world before the industrial revolution, from places that we have sources.

 

The study is made about unskilled males and it is very possible that the social position of this category will be different in widely different societies especially because in the case of romans existed a massive group below them, the slaves, that probably pushed the price for unskilled labor very low. I also doubt that unskilled wage earning laborers were a numerically significant group in roman society so their fate does not tell us much about the economic level of the empire.

 

Certainly, unskilled workers constitute the bulk of the working population of any pre-industrial society. So their wages would provide information regarding overall productivity. Slavery didn't reduce the wages of unskilled workers directly, they would only do that if the existence of slavery inflated the supply of unskilled labor relative to skilled labor, if slavery didn't exist (i.e. if many slaves wouldn't become unskilled laborers), but that's improbable as the vast majority of workers were unskilled workers.

[Guaporense]

Another paper on the Economy of the Roman Empire is by the MIT economic historian, Peter Temin:

 

http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/089533006776526148

 

Very good paper, he concludes that Roman income levels were comparable to Europe around 1700 CE.

[Kosmo]

The study is made about unskilled males and it is very possible that the social position of this category will be different in widely different societies especially because in the case of romans existed a massive group below them, the slaves, that probably pushed the price for unskilled labor very low. I also doubt that unskilled wage earning laborers were a numerically significant group in roman society so their fate does not tell us much about the economic level of the empire.

 

Certainly, unskilled workers constitute the bulk of the working population of any pre-industrial society. So their wages would provide information regarding overall productivity. Slavery didn't reduce the wages of unskilled workers directly, they would only do that if the existence of slavery inflated the supply of unskilled labor relative to skilled labor, if slavery didn't exist (i.e. if many slaves wouldn't become unskilled laborers), but that's improbable as the vast majority of workers were unskilled workers.

 

The bulk of the population was rural (maybe 80% or more) and I don't believe peasants can be called unskilled workers especially because they were rarely wage workers in preindustrial societies. They can more easily be described as tenants, small landowners, people with rights on community lands, long term skilled employees and a myriad other relations that created a very complicated rural system of land and labor relations before capitalism. Probably the only unskilled workers employed in farming were those used for occasional, larger projects or for seasonal work like harvest when the usual resources of labor were insufficient.

The study exemplifies unskilled workers as " i.e. farm labourers, camel and mule drivers, water carriers, and sewer cleaners". With the exception of the farm laborers I mentioned above the other categories don't look large enough to have an impact.

Slavery can reduce the price of labor because removes choice (for example many freeman could refuse to do a work like sewer cleaning pushing the wage up but a slave can be forced to do it) and because they can be kept at a subsistence minimum. Of course this must be correlated with the price of slaves and the ability to control them.

The article you posted is a very good narrative overview of roman economy, but with not enough data to prove the statements made.

Edited February 14, 2011 by Kosmo

[agamemnus]

Well, what about pirates and wars? Surely there were many more destroyed ships in the century before the start of Augustus's reign due to pirates and wars... the rather interesting chart you have there, Guaporense, doesn't seem to bear this out, though.

Edited February 15, 2011 by agamemnus

[Guaporense]

The study is made about unskilled males and it is very possible that the social position of this category will be different in widely different societies especially because in the case of romans existed a massive group below them, the slaves, that probably pushed the price for unskilled labor very low. I also doubt that unskilled wage earning laborers were a numerically significant group in roman society so their fate does not tell us much about the economic level of the empire.

 

Certainly, unskilled workers constitute the bulk of the working population of any pre-industrial society. So their wages would provide information regarding overall productivity. Slavery didn't reduce the wages of unskilled workers directly, they would only do that if the existence of slavery inflated the supply of unskilled labor relative to skilled labor, if slavery didn't exist (i.e. if many slaves wouldn't become unskilled laborers), but that's improbable as the vast majority of workers were unskilled workers.

 

The bulk of the population was rural (maybe 80% or more) and I don't believe peasants can be called unskilled workers especially because they were rarely wage workers in preindustrial societies. They can more easily be described as tenants, small landowners, people with rights on community lands, long term skilled employees and a myriad other relations that created a very complicated rural system of land and labor relations before capitalism. Probably the only unskilled workers employed in farming were those used for occasional, larger projects or for seasonal work like harvest when the usual resources of labor were insufficient.

The study exemplifies unskilled workers as " i.e. farm labourers, camel and mule drivers, water carriers, and sewer cleaners". With the exception of the farm laborers I mentioned above the other categories don't look large enough to have an impact.

Slavery can reduce the price of labor because removes choice (for example many freeman could refuse to do a work like sewer cleaning pushing the wage up but a slave can be forced to do it) and because they can be kept at a subsistence minimum. Of course this must be correlated with the price of slaves and the ability to control them.

 

The bulk of farm laborers were unskilled workers, because they didn't have much human capital invested. What is human capital? A skilled worker may know how to read, a unskilled don't. Human capital is the capital invested in education and courses. Workers would be skilled or not depending on their human capital invested. If they are wage laborers or tenants or small landholders, it doesn't matter according to this definition. They are workers as long as they are a part of the workforce, they don't need to be a part of the labor market.

 

The article you posted is a very good narrative overview of roman economy, but with not enough data to prove the statements made.

 

Which one of the two articles? Both are papers made by the leading authorities of Roman economic and social conditions in the world today.

 

If you mention the second: "The Economy of the Early Roman Empire", well that article was produced based on work on a dozen different articles before, the author synthesized his findings into that paper. The sources for his data are in his sources at the end of the paper.

Edited February 16, 2011 by Guaporense

[Guaporense]

Well, what about pirates and wars? Surely there were many more destroyed ships in the century before the start of Augustus's reign due to pirates and wars... the rather interesting chart you have there, Guaporense, doesn't seem to bear this out, though.

 

The reduction in wars and piracy may have reduced the number of ships sunk, reducing the number of wrecks to be found later. However, there would be other factors favoring the earlier period: in the empire more ships carried marble for the construction of monuments, such ships would tend to be found more easily than ships carrying wheat. Therefore, these types of distortions would tend to favor both periods. We cannot say for sure how a graph with the distortions evened out would look. Also, the data looks like to be quite consistent over time, increasing and decreasing in a smooth way.

 

However, other data, since there are 3 types of data presented in that graph, are strongly correlated with the shipwrecks data. So, only if all the data is distorted in favor of Augustus' age that you can claim that the shipwreck data is distorted by wars and piracy.

 

This is a graph of the rates of change in the relevant variables:

 

 

You can clearly see that their rate of growth followed a very sharp pattern: it started growing at near 1% a year in the early 3rd century BCE, and growth rates continually decreased, until by the late 4th century, the economy was collapsing. This data applies to both the shipwreck data and the lead pollution levels.

 

Also, if you wish to have a very long run view of the shipwrecks data, I can post this one, from 2500 BCE to 1500 CE, 4000 years of maritime trade:

 

 

It really shows the rise and decline of classical civilization. Also, in the middle ages, trade in the Mediterranean appear much smaller than Hellenistic and Roman times. Though that is partly explained by the fact that amphoras are much easier to spot than barrels when divers look out. Too bad that I don't have a long run lead pollution graph.

Edited February 17, 2011 by Guaporense

[GhostOfClayton]

It really shows the rise and decline of classical civilization. Also, in the middle ages, trade in the Mediterranean appear much smaller than Hellenistic and Roman times. Though that is partly explained by the fact that amphoras are much easier to spot than barrels when divers look out. Too bad that I don't have a long run lead pollution graph.

 

Another interpretation is that maritime navigation skills increased gradually from 100AD onwards.

Edited February 17, 2011 by GhostOfClayton