What?
Edit:
Oh, I got it. Never mind.
And here’s the thing-* wrong*.
Altho our figures may vary by quite a bit, they will all come to “a lot of money, a rich person with quite a bit of land”. They will not come out with the answer “homeless with 23 cents and have a pint of muscatel” or 'cucumber".
I dunno, the average car gets well over a hundred horsepower.
I think we can all agree that any reasonable calculation of the value of a sestertius in Ancient Rome needs to take into account the peak power generation of the internal combustion engine.
The Republic was never formally abolished even upto the time the Turkish cannon were bombarding Constantinople. Augustus was merely a special magistrate in the eyes of the law and the Senate did retain some significant influence through the Principate.
Most of the debasing occurred during he crises of the Third Century.
The post by **Hellestal ** is accurate. I’d add that the entire concept of the “value of money” is radically different in a society where landholding was viewed as more important than financial wealth, slaves did so much of the work that you would pay a person a daily wage for in later periods, and barter was still a major part of economic life. That’s the main reason why historians are always hesitant to say “10 sesterces = 100 dollars in 2015” – it’s not just about converting it to another unit, it’s about the fact that what you actually do with money isn’t anywhere close across the two periods.
Huh…all this time, I thought six was lime green.
Nonsense. A Lexus has 483 horses, and costs $40K. Generously rounding that down to 400 horses quite neatly makes $40,000 equivalent to one million sesterces.
Value of farmland, of course, varies significantly, but let’s take a look at Iowa. The average price for an acre of farmland statewide in 2014 was $7,943. The average farm is about 337 acres.
So your average farmer in Iowa is running approximately $2.7 million worth of land. However, the majority of cropland is comprised of farms of 1,100 acres or more, so let’s use that as the qualifying line. By that measure, your average Senate farmer would need $8.7 million in assets.
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Today the Top 1% is just about $800K, but the top .1% is $27 Million. Most of that is stocks, bonds, etc, so let us say $5MM in investment land.
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The top 1.7% of farms are larger than 2,000 acres. Now you’re talking >$15 million.
The answer is none…none more blue.
If the Romans valued some stretch of land as so many thousands of sesterces, would that have included the slaves who worked it?
It is worth noting that Edward Gibbon does not hesitate to express Roman money amounts in pounds:
I think that there is one thing that has remained constant over all the centuries, and that is the man hour. To compare the value of anything with today, you can simply (well reasonably easily) work out how many hours it would take a labourer to earn enough to buy it.
Those haven’t remained constant at all. The value of the man hour was artificially depressed in societies that permitted slavery, and is “naturally” depressed in industrialized societies.
So, how many quatloos would that be?
Respectfully disagree. It is true that there is no precise single point answer, but we can certainly create ranges of reasonableness and probability that can be used for practical application and are more useful than “0 to infinity” or “I dunno” or “how blue is six”. Rocket scientists and nuclear engineers and meteorologists do it all the time. Just doing some work to identify and rule out ridiculous answers increases our knowledge.
And while the past was vastly different, it is not difficult to imagine the ability to accumulate wealth across different social stratas was not completely different from today, and as others have pointed out, the relative value between asset classes is not a horrible starting point either. You can always widen the ranges for uncertainty and it’s still a better answer than throwing up your hands.
There are likely there are records of asset and land transactions from that time from merchants since those exist for other cultures that are even older.
As has been mentioned up-thread, you are comparing ubiquitous slave labor production, to contemporary earning. And there’s so much more: we have insured banks and expect some oversight over investments – they had none. They thought nothing of owning a massive silver or gold plate, and then shaving it off to make some spending money. I don’t own any wedding silverware, but there are many reasons I wouldn’t do that. I have a secure job as an analytical chemist for a production facility, my distant ancestor, Marcus Quintus Arkonicus has no ability nor opportunity to earn money in any analogous way. Even if he’s a widely respected Natural Historian on a level of Pliny the Younger, there’s no position for him with the job security that I have.
That doesn’t engage the substance of what I was saying.
This is not physics. This is not a one-dimensional problem. It’s not about getting more “precision” than an interval from 0 to infinity. Even if we “narrowed the interval” along some pseudo-reasonable range, such an confidence interval would still exist along a line, and that presupposes a single axis on which the answer can be given. But that single axis is meaningless. The underlying point is that any attempt to give an answer – even a window of values – is a fundamental mis-statement of the issue because this is not a one-dimensional problem.
Mathematically, we could compare to multiplication with a singular matrix in linear algebra. Such a multiplication collapses down the dimensions of what’s being multiplied. That’s why singular matrices don’t have inverses. You can’t reverse the process of the multiplication, because some of the dimensions are permanently collapsed and that means the information is permanently lost and can never be recovered. It’s inherently a one-way process.
