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Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

When comparing across time periods as broad as this, pretty much the only thing that matters is how you compare purchasing power and adjust for inflation. If you compare something that hasn't gotten appreciably cheaper over time - say, gold, or skilled labor - you wind up with an extremely large number. Compare something that has - like grain or clothing - and you wind up with a much more reasonable number. Going based off agriculture, back-of-the-envelope math gives about 400k people in Rome and $1000/yr expenses on staple foods for about $400m, which is significantly less than the probably-gold-based conversion scheme the article's source uses.

And if you want to be really persnickety, no amount of money in Rome would buy antibiotics, televisions, etc, etc.

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He could fed megalopolis of his time (with what they expected), and pay soldiers of empire of his time, shouldn't we adjust this as well?

* Feed New York for one year, grocery expenses $500/month [1]

8000000 * $500/month * 12 month = $48 billion

18000000 * $500/month * 12 month = $108 billion // metro area

* Pay US Army soldiers for a fifth of a year [2]

$140 billion / 5 = $28 billion

Who have enough to pay that?

Contemporary athletes, even Michael Jordan ($2.1 billion [3]) absolutely can't.

But Bill Gates ($106 billion [4]) can! As well as Jeff Bezos ($114 billion).

Was antique inequality bigger? Yes! "It is believed that Marcus Licinius Crassus expanded his personal fortune to 170 million sesterces, while Pliny the Elder surmised his fortune to be valued even higher, at 200 million sesterces" [5]. That's five times bigger. And Augustus "personally owned all of Egypt". That's $898 billions [6]

[1] https://smartasset.com/mortgage/what-is-the-cost-of-living-i...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wea...

Its funny how many comments in this article question that an athlete could have such absurd wealth, but don't pause to think that there are many modern people that have multiples of his claimed 15 billion in wealth, which is somehow completely not absurd...

I think you're confusing discussions about whether something is (or was) true and discussions about whether something should be true be some moral standards, the classic Hume's is/ought distinction. People in the comments here don't seem to be making any value judgements, just arguing about historical truth.

Bill Gates had huge factor in changing life of bilions people, how's that absurd?

He changed the way almost everyone lives

> Feed New York for one year

Economic comparisons across millennia are close to meaningless. For example, how does one compare modern New York City, with a population rivalling that of the ancient world’s human population, with a Roman urban centre?

The increased population is possible in part because staple prices have fallen enough to support that larger population. Not saying it's a perfect comparison but it can be used as a rough guide because there is no way that's perfectly accurate, the situation of the world has changed so much you can't account for every factor affecting any thing you try to use to create a meaningful baseline across centuries.

It is poetic comparison. Calculations performed out of curiosity.

My point was "comparison with greatest of its time, is it possible today?"

Your question based around "look how magnificent our civilization is."

And perfect counterbalance to your question would be "How does one compare biggest city of its time with New York City?" [1] [2]. I don't like such questions, they already contain judgement. And that I think is pointless.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_urban_community_siz...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities

Comparisons beyond 100 years or so are largely meaningless. You're right about purchasing power, and that leads to your last point which is that what could actually be bought was so fundamentally different that attempting to do so is almost always going to mislead the public and be irresponsible. But it's one of those things that reporters and journalists can't help themselves from doing.

Is 100yrs that hard? I recently watched "The Little Giant" (1933) where the main character claims to have over a million dollars and is kind of retiring. I found it fun to look up what that million dollars would be worth today. According to one site it is $18 million. He went to a hotel in Santa Barbara where he was paying $45 a night for a giant suite. That comes out to over $800 a night which sounds like it might be in the correct ballpark. He gave is girlfriend who he was breaking up with a check for $25k which came out to about $500k in todays terms it seems. He rented a 20 bedroom 12 bathroom mansion for $1450 a month which is apparently $25k today. Sounds reasonable for a 20 bedroom mansion?

Those all seem like reasonable numbers.

PS: not recommending the movie. It was cute but not great.

Well... That's less than 100 years ago so....

This isn’t some threshold below which results are meaningless, it’s a time period approximation.

Given the lack of computerised record keeping at the time compared to now, it’s more important to have a reliable metric from the period than hit the 100y mark exactly

That's measuring the monetary value while ignoring actual utility. No amount of money could have bought a polio vaccine or advanced cancer treatments or genetic testing or microelectronics in 1933 but these are common things across the world now. Purchasing power doesn't just grow in quantity, it grows in technological sophistication that make any comparison between now and even the early 20th century more than useless - they're actively misleading. The biggest growth is in industrial production and distribution of goods and it isn't really quantifiable.

