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132 results

Page 1 of 7

  • 27 - Inequality

  • from Empirical Approaches
  • Edited by Sitta von Reden, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Greek Economy
    Published online:
    21 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022, pp 404-420

  • Summary

    The extent of material inequality and its relationship to economic development are central questions for historians of all periods. In recent decades, historians of ancient Greece have sought to provide the basis for answering those questions by attempting to estimate the distribution of wealth and income in Athens (and to a lesser degree in other Greek poleis) by reference to statements in ancient texts, proxy data, and simple models. While there remains much room for debate on specifics, we suggest that, for certain periods of Athenian history, very rough, but nonetheless suggestive, estimates can be offered of the distribution of wealth across the citizen population and the distribution of income across the entire population. The chapter briefly sketches ancient Greek economic performance before discussing material inequality in Greece, with special reference to Athens, and in comparison with other premodern economies. It explains how Greek political institutions and competition among individuals and states drove comparatively high levels of growth, while inequality remained comparatively low. Finally, it tests this hypothesis against some more and less familiar facts about Greek history.

  • Roman wealth and wealth inequality in comparative perspective

  • Walter Scheidel
  • Journal:
    Journal of Roman Archaeology / Volume 33 / 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 October 2020, pp. 341-353
    Print publication:
    2020

  • In 2013, Barack Obama called rising inequality “the defining challenge of our time”. Since the Financial Crisis and Great Recession of 2007-9, the gap between the haves and have-nots has attracted unprecedented attention in politics, the media and academia.1 Students of the more distant past have also begun to embrace this trend. Economists are once again looking back in time, inspired in no small measure by the broad impact of the work of Thomas Piketty.2 Historians are laboring hard to unearth and publish relevant data. Thanks to their efforts, we are now able to glimpse the contours of changes in the concentration of income and wealth over the very long run, at least in some parts of the world.3 Archaeologists have been joining the fray, gathering and analyzing plausible proxies of inequality such as house sizes.4

  • BENFORD'S LAW AND NUMERICAL STYLIZATION OF MONETARY VALUATIONS IN CLASSICAL LITERATURE

  • Walter Scheidel
  • Journal:
    The Classical Quarterly / Volume 66 / Issue 2 / December 2016
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    29 July 2016, pp. 815-821
    Print publication:
    December 2016

  • In an article published in this journal in 1996, I surveyed number stylization in monetary amounts recorded in Roman-era literature up to the Severan period. I argued that certain leading digits such as 1, 3 and 4 were heavily over-represented in the evidence. For the limited samples I used at the time these findings are not in need of revision. However, as I show here, a more inclusive approach to the material produces a substantially different picture. The most significant shortcoming of my study was my failure to take account of the probable distribution of leading digits in a random sample, which may serve as a benchmark for assessing the nature and extent of number preference. While I noted that lower leading digits were inherently more likely to occur than higher ones, I schematically related observed frequencies to an even distribution of leading digits (in which each of them is expected to make up one-ninth of the total). This benchmarking strategy is invalidated by a widely observed phenomenon known as Benford's Law, according to which leading digits frequently conform to a predictable pattern that greatly favours lower over higher numbers. This is true in particular if observations are spread across several orders of magnitude. Ancient monetary valuations satisfy this condition since recorded amounts range from single digits to hundreds of millions. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, Benford's Law has never been applied to the study of these data.

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