We can try to restate this same idea more visually, with a completely made-up picture. A currency represents a set of interrelationships across more than one axis.
A----B
/ \ / \
/ \/ \
F----/\----C
\ / \ /
\/ \/
E----D
Everything relates to everything else. That’s what a price system is. It’s not a single number on a single axis, but a set of interrelationships based on the underlying conditions of the economy it represents.
We can’t choose a single relationship, like the one between A and B, and use the “relative value” as a starting point for any analysis. The geometry is wrong.
Q----C
/ \
/ \
Z----J H---F
/
/
A----B
/ \
/ \
P M----T
\
\
D
By attempting to preserve the relationship between A and B over time to use as some sort of arbitrary standard, we have distorted every other relationship. We have collapsed every other dimension of the analysis, and thus lost all of that information. There is no range of values, not even a broad window like 0 from infinity, that makes this work. Again: this is like asking what color the number six is. After the extra dimensions get squeezed out, they cannot be recovered. This is not a one-dimensional problem, and it cannot be reduced to one and retain any objective meaning.
By setting up an apparent equation between any two things, by looking for some “relative value” as you put it, you are not creating information. You are destroying it. You are papering over very real differences with a faux exchange rate that provides nothing more than a false illusion of objectivity. The entire reason why money works in a single time period is that our internal notions of this strange geometry are so intuitively understood that we don’t even have to consciously consider them. The people who don’t notice this are like fish who don’t notice water. It’s the whole environment, the background in which everything else is embedded.
Saintly Loser had exactly the right approach to the problem, which was to rephrase the question.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of Romans possessed enough valuable stuffs to qualify as a Senator. Other compelling questions could also be asked: It would be interesting to see an estimate of inequality with a rough construction of the gini coefficient. It would be interesting to know what percentage of people worked for wages, and what minimum wage level was sufficient to keep them alive (with and without the dole). It would be interesting to know what percentage of “spending” was done by the government, both during peacetime and during war.
But these are all different questions. They’re sharper and more concrete. Trying to answer these questions can also collapse the other dimensions, but in this case that’s perfectly okay because the questions are interesting in themselves. Equating one kind of money with another doesn’t do that, because money isn’t interesting in itself. To compare two moneys is to collapse all the other dimensions without providing any particular insight into even a single concrete question. It’s a blue six. It’s too subjective (or alternatively, too incoherent) to be generally meaningful.
There are plenty of meaningful comparisons to be made between present and past. But there is still no exchange rate between the dollar and the sesterces.
The restrictions on trade were laughably easy to get around. Get a third party to trade for you then buy land with the money made. The richest man in Rome, and a Senator and Consul, Marcus Licinius Crassus made his fortune from real estate speculation, which is certainly a form of trade. One of his tricks:
“When buildings were burning, Crassus and his purposely-trained crew would show up, and Crassus would offer to purchase the presumably doomed property and perhaps neighboring endangered properties from their owners for speculatively low sums; if the purchase offer was accepted, Crassus would then use his army of some 500 slaves which he purchased due to their knowledge of architecture and building to put the fire out, sometimes before too much damage had been done: otherwise Crassus would use his crews to rebuild. If his purchase offers were not accepted, then Crassus would not engage in firefighting.”
And there is no real exchange rate between the current dollar and the 1900’s dollar, either.:rolleyes: The answer to “How many Americans died in WWII” also can’t be answered- exactly. But people are happy with close numbers. Saying the answer is “blue” is worse than useless.
But the point is, your “answer” wasn’t. It wasn’t a answer or helpful. Obviously there’s no exact or even precise answer to the OP, but we can come close by approaching it from several attacks.
Ok, FTR, I did read your entire post and really appreciate the thought you put into it. I guess I feel the approaches that you proposed by rephrasing questions still provide ways to triangulate reasonable answers.
Saying that this question is unanswerable almost seems to in a sideways manner state that any attempt to analyze the past in relation to the present is completely futile, which also doesn’t feel right. Even questions like “what % of individuals could do X” or “how much was spent on war vs. peace” are meaningless and unanswerable (or at least the answers are incomprehensible) if we accept that the entire historic economic system is completely alien to the present.
Furthermore, if we can answer the question of what is the current value of XX amount of Italian currency from 5, 10, 20, 30, 100, 200 years ago, at what point does the question become unanswerable?
That said, it’s very possible the probabilistic range of answers to the OP’s question is so large as to not be very helpful. In that sense, maybe we are just saying the same thing in different words.
Again, very appreciative of the thoughtful response.