by Ober, Josiah
Many non-Athenians did choose to live in Athens as metics, and at least some of them did so for economic reasons. Indeed it is likely that most Greek poleis had populations of noncitizen residents. Thus, the costs of moving were not so high as to preclude all economically motivated movement.63 It is, therefore, at least a plausible starting hypothesis that the Athenian wages reflect a Hellenic wage regime that is substantially higher than the 5.5 L/day wheat wage postulated by Scheidel as the ancient/medieval “customary wage range” median.
TABLE 4.8 Income Distribution, Late Fourth Century BCE Athens
NOTE: For model on which these figures are based, see table 4.4.
Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that in modeling the distribution of consumption across the Greek world, we cut the percentage of middling people in the pessimistic Athenian model in half. The resulting percentage of “middling” Greeks (a little over 20%) would still nearly double the estimated middling percentage in Scheidel and Friesen’s optimistic Roman Empire model (12%). Moreover, as we have seen, the late classical Greek world was highly urbanized (table 4.3), and modern studies have demonstrated a high correlation between urbanization and real wages.64 All of this suggests, in turn, that there is quite likely to have been, at least by the later fourth century, a substantial number of Greeks living well above subsistence, and thus that there was likely to have been a correspondingly substantial social surplus produced by the Greek economy. This conclusion is compatible with the two premises of strikingly high per capita and aggregate economic growth and a remarkably dense and healthy urban population, discussed above.
In light of the evidence about income in Athens and what it might have to say about income distribution in the Greek world, I posit that Morris’ upper range estimate about Greek per capita economic growth is more likely than his lower range. Morris’ upper range assumes that consumption roughly doubled from 800 to 300 BCE. This assumption makes sense when translated into wheat wages. If we assume that in 800 BCE an ordinary family’s per capita daily consumption was fairly near the subsistence minimum (1.5S), and thus that the adult male wage earner contribution was about 5.25 L/day, doubling consumption would mean that by the later fourth century BCE the adult male wage earner contribution would be 10.5 L/day (3S). Given that fourth century Athenians were being paid at roughly 13–16 L/day, a late-classical Greek median daily income for adult male workers of more than 10 L seems plausible. Under this model, the rate of per capita Greek economic growth in the half-millennium 800–300 BCE would have been around 0.15% per annum, compared to ca. 0.1% per annum for the early Roman Empire.65
CONCLUSIONS
When the whole of Hellas is compared to the whole Roman Empire at its height, or when the presumptively most advanced Greek state (Athens) is compared to the most advanced early modern European states (Holland and England), Hellas, in the classical era, may reasonably be described as wealthy. The classical efflorescence was the high point of Greece’s premodern economic history—both population and consumption were much higher than the premodern normal and exceeded the levels of the Middle Bronze Age efflorescence centered on Crete and the robust Greek economic recovery of the fifth and sixth centuries CE.
Figure 4.3, which breaks out the development index of figure 1.1 into its population and consumption components, illustrates the long history of economic development in “core Greece.” Although the figures on which the chart is based are only rough estimates, if the main arguments of this chapter are on the right track, they must be of the right order of magnitude. The premodern normal population of “core Greece” (the territory controlled by the Greek state in 1881) was under a million; premodern normal median consumption probably hovered at 1.5 to 2 times subsistence. When we multiply population (in millions) by consumption (in multiples of subsistence) to create a simple development index, the premodern normal range is 0.5 to 2 (figure 1.1). The classical peak, from about 600 to 200 BCE is, in each instance, much higher.66
FIGURE 4.3 Population and consumption estimates, core Greece, 1300 BCE–1900 CE.
Notes: Population estimated in millions. Median per capita consumption estimated in multiples of subsistence minimum. LBA = Late Bronze Age. EIA = Early Iron Age. EH = Early Hellenistic. LH = Late Hellenistic. ER = Early Roman. LR = Late Roman. EB = Early Byzantine. MB = Middle Byzantine. EO = Early Ottoman. LO = Late Ottoman. Ind = Independent Greek state. Core Greece = Territory controlled by the Greek state 1881–1912. Estimates based on evidence discussed in chapters 2, 4, and 6.
Developing similar graphs that would trace long-run changes in population and consumption, for the whole of the territory occupied by Greeks in ca. 300 BCE, or for non-Greek regions of the Mediterranean/western Asia worlds, currently appears unfeasible: The intensity and quality of archaeological fieldwork and the availability of documentary evidence, across the many regions (and today, many countries) that constituted the classical Greek world and its neighbors, vary too greatly for plausible estimates. If, counterfactually, such charts could be produced, I believe that the “Greek world” chart would show a pattern somewhat similar to that of figure 4.3—although certainly not identical to it in light of diverging trajectories of development in different regions (e.g., Crete, eastern Sicily, Black Sea coast). By contrast, hypothetical long duration population/consumption graphs for most regions outside the Greek world would, I believe, look very different from figure 4.3.
The rest of this book explains how Hellas became wealthy in the archaic/classical era, why the wealth of Hellas did not prevent the Macedonian conquest of the late fourth century, and how efflorescence was sustained and Greek culture preserved after the loss of full independence by most of the great city-states.
