Comparing economic inequality between the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty
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I know that the Romans were good at record keeping for their time. But I understand the best population estimates for the Roman empire are based on economic metrics like agricultural modeling which in turn must make assumptions about wealth distribution. As for the Han, I don't think they've left us a complete census either.
To quote "How Many People? Ancient Demography" [0]:
> We generally estimate uncounted women, children and elderly males by using demographic modeling based on model life tables – data tables which project mortality simulations based on real-world populations. But how do you know what tables to use? The answer here has typically been that you comb the evidence you have (grave inscriptions, fragmentary census records that survive in Egypt) to create a statistical snapshot of your population and then try to match that, as best you can, to one of the extant models that ‘best fits.’ [...]
> That leaves the question of how many enslaved persons and those too poor to be counted in some of our figures.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2023/12/22/collections-how-many-people-an...
Cultures that prefer cremation, uh, that gets really complicated. We can't tell female ashes from male, nor tell the age of the deceased from them, even if the urn makes it through the centuries unscathed.
And with cultures that prefer more destructive burials (e.g. Parsis, where the dead are eaten by carrion fowl), there is basically zero chance.
I see "inequality" as a concept like "uncertainty", it can be pointed to as the source of social and economic issues, but only is undesirable that rain is seen as undesirable weather. Nobody likes being on the wrong end of these, but they are inevitable and natural (to some extent) and I think we're better off trying to acheive a society that works with an equilibrium wealth distribution. Umbrellas rather than weather control machines.
In the US, the top 10% are responsible for 50% of consumption. This means that higher redistribution can increase the spending of the bottom 90% by X% at the cost of decreasing the spending of the top 10% by X% (assuming no decrease in total production).
Of course, redistribution has negative effects too, I don't know what level of redistribution is optimal.
In general, markets can only work when people are averse to the loss of money, thereby introducing a feedback mechanism. And people are only averse to the loss of money when that has material consequences for their well-being. For the ultra-wealthy today, the marginal value of every additional dollar (or million dollars) is essentially zero, so the self-balancing properties of markets are prevented from doing their job properly, namely the efficient allocation of resources.
Why don't we follow evolutionary laws and let nature and competition tackle resource allocation?
We don't do that because we don't like seeing women and children get their brains beaten out with a large rock over a rabbit haunch that the bigger ape wanted.
As soon as you add social organization, you disrupt evolution inside that social unit: it then becomes one social unit vs others…. We’ve already been down that road, and now we live in large, relatively stable social units we call nations.
Anything inside a social unit is subject to the monopoly of coercion that the unit possesses over its members. Evolution is short-circuited by the presence of external existential forces.
Making evolution work inside a social unit is equivalent to dissolving it.
Also...
The idea that wealth hoarding inherently leads to inequality is flawed. If by “wealth” you mean capital, then unused capital doesn't distort markets or hinder wealth creation. If you're referring to wealth hoarding in the form of monopolies, it's important to note that monopolies tend to fail in truly free markets. Without innovation, they can't sustain themselves—unless they rely on government coercion to maintain control.
Government coercion is the primary force that inhibits both wealth creation and healthy competition. Overregulated markets and protectionist policies stifle innovation and prevent new players from entering the market. The most corrupt governments and corporations benefit from these systems because they reinforce existing power structures and shield them from competition.
That is also the stance of the capitalists. Have you heard of welfare? Now, have you heard about a successful capitalist society without some form of welfare?
1. "truly free markets" don't and can't exist.
In the absence of a strong government to create rules, companies and individuals will fill the power vacuum (e.g. the east India company). "free markets" are just as much of a fantasy as "Communist utopia".
2. Redistribution is less inefficient than the alternative
Without sufficiently redistributave policy, the alternatives arise. The French revolution and various communist revolutions throughout the world over the 20th century are the alternative to a populace that thinks inequality is too high.
Most people view the Nordics as desirable places to live and their Gini coefficient hovers around 0.3, while places with very high inequality, like Brazil and South Africa, tend to be poor and violent.
Nordic equality is as natural as the inequality we see everywhere else.
Once upon a time, it was so. Today, not so much. If that's a good or a bad thing, it's an entirely different can of worms. I think diversity in the Nordics is beautiful, but Japan has managed without it and they have great artisans.
