
What things cost in ancient Rome - pg
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/NumisWiki/view.asp?key=Edict%20of%20Diocletian%20Edict%20on%20Prices
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DanielBMarkham
Love the flowery language.

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...

~~~
dmix
Ancient Rome had a population of roughly one million people. That's quite a
large market for a government to attempt to manipulate back then, especially
before any financial system had matured. Now with populations a hundred times
the size and economies many times more complex, its interesting how they are
still trying.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Did you check out the penalty? Death.

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.

~~~
davidw
> economics is the most non-intuitive.

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.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yes, "leave it alone" does not work, but we can reason about that: buyers must
be assured that sellers have the goods they are selling. contract law must be
enforced for trades to happen.

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"

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bd
Here is another list, a bit different, with more goods and professions and
with some additional commentary (though based on the same historical source):

<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).

~~~
pg
Incidentally, that site is wrong about why silk was so expensive. The problem
was not lack of machines, but that in Roman times it was imported overland
from China.

~~~
bd
Indeed, in these times China had a monopoly for silk production [1].

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>

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jacquesm
Very interesting read! It seems that once again, those that don't study
history are bound to repeat it.

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!

~~~
tokenadult
_It's noteworthy how teachers were paid 'by the pupil'_

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.

~~~
jacquesm
I've seen that difference up close, we had a math teacher in high school that
was a fairly small, unassuming little guy. But he radiated a fair amount of
power and whenever he lectured you could have heard a pin drop in the pauses.
The year after we got one of the 'pedagogues', the grade point average dropped
right through the floor and pandemonium was more likely than order. Same
kids... what a difference.

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sam_in_nyc
History is a fascinating topic.

It's a bit hard to make sense of this without seeing it converted into current
units ($/lb or something).

~~~
ardit33
Here are the very basic: Pork 1 Italian pound 12

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...](http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11693372&fsrc=RSS)

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.

~~~
jacquesm
I think the 'with maintenance' means 'room & board'.

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bprater
How much is a denarius worth in today's US dollars?

~~~
swombat
This question is meaningless.

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.

~~~
pg
That is a complicated issue. If it's not meaningless to ask what a dollar 50
years ago was worth in present terms, then it isn't meaningless to ask about
further back. E.g. the answer would appear not to be a trillion, or a
trillionth.

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.

~~~
jodrellblank
I found a National Geographic Moon Landing Special from 1969 the other day. It
being more than a decade older than me, I was amused at the adverts in the
front.

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.

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gruseom
Interesting that lawyers were the most expensive.

(Actually, it's a little hard to compare, because some of the rates are
monthly, some daily, and some are per pupil.)

~~~
elai
But do think a lawyer would get that fee every day? Or only once or a few
times per month?

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rokhayakebe
So Lawyers always made more money than most people.

------
Haskell
Is there something like a census with the percentage of workers in each
profession for those times?

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Allocator2008
Funny that barristers cost just as much then as now! They had by far the
highest wages in the careers listed in the article.