It has footage of Santa Barbara from the 30s? I'd love to check it out - was born and raised there and worked at the Hotel Santa Barbara briefly which is the only hotel old enough to fit this bill!

$1 million then is not $18 Million today in purchasing power IMO. Maybe it is in inflation. Probably relative to GDP /stock market is a better way to measure it

$1 mil in 1993 is not worth $18 mil today (ie. in 2020).

Inflation has averaged 2% during this time, so over 27 years: (1.02)^27 = 1.7069

$1 mil from 1993 would be worth no more than ~$1.71 today.

He said 1933, not 1993

1933, not 1993.

How do you meaningfully compare a hotel or mansion in 1933 to one today though? The reasons you'd travel would be very different, and so would the experience of the hotel. Those 20 bedrooms would presumably have blankets rather than duvets; the variety of food you get in a budget hotel today would have been virtually unimaginable then. The very concept of a girlfriend back then is hard to compare to what a girlfriend means now. Etc.

The food is a good example - you could buy handmade quilts at a surprisingly cheap rate, but you could not buy fresh Lychee from Asia at any price. You could buy an encyclopedia, but couldn't buy a single Google search. A Roman emperor could wear a handcrafted sword of the finest exotic steel, but could not get a single AK-47 in his army.

$800 is more in the good 5 star room than opulent suite territory tho, given the location

I think the answer to this is basically that the further you go back, the harder the comparisons become - or at least you have to think much harder about why you're comparing things.

Over a few years, it's pretty easy to talk about the amount of money to maintain a certain standard of living. Some things cost more, some less and it averages out to a comparative number.

How do I compare my outgoings on a mobile phone to the 1980s/60s/40s? Should I? How do I compare international travel to a time before commercial flight? Before powered flight at all? Should I compare year round access to exotic fruits - something that would require royal wealth if even possible depending on how far back you want to go.

It doesn't mean we can't do it though, just that the comparisons come with more and more caveats and more ways of working it out make sense in different contexts.

One I think is quite interesting is "how many human hours can I direct with this sum?" or even "what portion of human output can I control?". It doesn't tell you what your salary would be in the 1200s but I think it's an interesting framing for looking at how the world has changed.

>I think the answer to this is basically that the further you go back, the harder the comparisons become

That's clearly true although I suspect it's rather non-linear depending upon the metric you're trying to compare.

Healthcare is certainly one big thing that money can only buy to some degree over time. Go back to the early twentieth century and a very wealthy person can largely be as comfortable as today. The fact that they don't have kitchen appliances, TV, and so forth doesn't really matter a lot. But they can't get polio vaccine or many medical treatments that are pretty routine today.

The whole nature of what property and ownership means tends to shift with large enough time frames. It wasn't that long ago that in many places it was difficult to be wealthy without being a noble. A mansion tended to come with tenant farmers and feudal obligations.

>... is almost always going to mislead the public and be irresponsible.

Yes, the author should be careful not to mislead anyone and inspire them to travel back in time to become a charioteer.

Laughed out loud here. But I still think there's more to the original argument: If someone takes this argument at face value, they may conclude that Roman society was a modern capitalistic one, with sponsorships for athletes, celebrities endorsing products and so on. Almost reminiscent of The Flintstones. It won't be of much consequence, but it would be a bit silly.

Comparisons in the largely static medieval and early renaissance periods in Europe can easily be made across centuries without even adjusting the numbers.

I think this is an important point. Life really wasn't improving much for the average person before the industrial revolution. GDP per capita estimates of the past before the industrial revolution give us something like 50-100% GDP per capita increase over 1000+ years.

The medieval period was much more dynamic than eg classic antiquity. See the 'Real World' section of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis for some writing on the topic.

To get to your point: comparisons work for a surprisingly long time, when you compare societies on metallic monetary standards.

It's not really obvious why using eg gold or silver as money should keep the prices of goods and services we actually care about so stable over long times. One explanation I read is that the real cost of mining more gold is relatively stable (in terms of real labour and resources expended).

So if the market price of gold in terms of those real resources goes up, more mines will open and existing mines will work harder, eventually restoring long running equilibrium.

