What things cost in ancient Rome
forumancientcoins.com
forumancientcoins.com
Yep -- anybody who thinks government can control prices should take a look at history. This kind of thinking goes back a long ways.
Wiki has the result: "However, the Edict did not solve the problem, as Diocletian's mass minting of coins of low metallic value continued to increase inflation, and the maximum prices in the Edict were apparently too low. Merchants either stopped producing goods, sold their goods illegally, or used barter. The Edict tended to disrupt trade and commerce, especially among merchants. Sometimes entire towns could no longer afford to produce trade goods. Because the Edict also set limits on wages, those who had fixed salaries (especially soldiers) found that their money was increasingly worthless as the artificial prices did not reflect actual costs."
la plus ca change...
You sell a loaf of bread for a proscribed price and they come and kill you. I would imagine the arresting, jury, and trial took only a very short amount of time.
There's a human urge to try to micromanage economics. It all looks so simple. You just set the price of bread so that everybody can afford a loaf each day. How much easier could it get? Or if people are poor, just up the minimum wage. Heck, make the minimum wage 100 bucks an hour and we'll all be upper middle-class! All of us! Above average. All it would take would be some smart politicians to write a law.
Somebody once said that voters should have one year of economics before they would be allowed to vote. I'm against that, but the guy had a point: of all the political topics, economics is the most non-intuitive.
Bear in mind too that most of Rome's million inhabitants were originally family farmers who went broke trying to compete with big plantation-farmers under Rome's weird political institutions. Lots of urban unrest, gang violence, riots, and so on. Gruesome public executions were an effective (and maybe even necessary) means of keeping the peace.
Especially if you go beyond the sort of "Economics 101" where everything is supply and demand, and markets always self-regulate and yadda yadda yadda.
Politics can and does have positive effects on markets, too. The internet that we're using to post these messages, was of course created with US taxpayer dollars. As you say, it is complex, and simplistic things like "those silly politicians should just leave it alone and it would be ok", or "Buy American!" are appealing, but wrong.
The "fuzzier" the reasoning to put controls in, the more they seem due to failure. That means that emotional arguments, based on "fairness" are out: practical arguments based on things that simply have to exist for an open market to exist are in.
It's complex, but we have clear limits on each end. Total lack of control won't work, but control based on politics or emotional appeal won't work either. The criteria has to be "things that make the market more efficient"
http://www.constantinethegreatcoins.com/edict/
There is some interesting information, for example about soldiers pay and costs, exchange rates or about a death penalty for refusing to sell goods at the stated price.
Also silk prices have been crazy: 12,000 denarii for a libra of white silk and a whopping 150,000 denarii for a purple silk (use of which was regulated by the Emperor with misuse punishable by a death penalty).
It would be also interesting to know prices of spices, other luxury product driving international trade in ancient times [2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_silk
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incense_Route, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road
It's noteworthy how teachers were paid 'by the pupil', and how architecture is apparently lower on the social ladder than rhetoric.
An advocates fee for a pleading works out to teaching 5 pupils geometry for a month. Some things never change!
Indeed, the Roman author Quintilian held teachers who insisted on small class-sizes in contempt, as mere "pedagogues" (by etymology, slaves who baby-sat children), and insisted that a skilled teacher could handle a large class by his rhetorical power.
It's a bit hard to make sense of this without seeing it converted into current units ($/lb or something).
Assuming a person eats 1/2 of meat a day, plus bread and other stuff, you could deduct that it would take about 8-10 Denarii per day for a person to feed themseleves.
The lowes wage, is for unskilled famer: Farm laborer, with maintenance (daily) 25
So about 33% of the income is spend on food, nevermind basic necessities. But when you compare to today's countries in development, it fares pretty well. http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm...
Now if you are a wall painter, things get better: Wall painter, as above (daily) 75
You are spending only a small fraction of your income in basic food.
from that limited data, it seems that life wasn't bad at all during those times.
Why?