In the Nordics, in addition to long barbaric winters, having long barbaric Middle Ages helps foster social discipline. See what beloved King Vasa of Sweden did to peasants that weren't happy with their Gini coefficient:
Something like 25%-32% of Sweden is non-ethnic Swedish.
Maybe once upon a time they were homogeneous, but they are probably one of the most heterogeneous countries (outside of the New World countries, which are an entirely different category), though I'd wager most of Western Europe is catching up (see: UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain).
Trying to artificially reduce inequalities as in communism didn't yield good results as everything was reduced to the lowest common denominator.
edit: I'm saying don't just assume it. Otherwise I can simply assume the counterposition.
Because I do assume equality to be a good thing; if that is an incorrect assumption I would like to know.
Roughly, my feeling is that perfect equality is unstable, or at least enforcing it would cost a lot more than allowing for (limited) inequality. I don't think that perfectly free markets are desirable (or efficient) but I think that how do distribute resources in a way that maintains equality while also keeping the median wellbeing high (relative to other systems) is a huge ask.
Thank you for the clarification, your position makes more sense now. It sounds like you're not saying there's something inherently bad about equality, but rather that the practical cost of enforcing absolute equality top-down makes it actually a net negative in well-being for the population of a state?
(I can't help but point out that if there's someone with the power to enforce it, things are very far from equal - but I'm guessing you mean 'equality' more in a monetary / real goods sense)
Even behind the veil of ignorance I can imagine that, say, a society with a small amount of inequality would have higher average wealth and that most people would be happy with such a system even if, say, 10% of people were worse off than under perfect equality.
(For balance, maybe you could have a "crabs in a barrel" style of enforcement where all of the equal society members equally ensure that nobody becomes richer or poorer than anyone else. See e.g. this old story https://granta.com/the-black-sheep/ )
You also seem to assume that inequality has benefits (rain is good), but we haven't really had a truly equal society since we started farming. The attempts at communism were just as if not more unequal as anything we have today. We don't know what it would be like, we just assume and we just believe the ones benefiting from inequality when they tell us how everything would fall apart if we tried to pursue such a thing.
Any amount of inequality can be used as leverage to gain more power and increase inequality, so there's no way to have any natural equilibrium of inequality. People who have the most power will always seek more and be in the best position to get it. We need true equality to have an equilibrium.
You may already appreciate this point, but I think that even without having a modern example of a truly equal society we can reason about what it might be like. Specifically I believe that it's been well argued (though I don't have a reference to hand) that wealth equality is an unstable equilibrium. It should follow from the tendency of inequality exacerbate itself, as you mention.
Of course you can make a the equilibrium stable with a sufficient restoring force, but I haven't been convinced that such a thing is possible. I would be glad to hear ideas on that though (maybe income/wealth tax with negative rates below the average and then a sharp increase?).
Before we can create an equal society without forcing it in some way, we need to figure out a system of decision-making that doesn't have to centralize power and can produce high quality decisions. Throughout history this has been impossible, but I think now with current technology it could be done if we put enough effort into it. A decision-making process in which anyone can participate, and which somehow makes sure participants have the required knowledge to make good decisions (or gathers all knowledge from participants and can figure out the good, relevant parts of it).
“To address this puzzle, I conducted a meta-analysis based on 1,341 estimates drawn from 43 studies in economics journals. The findings indicate a statistically significant but economically insignificant true effect of inequality on crime, ranging between 0.007 and 0.123 using UWLS FAT-PET and advanced methods. In essence, if there is an impact of inequality on crime, it is, at best, minimal.”
I don't know what exact scholarly literature you're referring to, but I'd guess that they're talking about local properties, i.e. starting from where we are increasing inequality would decrease growth etc.
On the other hand we know from history that technological and social innovation comes for production surpluses and specialisation allowing innovation. Taxing subsistence farmers to pay scientists and philosophers is cruel, but it seems to be how societal progress comes about. If you accept that (hopefully anodyne) premise then you'll agree that starting from relative wealth equality we can (long term) increase growth and social mobility and overall wellbeing by increasing inequality.
Not relevant to the ancient Romans or Han.