Similar when relative gold prices are dropping.

Another fun fact: modern economies on fiat money spend more real resources on mining gold than classic gold standard economies (like Scotland). Perhaps because people feel more of a need to invest in gold as an inflation hedge?

See 'The Resource Costs of Fiat Money Exceed Those of a Gold Standard' https://www.econlib.org/the-resource-costs-of-fiat-money-exc...

On the gold mining in different countries, maybe historically gold-based countries did all their mining back in the day and now have none left?

Not sure. Gold has been exchanged on global markets since basically forever. So local exhaustion of mines doesn't make much of a differences.

I've always gauged it by cost of living expenses for working class people.

It's one reason why I love the road to wiggan pier so much. George Orwell breaks down the cost of living in many areas of Britain for the average person. I think when I calculated it out, even me living in the US at $12/hr with a 700 rent payment and all other expenses, I was still living a comfier life than those people. And they put in some LONG days too.

The most interesting thing he pointed out too was it wasnt the corporate places that had the worst landlords and rooms, it was the small or individual owners. Simply because they couldn't afford to fix anything or give you back your deposit.

> And if you want to be really persnickety, no amount of money in Rome would buy antibiotics, televisions, etc, etc.

True, but there’s plenty of things that could have been bought in ancient Rome that simply aren’t for sale today.

I know there was a plant that acted as a birth control the the Romans used until it was extinct.

Silphium, a drug that induced abortion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

What are some examples?

Fiat currency.

You can buy fiat currency today without any problems. You'd have a harder time buying those in Roman times.

Slaves would be the most obvious.

I think at that level of wealth you could simply use paid labour to do anything you want, no slavery required.

There are a few unspeakable things that you can not do with paid labor but can do with slaves, you would have to be extraordinarily evil to pursue any of them which is unlikely but is a possibility nonetheless.

Romans were far more tolerant of official corruption for one. Appointment to government positions and influence over government officials were pretty much blatantly for-sale.

Really? This doesn’t sound very different to me.

LOL, agree, from all the examples he could give, he chose the worst one. That has not changed at all.

People

> plenty of things

What other than slaves?

Far more animals available today. A far greater selection of meat and vegetables today. Far more selection of sexual services available today. Far more medicines (plus they work).

sexual services? I bet the Romans were not lacking anything in that department.

Definitely still for sale today

It's kind of like the difference between marijuana in California vs marijuana in Singapore. Yes, you can get weed in Singapore, but in California it's not just legal, it's an essential business in a pandemic. Similarly, you can run an Epstein-style sex trafficking operation in the 2010s West, but in ancient Rome you don't have to hide it or worry about getting "caught."

There are the illegal services, yes.

But then there a lots of legal ones, like sex with a sex worker without getting an STD for life.

You don't have a car or plane so they will all be the same down the road in your small town aka Rome. Rome would have been very homogeneous with ethnicity (Yes it would)

You have better soap and washing powder now. Today you can chose someone with good dental.

The past wasn't this imaginary movie using 21st century props everyone thinks it was. It was shit. It was boring.

Rome was bush weed. Today is MDMA

Power was more concentrated and was more absolute and that gave you way more advantages. A run-of-the-mill Roman patrician had more power and influence then than let's say Jeff Bezos today.

Tickets to a life or death battle at the Colosseum for one.

Net worth per capita is another measurement worth considering. $400m at roman population size is nuts.

And if you want to be really persnickety... let's see how much money it would take to get CO2 levels down to Roman times! It would cost $0 in Roman Times, and trillions now, so ... they were all rich?

Well...not $0:

https://www.livescience.com/23678-methane-emissions-roman-ti...

>researchers found that methane production was high around 100 B.C., during the heyday of the Roman civilization, and waned around A.D. 200 as the empire faltered. The methane was released when Romans burned down forest to clear land for crops and expanding settlements, Sapart said.

Yep! These were Little Ice Age prevention measures, or maybe Roman Warm Period investments.

Still expenses. State should have been involved, economic incentives, campaigns like "Burn the coal - stay Huns home" Everyone knew it, but then as now too little to late

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period

CO2 levels now aren't great, but I'm not sure Roman-era lead emissions were an improvement: https://phys.org/news/2019-05-roman-polluted-european-air-he...

that’s still a boatload of duckets (ducats, for the intelligentsia). it would have bought basically anything you wanted. $400MM is roughly what lebron james has made from basketball (aside from side hustles), so the comparison of best athlete of his time is likely apt at least.