1) The value of the denarius was clearly subject to inflation, and so varied greatly. You could say "how much was the denarius worth of October 1st, 10 AD?", but that value would have changed by the next day. In fact, around the time this edict was proclaimed, clearly the value of the denarius was inflating rapidly.
2) The only way you could come up with a relative value for even one day is by looking at how much comparable goods cost. The thing is, are there any comparable goods? The average "consumption basket" (used to calculate the inflation index in modern times) was drastically different back then. The standard of living of people around that time was incomparable.
A kilogram of corn, which you might think would be a good item to evaluate relative prices, was harder to come by back then. Relative and absolute scarcity of resources was different.
However, while this seems to be the view of most economists, I think it's meaningless to ask even what the value of a dollar 50 years ago was, because we are so much richer now. A dollar now can buy you computing power that would have been unthinkable then, cures for diseases that were then incurable, and so on. Economists deliberately ignore immensely valuable new innovations till their prices stabilize (= decline dramatically), since otherwise the CPI would jump around wildly. But this means the CPI greatly understates the growth in wealth.
Watches with "electric" (rather than 'electronic') precision, that run for a year on a power cell and don't need winding (gasp!).
A stereo where the 'stereo' ability was the main feature (woo!).
Polaroid cameras advertising all the brilliant things you could do for your business by having a near-instant photo (You mean they didn't bother inventing a digital camera to take to the moon? What were they doing?).
A cadillac, an oldsmobile, a steel framed suitcase, a Hassleblad camera crowing about auto-wind-on film, an insurance company covering an elephant on a raft, a dishwasher...
A mere 40 years ago, and a lot of the products have an air of being low-spec, basic, simplistic, even. Growth in wealth? Aye.
We define money in terms of wealth & then are forced to define wealth in terms of money. Even using item baskets as a unit of wealth is really doomed to imperfection. All you are doing is attempting to standardise wealth. That's what money try's to do.
In any case, while I disagree that it is meaningless to make comparisons, I think that it is meaningful to discuss the value of money. Wealth is not a precise unit. I'm not at all sure that makes it meaningless. But I'd rather avoid defining it as that which a basket measures.
Emotional wealth anyone?
Think of it as "scarcity distribution" if you will. The typical food basket cost a different amount then than now. And there are plenty of times when most people could barely afford to eat (e.g. the early industrial age, when most factory workers were barely paid a living wage).
A good example of the differences that make this discrepancy so large is the price of salt. Just now, the department in charge of road gritting in the UK has announced that it's out of gritting salt, so they're planning to use table salt instead. Flash back two thousand years ago, and salt was so precious that it was used as a currency to pay soldiers (hence the name "salary").
Other commodities suffer from similar differences, not only with 2000 years of distance, but even closer to us. As pg pointed out, many things which are available today for a dollar were unthinkable even 50 years ago. All these discrepancies make it impossible to compute any sort of exchange rate between dollars and denarii. You can make one up in your head, but it's pure fantasy.
I agree that it gets very vague when societies are as different as ancient Rome and a modern industrial country. But knowing what share of a person's income is spent on biological necessities (basic food and shelter) is meaningful and can be expressed in dollar terms to make it more understandable.
(In fact, what we call corn is a new world crop, unknown in Europe until the 16th century. The word would have referred to barley or wheat before that.) So not even the most basic foodstuffs were comparable.
Wages are a much better basis for comparison. Unskilled, medium-skilled, and high-skilled jobs are pretty comparable now and then.
1/4 of a decent beer, or 1/2 of a Egyptian beer
1/2 an ounce of Pork Mincemeat
1/12th of an Italian pound of Venison
1/2 a bath
2.5 denarii an hour for farm labor
5 denarii an hour for carpentry
2.5 denarii an hour for data entry (scribing)
1.5 denarii an hour for entry level teaching
(assuming 10 pupils and 10 hour workday(Actually, it's a little hard to compare, because some of the rates are monthly, some daily, and some are per pupil.)
What I find more interesting is the extremely high relative wage for Teachers.