5
EXPLAINING HELLAS’ WEALTH
FAIR RULES AND COMPETITION
TAKING STOCK
The evidence presented in the previous chapter shows that in the 700 years between 1000 and 300 BCE Hellas experienced a sustained era of economic growth, culminating in a strikingly high level of development. By the later fourth century BCE, the Greek world was unusual in the extent and density of its population, its level of urbanization, the material conditions of life (including housing), and the health of the adult population. In comparison with other premodern societies, wealth and income were quite equitably distributed. Many Greeks lived between the extremes of affluence and poverty and well above the level of bare subsistence. There is good reason to believe that consumption by a substantial middle class drove classical Hellas’ economic growth.
While there is room for debate about just how wealthy classical Hellas actually was, all the evidence discussed in chapter 4, drawn from a variety of primary sources and modeled in different ways, points in the same direction—and away from standard ancient and modern premises about Greek poverty. Classical Hellas was wealthy in ways that are unparalleled in earlier or later pre-twentieth century Greek history and rare in the documented premodern history of the world.
It remains to explain the phenomenon of exceptional economic performance. Why and how did Hellas become wealthy? The solution to the puzzle of Greek economic exceptionalism is political exceptionalism: institutions, understood as action-guiding rules, conjoined with civic culture, action-guiding social norms. Citizen-centered rules and norms promoted relatively open markets, enabling the constant exchange of information among many diverse people, and thereby drove continuous innovation and learning.
The institutions and civic culture that underpinned efflorescence arose in the context of dispersed authority, both at the level of the ecology of small states described in chapter 2 and at the level of individual poleis. We saw in chapter 3 how decentralized social cooperation in the form of a plethora of marketlike exchanges of information could ground high-level political order. It is because relevant information kept getting better—taking the form of greater assurance of aligned interests, more useful knowledge, and more innovative ideas, that the classical Greek world experienced dynamic and sustained
efflorescence, rather than settling into a low-performing premodern normal equilibrium. But why did the quality of information keep improving? A plethora of choices leading to greater specialization is an important part of the answer. Those choices were framed by rules that served to regulate competitive markets in information, goods, and services.1
In chapter 1, I posited that specialization—along with the cooperative exchange of goods and ideas, and conjoined with innovation-driven creative destruction—was a key to the rise (as well as to the fall) of classical Hellas. The number of economic specializations that are known from classical Greek sources is striking. Edward Harris has documented 170 different nonpublic-sphere Athenian occupations, most of them from outside the agricultural sector, and many involved in one form or another with production or exchange. While acknowledging that farmers made up the most numerous single occupational category, Harris argues that, at least in Athens, most resident foreigners and about half of the citizens worked outside agriculture. Assuming that this is correct, and—as the evidence for urbanization and population density (ch. 4) seems to suggest—if Athens was not entirely exceptional in having a substantial nonagricultural population, we will need to revise, or at least to reinterpret, long-prevalent assumptions about the Greek economy.2
In the words of the Cambridge historian, Paul Cartledge, “the ancient Greek world was massively and unalterably rural.”3 This was no doubt true, in the sense that agriculture did remain the single biggest sector. Highly specialized, relatively urbanized, trade-intensive classical Greece certainly remained much more oriented around agricultural production than is the case in any developed-world modern economy. But what I take to be the ordinary connotations of the phrase “massively and unalterably rural” will need to be adjusted if we hope even to describe, much less to explain, the efflorescence of classical Hellas.
EXPLANATORY HYPOTHESES
In chapters 6–11, we will examine in detail historical examples of choices leading to classical Greek specialization, innovation, and creative destruction. Here, based on the theory of decentralized cooperation set out in chapter 3 and the evidence for Hellas’ wealth presented in chapter 4, I offer two related hypotheses to explain how and why a particular set of political institutions typical of the classical Greek world (especially, but not uniquely, manifest in democratic Athens) provided Greeks with good reasons to make choices that resulted in Hellas growing wealthy.4
Hypothesis 1
Fair rules (formal institutions and cultural norms) promoted capital investment (human, social, material) and lowered transaction costs.
Hypothesis 2
Competition within marketlike systems of decentralized authority spurred innovation and rational cooperation. Successful innovations were spread by learning and adaptive emulation.
The first, “fair rules, capital investment, low transaction costs,” hypothesis is related to the second, “competition, innovation, rational cooperation,” hypothesis. Each requires (per ch. 3) valuable information to be actively and regularly exchanged and shared among many individuals. Egalitarian institutions, by creating a fair playing field and limiting expropriation by the powerful, fostered competition and innovation. Lowering transaction costs lowered the costs of movement, learning, emulation, and thus of technological and institutional transfer. Learning in turn increased human capital and local and collective stocks of useful knowledge. Capital investment, competition, innovation, and rational cooperation, in a context of low transaction costs, drove increased economic specialization. Although, for purposes of testing, it is useful to look at each hypothesis individually, the two hypotheses can be combined into a general explanation for the classical Greek efflorescence:
Fair rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation, and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs.