> pretty much the only thing that matters is how you compare purchasing power and adjust for inflation

Or just compare it to the average salary at the time

Is there an athlete today that could pay for the entire Roman army (80 thousand people more or less, their salary, food, houses, equipment) for a year?

The 1,000$/year expenses on staple food is entirely made up, Roman food supply wasn't based on agriculture, at the dawn of Rome it was vegetables, catch of the day and the occasional meat bought at the market

When Rome became an empire the food started coming from all over the place as a tribute to the empire, so to establish how much it costs you have to factor in military expenditure and the cost of the political structure to sustain the logistic

Romans in fact rarely ate at home, they usually went to tabernas where they could buy their meals

Supplies were taken from the provinces and brought to Rome, that's why they also built roadways, harbours and other facilities to improve moving armies and good throughout the empire ("all roads lead to Rome" was born from that)

Now you have a better idea how much 5 times a local governor means. It means 5 times the amount of goods and troops a local governor could control.

It's like saying that an athlete today earned 5 times the GDP of an US State.

"Average salary at the time" was of course far lower than today's. It's like what we hear about folks in Sub-Saharan Africa that still have to subsist on $2 per day - the reality for most folks back then wasn't far from that.

Lower doesn't mean anything, when compared relatively

You have to compare the wealth of the rich guy with the average wealth at the time not with today's standards...

And even today, 2$ a day seem low but it's about how much the US government is giving away as aid too poor people to eat (it's about 3.4$ a day)

It doesn't mean anything if it's not compared with something that has the same base (hence my whole comment about Roman food cost that should include expenses for keeping the military state running)

> You have to compare the wealth of the rich guy with the average wealth at the time not with today's standards...

Well, maybe. It depends what question you're asking. If the question is a social one about "what would it have looked like, broadly speaking, to have someone so relatively wealthy back then?" then maybe that's a reasonable comparison. If you're trying to get at "what would the rich guy really have been able to buy, subsidize, control etc. with that kind of wealth?", comparing by consumption basket gives an interesting perspective that tries to reflect absolute differences in the standard of living.

The answer to the question is "he would be as rich as a modern billionaire in the tens of billions range"

Marcus Licinius Crassus, "The richest man in Rome" [1], net worth c. 170 million sesterces (five times athletes net worth), "joined Caesar and Pompey in the unofficial political alliance known as the First Triumvirate". Together they got end of Republic. That worth a lot.

Lets return to "the richest man in Rome". Jeff Bezos, richest in USA, net worth $114 billion [2]. Is it enough to join triumvirate, influence senate? Donald Trump net worth estimated $3.1 billion, but he is party representative. How much is party supporters net worth? [4] lists $143 billion, $82 billion - families controlling Walmart (about $150 billion net), Johnson & Johnson (about $100 billion)... About same

Gaius Appuleius Diocles, net worth 35,863,120 sesterces. About fifth of Crassus. Assuming Rome had same inequality as in USA:

35,863,120 / 170 million * $114 billion = $24.05 billion

Original posters estimate

$400m * 5 = $2 billion

Assuming [8] New Yorkers grocery expenses should be $10-20/month. They would revolt. Or city should be about Tallahassee and that's not the power they compare with [9].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_Donald_Trump

[4] https://budgetandthebees.com/who-is-richer-democrats-or-repu...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_%26_Johnson

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22777782

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

> Is it enough to join triumvirate, influence senate?

Crassus, Pompey and Caesar were not just incredibly wealthy relative to the average Roman. They were rich compared to Rome. They could buy the state. That’s simply not true in modern America, where D.C. can, in times of crisis, spend trillions unencumbered. (Something no individual, presently, can.)

By that logic Mukesh Ambani is the richest person on earth by about 1.5 orders of magnitude because he's from India.

But is he the richest man in history?

Don't forget that Rome was the largest empire of its times but also the most powerful military entity by a large margin.

Is India comparable?

True to all you said, but no athlete can do (the equivalent of) this today:

“His total take home amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period – enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year”.

The two big metrics I would use to measure inflation

* How many acres of average quality land could you buy?

* How many hours of average skill labor could you buy?

Maybe we should also have one taking improved efficiency into account

* How much food could you buy?

