Ancient Economics

[Kosmo]

How long were the price edicts in force?

Giving money to church also meant investment in buildings providing employment and also ment seting up charities that incresed the purchasing power of the poor enlarging the market. That's also basic economics and the argument seems simply anticlerical rather then economic. Pericle's building program it's usually praised despite focusing on another religious building.

Maybe the high price of the army, the greatest burden for the empire, has more to do with economic problems, but if certainly created buget deficit and inflation still kept money moving and was beneficial for the regions were the money were spent.

 

MPC I have to agree with you. before looking for the causes of economic downturn we should know if such event happened in the first place.

 

I already admited of not knowing much about roman labour market, but I know that traditional, agricultural, rural societies did not had a developed labour market.

A survey of bohemian textile industry in XVIII C showed that 2/3 of the total labour force involved were masters while 1/3 were apprentices and employes.

Traditional manufacture was labour intensive but had low capital needs so having large entreprises was highly unusual. More often, manufacture and other labours were done as a secundary occupation for peasants or other people in periods when the main activity was low like in winter. If the work force was full time probably a high proprtion was made of owners and not employes.

 

The early modern industry, that of Industrial Revolution, had serious problems finding the needed labour.

[M. Porcius Cato]

Giving money to church also meant investment in buildings providing employment and also ment seting up charities that incresed the purchasing power of the poor enlarging the market. That's also basic economics and the argument seems simply anticlerical rather then economic. Pericle's building program it's usually praised despite focusing on another religious building.

 

This argument is a variant of the broken window fallacy. In short, there is no net economic value created in these cases because the wealth spent on churches would have been spent elsewhere. Thus, the money paid to the builders of churches could have gone to pay builders of ships, grape-presses, and pottery shops. Since these latter enterprises would be able to return the cost of the initial investment (unlike churches and other money-pits), the net wealth of the empire would have increased (i.e., more goods per denarius) instead of declining.

[Kosmo]

Of course a productive investment it's more economically sound that a religious building but usually the romans did not invest in economy (except mines or military needs) and we don't know if the economy needed another pottery shop.

You are corect about the broken window fallacy when building a church, but building useless enterprises might be the same thing as many development plans showed.

 

That argument blamed the church for eating the money of the empire but pagan temples, priests and celebrations did not come for free either. Hadrian spent loads of money on temples and he was not alone in this.

 

Reading a life of Constantine I was amazed by the resources of the empire after many years of crisis and conflict. He doubled the size of the army, fought many wars, build a new capital, constructed huge churces around the empire from Rome to Jerusalem. The empire was still strong.

[Horatius]

For what it's worth here is an old thread that touched on Diocletian's economic reforms http://www.unrv.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=4720&st=0 Even though as Ursus pointed out it turned into a less than "riveting coinage debate" LOL!! I think there were some interesting points made and it was a major economic reform. It does show I guess that at this point it was recognized that there were serious problems with the state economy. You would not impose such drastic changes if things were running smoothly.