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Imperial Forum → Politics → Ancient Greece: more or less egalitarian
If it is true that maintaining a thriving middle class is the objective of nation states, and yet we have not been able to sustain as proportionately large a middle class as the Ancient Greeks were able to more than 2000 years ago, how can we say our civilizations have made any real progress at all since 300 BC?
Yay assumption-filled conclusions! 
EDIT: Oh, right... ignoring Kemp, aren't you? 
re: slaves in ancient Greece. They were, as was mentioned, volunteer "slaves" and could leave at any time, and, moreover, according to the study posted earlier, apparently they were actually quite wealthy comparatively speaking, the majority of them considered middle class.
It is somewhat akin today working where room and board are provided, including food, and thus being able to save any tips or stipend of a salary you'd make. A lot of jobs are like this today.
Some "slaves" owned land, too, apparently, which is more than most people today can say. People forget that having a mortgage doesn't mean you own your property. The bank does, basically renting to own from the bank - a small step up from serfdom.
"Yay assumption-filled conclusions!"
There is only one assumption, and it isn't even mine:
Ancient Greece probably had a gini coeficient factor of 37
This is based on the studies sourced by the author of the essay I linked to.
Granted, it could have been higher and lower at certain points, but the point is, that most modern states have rarely experienced that level of middle class.
I think this is rather shocking, isn't it? I mean, for all our developments in technology, and all our espousing the value of having a burgeoning middle class, you'd think we would have made at least some progress since 300 BC. Instead, we just can't seem to even maintain 300 BC levels.
Do you want to argue that having the majority of wealth in middle-income earning segments of the population isn't a good thing? Do you want to argue that having a thriving middle class is bad?
I thought it was a given that a thriving middle class was what modernity was supposed to be about; that this was the whole reason we havd revolutions, wars, constitutions, charters of rights, declarations or independences, etc., etc., yadda, yadda. Wasn't it for this very reason that Europeans deposed their feudal lords, that the United States declared independence from Britain, that Russia deposed the Tzars and adopted communism. Wasn't it for the purpose of establishing a burgeoning middle class that we as a civilization went through all the horrors that we did in the last century?
Or are you saying Zarf, that all that was for naught?
If all the BULLSHIT we have gone through as a civilization over the last hundred years WASN'T about establishing a strong middle class, then, what was it all for? Was it for making a few rich, and keeping the vast majority at subsistence levels?
I thought the whole point of civilization was the middle class.
Is this a flawed assumption, ZARF? Is this what you are accusing me of being errant about?
Again, why is it that in this regard, we can't seem to do much better than the Ancient Greeks in spite of all our technologies, wars, constitutions, laws, etc., blah, blah, blah?
Why can't we have a as big (proportionately) a middle class as the Ancient Greeks?
Though I haven't studied Greek slavery in any great detail since I've been at university could you please direct me to the article where it says slaves were allowed to leave if they wanted to (or if it is in that Ober article tell me the general page number).
In Greek (and Roman) court cases a slave's testimony was not enough, they were usually automatically tortured before their statement was believed.
I'm not espousing ancient Greece as being any sort of utopia or anything. After all, it was over 2000 years ago. That their "slaves" were probably wealthier relative to the wealth distribution of their society than most of are today relative to the wealth distribution of our societies, is a very sad state, for, if anything, the middle class of our day and age should be far larger a proportion to any society, especially one that had slaves.
I mean, their SLAVES were apparently better off than most of us today.
What does that say about our civilization today?
What does that say about all of the so called advancements in intellectual and political thought we've purportedly made? What does that say of the purpose for all of the horrible wars we've had to endure?
I dare say that if the middle classes of our societies do not rise in prominence by leaps and bounds over the prominence of the ancient Greeks' middle class, all our efforts, all our "development", all that we have endured, in all of history since, has been for naught.
If any of our nations' middle class is worse off than the Ancient Greeks' middle class was over 2000 years ago, then, honestly, what the hell have we been doing all of this time?
> [TI] ARFeh zee Frenchie wrote:
> Though I haven't studied Greek slavery in any great detail since I've been at university could you please direct me to the article where it says slaves were allowed to leave if they wanted to (or if it is in that Ober article tell me the general page number).
In Greek (and Roman) court cases a slave's testimony was not enough, they were usually automatically tortured before their statement was believed.
Baratheon? Do you have a source for that?
