Roman wealth and wealth inequality in comparative perspective

Extract

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