Income Disparity Was Better in the Roman Empire (Sort Of)

Gladiators, aqueducts, and a vast mythological pantheon. Are we Rome? Actually, the gap between the rich and the poor may be greater today than at the height of the Roman Empire.

According to an analysis on Per Square Mile, a data analysis blog by writer Tim De Chant, contemporary income disparity in the United States may be worse than in ancient Rome. That's based on a 2010 paper by Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen, published in the Journal of Roman Studies, which estimates income distribution in the Roman Empire around 150 C.E.

At that time, they estimate, the top one percent of Roman earners took in something around 16 percent of the gross domestic product. In contrast, the top one percent of earners in the United States controlled 38.5 percent of Americans' net worth in 2007.

It's far from a perfect comparison with present day, largely because of slavery and stratified citizenship. The perspective is sobering, though, to the working class' lasting sense of contribution to a civilization.

“What we see as the glory of Rome is really just the rubble of the rich, built on the backs of poor farmers and laborers, traces of whom have all but vanished,” De Chant wrote. “It’s as though Rome’s 99 percent never existed. Which makes me wonder, what will future civilizations think of us?”

The authors of the paper point out that the demands of the Roman elite fueled, in large part, the physical vestiges of the civilization.

“Physical evidence of Roman prosperity in the form of infrastructure and traded goods will therefore best be understood as the most visible manifestation of demand generated by the most affluent tenth of society,” wrote Schiedel and Friesen.

The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality of a distribution, is zero in a state of perfect equality and 1 in a state of maximum inequality. The Gini coefficient was between 0.42 and 0.44 in Rome, and is 0.45 in the United States.

Income disparity has become a hot button issue this election season following the success of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has drawn attention to financial disenfranchisement and corporate money in politics with the slogan “We Are The 99 Percent.”

Tim De Chant holds a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from the University of California, Berkeley.

Jon Christian is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter @Jon_Christian.

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