Assumptions you have made:
1: You are equating "Athens" to "Ancient Greece." Athens was the most affluent, and at times economically hegemonic of the city-states in Athens. We're talking about a city-state that led the Greek alliance for decades, siphoning resources from other Greek city-states to fund its own academies. The article you discussed only considers Athens. You are the one who extrapolated this to be a representation of Greece. That's the same thing as if I said that Silicon Valley was a proper representation of the US, Vatican City was a proper representation of Italy, or Singapore was a proper representation of East Asia. It's just bad science.
2: You assume that the #1 goal of a nation is establishing a big middle class. If this was true, in the most extreme example, the USSR would be the perfect society. However, we empirically know that distribution divorced from income creates inefficiencies of production. No, that doesn't mean the best solution is an economic free-for-all. That being said, just judging nations solely based on income distribution is to create a judgment that isn't actually useful. Again, bad science.
3: Economists rarely argue that technology is a tool to expand the middle class. The size of middle classes is a question of distribution, not production. Technology clearly has a relatively flat impact on distribution. Why? If I create a technology that reduces a poor person's cost of food consumption by 50%, it will generally also decrease a rich person's cost of food consumption by 50% as well. Now, there are exceptions to this, but they generally create disproportionate benefits due to taste, a largely discretionary factor (for example, if wheat production costs were cut in half, it wouldn't help someone who was allergic to wheat).
4: Don't you find it at all odd that standards of living have absolutely no representation in your model. I'm going to see if I can find it, but I used to have a study which used anthropology data on per-person food consumption as a measure of standard of living in Europe (with the idea being that since food represented a significant portion of individual expenses, measuring the amount of calorie intake would be a decent analysis of how much resources an individual had to live). The study found that consumption dropped after the fall of the Roman Empire, remaining relatively flat until about the 1500's, where it began to slowly creep up until food consumption began to really take off with the Industrial Revolution... obviously culminating in modern times, where we have an obesity crisis.
But anyway, is it really a proper determinant of well-being if we're only looking at distribution? I mean, if a middle class person in the US is able to obtain as much utility as a rich person in Athens, that middle class person is better off regardless of their place in society because the middle class person is able to access more utility from their income than the rich person in Athens. That's real, empirical progress. THAT is what you're trying to achieve.
"That their "slaves" were probably wealthier relative to the wealth distribution of their society than most of are today relative to the wealth distribution of our societies, is a very sad state, for, if anything, the middle class of our day and age should be far larger a proportion to any society, especially one that had slaves. "
Not at all. Starvation rations and 1 smelly loincloth are no better or worse whether the top man in town wears 400 bedsheets, rides 600 horses and has 2 tons of gold coins with his face on them in 1 palace, or whether the top man in town has 40 bespoke shirts, 2 dozen bespoke suits, 40 handmade shoes, $400 million in municipal bonds, 50 $250,000 CD accounts, 7 homes, a yacht, 16 cars, 4 planes, a sub, 60 horses, and a monkey.
Starvation rations and a smelly loincloth suck absolutely, not proportionately.
Well maybe the monkey envy adds an extra sting.
xeno syndicated:
"If it is true that maintaining a thriving middle class is the objective of nation states, and yet we have not been able to sustain as proportionately large a middle class as the Ancient Greeks were able to more than 2000 years ago, how can we say our civilizations have made any real progress at all since 300 BC?"
You have limited data available for comparison.
And dishonesty upsets me and offends me, so I'm going to be blunt about this next point:
Even accepting whatever numbers you've chosen, your claim that we have a smaller middle class, by proportion, is either dishonest or stupid.
The numbers referenced in that paper are only for citizens--a minority of the population. And a privileged one at that, disproportionately wealthier than slaves/women/aliens. Nowhere can you conclude that a great % of Greeks were in a "middle class" than modern states today. You're either lying, hoping to be perceived by idiots as making a "point," or you don't understand that the paper you've linked in absolutely no way provides a basis for claiming ancient Greeks of any city-state had a higher portion of their population in the middle class than any modern nation.
This is not a matter of opinion. You either don't understand the simple numbers referenced or you're lying.
Your comments on slaves are, again, either offensively ignorant or outright lies. You've already demonstrated that you have absolutely zero knowledge of ancient Greece. In your opening post you didn't specify a city-state or time period. Here, again, you make a massive generalization which is absolutely false. This is just offensive. You know you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, yet you continue to just make things up and post them anyway.
