Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome’s Ninety Percent

Kim Bowes — Roman archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent — joins Tyler Cowen for Ep. 275 to argue that the Roman world was a sophisticated consumer economy whose ordinary participants — the ninety percent of the population who were not elite — used money, bought goods from afar, and trusted state-issued coinage even as it was debased.

Key ideas

1. The Roman world was a consumer economy, and consumption was the empire’s glue. Against the assumption that ordinary Romans were subsistence farmers, Bowes shows that even rural people bought clothes woven in Gaul and owned more ceramic dishes than a seventeenth-century English household. She argues that shared participation in this consumer universe — not ideology or military coercion alone — is what held a geographically vast empire together; when consumption collapsed, tax collection collapsed with it.
2. Romans had economic thinking without an Adam Smith. They understood supply and demand in practice — adjusting plans to harvest-time price swings, lending at interest, trading wool futures — but never formalised these intuitions into a discrete discipline. Bowes argues this reflects a different mode of economic reasoning, not an absence of economic reasoning.
3. Monetary trust persisted far beyond what the silver content warranted. Roman emperors steadily reduced the silver in their coins from Nero onwards, yet inflation remained low and people kept using the denarius. When severe inflation did arrive in the third and fourth centuries, ordinary Romans still used bronze coinage rather than switching to barter — a sign that the convenience of a common medium of exchange outweighed the inconvenience of carrying coins whose metal value had collapsed.
4. The Roman state was a privatised affair built on networks of friends and family. Tax collection, credit, and even what we might call banking were conducted through personal relationships rather than formal institutions. ‘Banks’ were largely family firms; loan markets were circles of acquaintance. Bowes sees this not as a failure to evolve but as a different and functional architecture, harder to distinguish from formal banking than modern categories suggest.
5. Archaeology of the non-elite is reshaping the decline narrative. Landscape archaeology — the non-excavation study of whole rural landscapes through surface pottery, geophysics, and drone surveys — lets Bowes track when smallholder farming communities contracted and markets fell silent. Her emerging thesis for Rome’s transformation: a feedback loop broke down. High population sustained local production and exchange, which sustained tax revenues, which sustained the state. Population decline — setting in perhaps as early as Hadrian’s reign — broke that loop. Inflation and demography, not a single catastrophic event, undid the empire.

Content

Houses, colour, and the productive home

Bowes opens with the elite Roman house, which she describes as a machine for the production of social status rather than a private retreat. Every surface was covered in decoration — mosaics, painted plaster, elaborate floors — all in active daily use rather than fenced off as precious. The house served business: clients came to your home, deals were struck in your atrium. The separation of home from workplace is, she argues, a nineteenth-century invention. Most Roman cities were villages by modern standards (2,000–3,000 people), so navigation happened through human networks rather than addresses.

Sanitation was a genuine limit on urban quality of life. Pompeii had stepping stones across streets explicitly to keep pedestrians out of the refuse even in a city with unusually good public drainage. Bowes is direct: walking around a Roman city, you would be holding your nose.

The 90 percent and the consuming society

The book’s central claim — that ordinary Romans participated in a sophisticated consumer economy — rests on archaeological evidence that could not have been assembled a generation ago. Clothing was not home-spun; standardised weaving workshops distributed garments across long distances, and even poor people owned several tunics, cloaks, undergarments, and elaborately styled shoes. The shoe collection at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, she says, is worth a detour for any visitor to England. Ceramic tableware was more varied in a Roman household than in a seventeenth-century English one of equivalent status.

This consuming world was not merely a quality-of-life story; it was an economic mechanism. Consumption produced the exchange activity from which the Roman state extracted its taxes. The state, in turn, backed the coin that made consumption possible. Bowes describes the relationship as a feedback loop: private commerce and state commerce were mutually dependent rather than one subordinate to the other.

Economic reasoning without systematic theory

Cowen presses Bowes on why, given Rome’s sophistication in so many domains, no Roman ever wrote an Wealth of Nations. Her answer is careful: Romans absolutely reasoned about prices, profit, and anticipating future supply. What they lacked was a discrete, formalised branch of inquiry — the act of separating economic reasoning from social and moral reasoning and writing it down as such. This is, she argues, a different mode of economic thought rather than the absence of one; we have confused the absence of a treatise with the absence of the underlying cognition.

She illustrates the point with futures-like arrangements: an Egyptian shepherd too poor to own sheep leases them, then sells the future wool clip in advance to fund the lease. Bowes and Cowen agree the distinction between a loan and a futures contract collapses in such a case — the shepherd is doing both simultaneously, and the lack of a formal vocabulary for the difference does not mean the economic logic was unavailable to him.