I suggested in the preface that among reasons to care about classical Greek efflorescence is that it emerged in the context of democratic exceptionalism—rules, civic culture, and values that have a more-than-superficial similarity to attractive features of contemporary democratic society. It is, however, necessary to keep in mind that classical Greek rules, even in the most developed states, favored adult male citizens. Rules were fair only in a relative sense—when compared with the norms typical of premodern states. They fall far short of the demands of contemporary moral theories of “justice as fairness.”5 Likewise, the level of classical Greek innovation was not high enough, nor transaction costs low enough, to satisfy a modern market economist.
Per the argument developed in chapter 3, the high-level phenomenon of Hellas’ wealth is causally related to the microlevel of more or less rational choices made by many social, interdependent, justice-seeking individuals. Efflorescence was not a result of central planning, nor did any Greek have the conceptual means to measure or to explain the phenomenon. Like the collective behavior of ant nests as quasi-organisms, classical Greek wealth was an emergent phenomenon. That phenomenon was shaped by social-evolutionary processes that tended to select functionally efficient rules in a highly competitive environment. Rules were made self-consciously, by legislators, individual and collective. But the process by which rules were selected and distributed across the ecology was outside the control of any individual agent. The wealthy Hellas effect arose from uncounted individual choices but was not readily predicted by them.6
Before turning to the role of fair rules, capital investment, competition, and rational cooperation, other often-cited features of the classical Greek world—geography, climate, location, and exploitation of non-Greeks—deserve further attention. It seems unlikely that a marketlike ecology of citizen-centered Greek city-states would have arisen under various imaginable conditions of geography, resource distribution, and climate very different from the conditions that in fact pertained in the Greek world. Nor could the classical Greek social ecology have arisen without the prior collapse of Mycenaean civilization—a collapse that was both of the right sort (severe, long duration) and at the right time (the dawn of the Iron Age) to set the stage for a new social order.7 By the same token, natural conditions and exogenous shock were insufficient, in and of themselves, to bring about the phenomena we are seeking to explain.
My explanation of classical efflorescence is illustrated schematically in figure 5.1. “Nature” provides the inherent human capacity for decentralized cooperation through information exchange (discussed in ch. 3) and a framework of geography, resources, climate, and collapse.8 In this chapter, I focus on the causal role played by fair rules and competition—that is, on the political inputs of institutions and civic culture that arose after the accidents of nature established humans as beings with certain political capacities, provided a specific geophysical framework, and threw in a powerful shock with the Early Iron Age collapse. Before proceeding, we should consider whether natural conditions, along with the factor of exploitation, might, in and of themselves, explain enough to relegate politics to the realm of epiphenomena.
FIGURE 5.1 Origins of efflorescence in a marketlike ecology of citizen-centered states.
NOTES: The two hypotheses developed in chapter 5 are intended to explain how, after nature has set the framework at level I, the political inputs of level II and behavioral choices of levels III–IV lead to the outcomes of level V. At levels II and III, Hypothesis 1 is on the left side, and Hypothesis 2 on the right side. The two hypotheses are integrated at level IV. The early emergence of the basic polis framework during the Early Iron Age and archaic period, in response to the accidents of “nature” (level I) are discussed in chapter 6. The economic outcomes (level V) are detailed in chapter 4.
CLIMATE, LANDSCAPE, LOCATION, EXPLOITATION
The Greek world’s geophysical conditions and location—including topography, climate, natural resources, and exposure to disease pools—unquestionably played a role in Greek history over the long run. As we have seen (ch. 2), most of the territory once occupied by a
ncient Greeks shares a rare (in global terms) “Mediterranean” climate. A substantial change in the climate of the Mediterranean basin has sometimes been invoked to explain ancient Greek population growth. A recent metastudy of rainfall and temperature changes in the eastern Mediterranean over the past 8,000 years has documented a long-term drying trend beginning around 2600 BCE. The study showed no evidence of a sustained regional trend toward the consistently cooler and wetter conditions that have been posited as a driver of long-term Greek population growth. Within the general frame, however, there appears to have been an especially arid period from around 1450 to 850 BCE, roughly coinciding with the Early Iron Age (EIA) collapse.9 Other recent studies suggest that this era of aridity precipitated the EIA collapse.10 At the other end of our era, the centuries from ca. 100 BCE to 200 CE—the height of the “Roman Warm,” which may have begun as early as ca. 350 BCE—were an era of relatively moister and warmer conditions. These centuries are coincident with the height of the Roman Empire. Within every climatic period there was subregional and short-term variation in temperature and rainfall, but the Roman Warm era seems to have seen much less variation than the periods preceding and following it.11
It is certainly plausible that aridity was a precipitating factor in the EIA collapse and that the end of a period of exceptional aridity enabled the population of Greece to climb back toward the premodern normal. Other, less pronounced, changes in temperature and rainfall may have had some effect on general or regional Greek social development. But, in contrast to the Roman Warm, there is as yet nothing in the known climate record of the first millennium BCE that would readily explain the intensity or duration of the classical Greek efflorescence, much less its historically distinctive framing in an extensive system of decentralized authority.12
