Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, November (2006)
Abstract
In his contribution to the conference on ‘Approaches to quantifying the Roman economy’ held at Oxford on September 27, 2006, Dominic Rathbone highlighted many of the problems that undermine modern attempts to reconstruct price and income levels in the Roman world. In my comments, I touch very briefly on three ways of expanding the scope of our studies beyond the limits of the existing and mostly inadequate data on costs and wages, by considering the determinants of real incomes; the use of proxy data for real incomes; and the potential of cross-cultural comparison.
Real wages are strongly influenced by demographic conditions, given that they tend to be fairly sensitive to deviations from an economic system’s equilibrium level of population size. A classic exposition of this principle is provided by Ron Lee’s analysis of the correlation of real wages and demographic growth rates in pre-industrial England (Fig. 1). Papyrological evidence from Roman Egypt offers an opportunity to study this relationship in an ancient economy. However, my earlier attempt to explain an apparent increase in real wages (and concurrent drop in land rents) in third-century CE Egypt with reference to population losses incurred in the ‘Antonine Plague’ of the late second century CE (Table 1) has met with some skepticism due to that fact that even in that region, the available data may be insufficient to test this assumption in a rigorous fashion. These uncertainties, in turn, effectively rule out comparable empirical studies of other, less well documented parts of the Roman empire.
Walter Scheidel
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, November (2006)
Abstract
In his contribution to the conference on ‘Approaches to quantifying the Roman economy’ held at Oxford on September 27, 2006, Dominic Rathbone highlighted many of the problems that undermine modern attempts to reconstruct price and income levels in the Roman world. In my comments, I touch very briefly on three ways of expanding the scope of our studies beyond the limits of the existing and mostly inadequate data on costs and wages, by considering the determinants of real incomes; the use of proxy data for real incomes; and the potential of cross-cultural comparison.
Real wages are strongly influenced by demographic conditions, given that they tend to be fairly sensitive to deviations from an economic system’s equilibrium level of population size. A classic exposition of this principle is provided by Ron Lee’s analysis of the correlation of real wages and demographic growth rates in pre-industrial England (Fig. 1). Papyrological evidence from Roman Egypt offers an opportunity to study this relationship in an ancient economy. However, my earlier attempt to explain an apparent increase in real wages (and concurrent drop in land rents) in third-century CE Egypt with reference to population losses incurred in the ‘Antonine Plague’ of the late second century CE (Table 1) has met with some skepticism due to that fact that even in that region, the available data may be insufficient to test this assumption in a rigorous fashion. These uncertainties, in turn, effectively rule out comparable empirical studies of other, less well documented parts of the Roman empire.
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