Banking, credit, and the family firm

Roman credit markets were organised around personal trust rather than institutional guarantees. Banks existed but were largely family enterprises; borrowing from a bank and borrowing from a friend of the family were not sharply different acts in a world without deposit insurance or state backing of financial institutions. Bowes points to Caecilius Iucundus, the Pompeii auctioneer whose tablets survive, as an example of someone performing bank-like functions — short-term lending, bringing parties together for monetary exchange — without being a bank in the modern sense.

She is honest about the limits of the evidence: ordinary people’s interactions with credit markets are much harder to see archaeologically than elite ones. What is clear is that the Roman Empire, for all its roads and aqueducts, did not produce the dense commercial banking infrastructure of Renaissance Florence — though she cautions that Florentine banks were themselves mostly serving large merchants, not the Florentine equivalent of the ninety percent.

Monetary trust and the puzzle of Roman money

Bowes describes the Roman monetary system as one of the things she finds most puzzling. Debasement began early and continued across centuries; inflation tracked upward but slowly, and never in proportion to the silver content removed from coins. People kept using the denarius. In the severe inflation of the third and fourth centuries — 1,000 percent in waves — they shifted to gold but clung on to bronze coinage too, carting it in sacks because barter was worse. The Byzantine economy continued on gold and bronze for another thousand years.

She reads this as evidence that the Roman state had built genuine monetary trust — people believed the coins would work because they had always worked, and that belief proved stickier than the metal content warranted. The puzzle she is still working on is why that trust eventually eroded and whether the erosion was cause or symptom.

Slavery, free labour, and the question of profitability

Applying the Bob Fogel question — was Roman slavery profitable? — Bowes gives a conditional yes, sector by sector. In some agriculture it was profitable because a slave is not seasonal (you cannot lay off a slave when there is no harvest to bring in, but you also do not need to hire one), making the profitability calculation turn on the specific crop and the specific farm. In the mines, free and slave labour worked side by side, which she finds genuinely puzzling and has not yet satisfactorily explained.

Her best current answer involves the population question: she believes Roman population was higher than previously assumed — potentially approaching early nineteenth-century levels in some regions — which meant an enormous pool of cheap free labour. In that world, the arithmetic of slavery versus free hire was more finely balanced than it appears from the top-level numbers.

Technology and scale

Bowes resists the maximalist argument that Romans had hidden advanced technology, but she offers a more nuanced position: Romans were not primarily inventors but ‘giganticizers’. They took technologies — water power, mortar, loom design, brick production — and massively expanded the scale of their deployment. The recent discovery that Rome’s bricks were manufactured in an industrial belt 80 to 100 kilometres up the Tiber Valley, not in the city itself, is her example of how much remains to be discovered even about obvious features of the built environment. What she still cannot see, and wishes she could, is water-wheel technology trickling down to smallholder farms — the trickle-down effect into ordinary economic life that began to appear in northern Europe only in the eighteenth century.

The fall of Rome: demographics and the broken loop

Bowes is writing a sequel on Rome’s transformation in late antiquity, and her early thesis centres on two culprits: money and demography. Population decline in Roman Italy may have begun as early as Hadrian’s reign, and by the fifth century had fallen precipitously. That decline broke the feedback loop she describes throughout: dense population sustained local production and exchange, which sustained tax revenues, which sustained the state. Once population thinned, the loop could not sustain itself.

She places plague in a secondary role — it was ‘working on a population already declining.’ The Justinianic plague, which most historians emphasise, came too late to explain the process. Endemic disease (cholera, dysentery) in a hyper-dense, never-quite-sanitated urban world is her candidate for the chronic demographic drag, though why population numbers then stayed low for so long is a question she says she still has to figure out.

The Vesuvius Challenge and what the papyri can teach

Asked about the Vesuvius Challenge — the ongoing project to decipher carbonised Herculaneum scrolls using AI — Bowes is politely sceptical. A lost Aristotle text would be remarkable, but the opportunity cost is her real objection: millions of already-excavated papyri, mostly from Roman Egypt, sit in museum collections and libraries unpublished and unanalysed, available now at papyri.info. She sends doctoral students there. These documents — economic records, leases, accounts, personal letters — relate directly to the activities of ordinary Romans, and the work of digitising and analysing them will, she predicts, produce a fundamentally different picture of the Roman economy within twenty years.

Related

• Kim Bowes — speaker; author of Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Gregory Aldrete on Ancient Rome, the Roman Legions, and Military History — companion episode on Roman military and daily life
• Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization — ancient economy and trade in the Hellenistic world