roman vs han overstaffing?

[caesar novus]

I heard a talk (imperfectly) about roman vs surprisingly similar han dynasty, and got interested in the claim han had almost a thousand times more administrators for a nearly identical land area and population size at similar points in time. I wondered if the romans suffered from the light staffing, or did that austerity allow the economy to grow more freely or support bread handouts, baths, amphitheaters?

 

I see some comparisons were made in the past here, with a lot of concern about bias for some reason. But it seems an interesting and timely tradeoff to brainstorm. The hans apparently wanted a huge centralized meritocracy to smother any regional attempt at cronyism or whatever. Even today i think chinese central govt fights regional govt corruption.

 

The romans on the other hand were reluctant to expand staff when expanding their borders and allowed cronies, privatized tax collectors, and local puppets to fill the void. Either approach may have their advantages, but if the scale is 1000 fold apart, something must have been carried to the breaking point and made a cautionary tale.

 

A possible connection today is what to do in shrinking economic times... public job cutback (like austerity in greece), or stimulation (like beloved fdr1930s make-work or currently failing us green job training programs). Sicily has a wild middle path: to not let go any of 26000 forest rangers, easily 1000 times their staffing needs on worldwide per tree standards http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/sicily-fact-of-the-day.html

 

Well, i know it wont prove much... but was administration so terrible by the understaffed romans (they did staff up more late in the game) or was it paradisical for the han population supporting 1000x public servants? I want to focus on the concrete benefit/cost they provided to their society, not the fact that juicy jobs became available. Any society could (and does) fund plum jobs that returns no benefit to taxpayers they burden.

 

There was also an interesting comparison of the armies... han had meritocratic professional leaders and conscript soldiers. Romans had politician amateur generals and professional volunteer officers and soldiers. The speaker marveled the roman model in either case worked as well as it did. It was from some teaching company lecture series on ancient civilizations.

 

PS Edit: my 1000x factor was a bit, but not too, high... I checked back with "History Of The Ancient World A Global Perspective" "lect 32. Han And Roman Empires Compared" to find Han estimated at 1 bureaucrat per 450 population vs Roman 1 bureaucrat per 250,000 population. So many Roman provences had only 3 formal administrators, although various informal helpers such as provence-owned clerical slaves.

Edited November 8, 2012 by caesar novus

[Melvadius]

While the Romans may have been relatively lighlty staffed I suspect your lecturer's talk is to some extent suffering from the well known trap of a lack of direct compatability between terminology used in different cultures and different situations. You have actually touched on this in your side comments in the post.

 

This is possibly exemplified by the recurring difficulties people have in deciding what the Roman population was at different points in time because in some counts only the head of household would have been counted while at other times only men over certain ages were or those in receipt of the bread dole and in csome counts slaves were included but not in others (see this thread for a bit more on the topic of the total empire population).

 

If the Roman 'administrator' numbers are for instance only based on the final layer discounting slaves and possibly anyone who fed back information then there is obviously going to be a massive disparity with the Chinese system where everyone was allocated a post and their expertise/ social standing and responsibilities were enumerated to the last digit.

 

Its a bit like comparing chalk with cheese or counting apples and pears in two different areas where what is counted and in which circumstances is poorly understood even by experts let alone anyone simply picking up on what without this background context are effectively random statistics.

[caesar novus]

I can think of further things that muddy the picture, like both "taxpayer" groups would be supporting a sizable army regardless of lack of administrators. BTW, prof Gregory Aldrete of University of Wisconsin devoted 3 lectures to comparing them, after 6 lectures on the Han and Romans separately. I still think there may be a lesson to be learned from the differences if I knew more details. For instance you might expect the Han to benefit from more policing, but I believe he said both Romans and Hans frequently died from bandits on internal travel.

 

And the connections to the modern crises is hard to make since "economies" is a recent concept. I was alluding to the dilemma that public sector staffing during a downturn wants to go down to save money, but wants to go up to provide a stimulus (if you can find some genuinely useful task for them). An overstaffed society cannot do a stimulus and an understaffed one cannot do cutbacks, which limits their options.