"Average skill labor" would not account for a reasonable comparison in standards of living. It takes the exact same amount of "average skill labor" to perform a string quartet in 2020 as it did in 1720, but the cost today is far higher than it was back then, if assessed via a reasonable consumption basket (perhaps involving chained comparisons over time, etc.). That's no coincidence, of course; performing a string quartet is the rare case of a good/service that has not been made cheaper by technological progress and growth.

Comparing by food prices, while ultimately a bit more reasonable, would plausibly err in the other direction since food prices have radically fallen in modern times. It's very helpful to expand the basket beyond food, and additional historical data helps take a guess at questions like "how much would good X have been valued in Roman times, if it was available on the market?"

I grant you a city with all its subjects and a position in my government.

> And if you want to be really persnickety, no amount of money in Rome would buy antibiotics, televisions, etc, etc.

Apparently they had advanced plastic surgery using obsidian blades, and must have had some type of antibiotics for all that surgery.

https://bulletin.facs.org/2018/02/the-history-of-the-scalpel...

Unfortunately they didn't. They didn't have anaesthetic either, beyond the usual drugs and alcohol.

Plastic surgery is as old as civilization and possibly older, there are recorded procedures for doing rhinoplasty in ancient Egypt. I’d attribute the reason for this being certain bones in the face breaking and mending easily.

This is basically the same problem that cross-cultural or -temporal IQ comparisons have.

But some things got more expensive over time. Human labor, manufacture, handicraft.

Your persnickety line is precisely why you would use Gold instead of commodities for the comparison.

The appreciation of Gold is perhaps the best stand-in for the value of technological progress since then (including financial technology, e.g. if the Roman held onto that gold to from then until day).

And to be really persnickety, staple purchasing power is hardly a ruler for enormous wealth.

We also need to adjust for the supply of gold available at the time, which I would think is much less than the amount available now. That way we can estimate a reasonable percentage of global wealth. Though it's still a guess, since gold buying power fluctuates and then we are back to trying to estimate a basket of goods ala CPI.

Also, this guy is a G and reminds me that my life has no meaning. Or at least less meaning than a dude who rode a chariot and chucked spears at dudes.

Edit: Oh, looks like he didn't even chuck spears, just raced. I assumed gladiator for some reason. Didn't even know this chariot racing thing was a big deal. Interesting.

Have you never seen Ben-Hur? It's an amazing movie with a classic chariot racing scene.

I haven't. Maybe I just ignored the chariot racing part of history because it didn't seem interesting.

Chariot Racing was huge.

The largest stadium ever built was the Circus Maximus which could hold over 150,000 people. The stadiums in the world right now don’t even come close.

It seems like the modern equivalent is NASCAR or F1. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway fits over 250,000 people.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway isn't in the middle of Washington DC though! The Circus Maximus is right at the bottom of the Palatine hill in the centre of Rome.

> isn't in the middle of Washington DC though

1) the speedway is far bigger in overall size than Circus Maximus

2) They likely didn’t have the same concerns over safety, noise (which is far louder with cars than chariots), traffic flow in/out, etc

3) didn’t likely have the same NIMB issues we’d have today

Re: #1, decided to look it up to get the exact difference. Based on km² data from Wikipedia, Indy is over 30x larger than Circus Maximus.

Even if we leave aside race tracks, there's a few stadia over 100k, especially college football in the US. Michigan college is at 107k apparently. Camp Nou (Barcelona) is close to a 100k as well.

They used to be bigger, in the 150k/200k range in the 20th century, back before safety concerns were really a thing.

Not just huge as a sport, but enormously important to politics as well. They nearly brought down Constantinople: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots

That's not remotely true. The 1950 world cup final (the famous Maracanaço), for example, had 200,000 people in the seats.

Ahh that’s true. I stand corrected.

I incorrectly assumed that the largest sports stadium since that time would be around today.

I also did not consider race tracks which do cross that bound.

Yes, the thing is stadiums in those days were massively unsafe and uncomfortabe: cramped all standing sections, no amenities, etc. Over time safety standards improved and so even if stadiums are physically the same size or even bigger, the density is much lower. The biggest football stadium nowadays I believe is Camp Nou, short of 100,000. The new Maracanã seats only 80,000 :p

Chariot racing was big for a long time in the classical world. The Nika Riots of Justinian were sparked during a race. The Blues and Greens were almost psuedo religions in Constantinople, giving out food and healthcare in some cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots

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