"I think this is rather shocking, isn't it? "
What's shocking is that you don't understand the numbers you're referencing, you don't understand this, and you continue to embarrass yourself anyway.
Zarf BeebleBrix:
xeno posted "BULLSHIT" and it was not edited. As this is a word I would like to use a lot in reference to dishonest and ignorant posters, I shall take note and this word will surely appear frequently in my posts. 
xeno:
"If all the BULLSHIT we have gone through as a civilization over the last hundred years WASN'T about establishing a strong middle class, then, what was it all for? Was it for making a few rich, and keeping the vast majority at subsistence levels?"
It was about freedom and people being rewarded for their productivity. We've achieved this and have a proportionally much larger middle class than any city-state in ancient Greece ever had.
"I thought the whole point of civilization was the middle class."
It's not.
"Again, why is it that in this regard, we can't seem to do much better than the Ancient Greeks in spite of all our technologies, wars, constitutions, laws, etc., blah, blah, blah?
Why can't we have a as big (proportionately) a middle class as the Ancient Greeks?"
Ours is bigger. The question is what was so faulty in your education. The paper you referenced refers to "citizens" about a thousand times. It'd be hard to read and not understand that none of its numbers applied to women, slaves, nor aliens.
Additionally, your claims about slavery are absolutely laughable. While, just like anywhere else, not all slaves lived in as horrible of conditions, your comparisons are just ridiculous. This is just trolling, because you could find 100 sources to back me up and 0 to support your claims in an hour.
" That their "slaves" were probably wealthier relative to the wealth distribution of their society than most of are today relative to the wealth distribution of our societies, is a very sad state, for, if anything, the middle class of our day and age should be far larger a proportion to any society, especially one that had slaves.
I mean, their SLAVES were apparently better off than most of us today."
hahahhahahaha! hahhahahahahhhahahahahhaa! Oh my god this is retarded. Nobody is prohibited from voting today because they're poor or on welfare. 0 slaves could vote or take part in politics. Most people on welfare today have cable tv, cell phones, and air conditioning. Slaves had... hahahhahahahahahhahaahha!
You can't be serious. This is possibly the dumbest bullshit I have ever read in my entire life. It's not like you're talking about a minority opinion held by some scholars/archaeologists/historians. You're just making up some of the dumbest drivel I've ever seen. You're repeatedly lying about numbers used in the paper you referenced--This isn't a matter of opinion: The paper does not back up any of your claims, it dismisses them.
I should remind you that, although "bullshit" is allowed, a post which does nothing but repeat that word 400 times would still be considered spam. 
Fortunately for both of us, my posts are filled with too much scathing commentary for that!
...okay, thanks for the warning. It probably would have happened eventually. Or "BUUUUUUULLSHIT" with about 400 million more U's.
Comparing slaves, who could be killed or tortured at will with modern day poor.
How quaint
First, I want to say, Zarf, that your skirting the issue here (the FACT that we have not improved, but, rather, deteriorated in our levels of egalitarian wealth distribution from ancient times) I find disingenuous. From my perspective, since this is clearly the case, clearly we should be discussing what really matters here: how to grow the prominence of the middle class in our societies to make up for our shameful shortcomings in this regard, rather than argue about things that really don't make much difference at all.
"You are equating "Athens" to "Ancient Greece."
From my understanding, Athens was sometimes the more egalitarian or had the most wealth distributed among the middle class compared to other city states, and sometimes it didn't. Some smaller states were just as wealthy per capita as Athens was and had just as prominent a middle class per capita as Athens did, and some didn't. Perhaps Athens was at a 37 gini coefficient while Sparta was on average a 38? Perhaps another city state - the Minoans as an example - were 30? If you'd like, you could present the gini coefficient levels for each of the city states and find the average for Ancient Greece, then? If not, for the sake of brevity, and getting back to the important issue here: the lower than expected prominence of our middle classes.
"You assume that the #1 goal of a nation is establishing a big middle class."
I don't think this is an assumption. I think this is a fact. Whether it is the western democracies or the communists, the fascists or the anarchists, whether it is the republican or the democrat, the socialist or conservative, the Leninist or the Maoist, they ALL claim as their main purpose to increase the standard of living of the majority - THE MIDDLE CLASS. The problem is they tend to argue about how to go about it, have wars over it, and, ultimately, the majority never get what they were promised by any of them. I, for one, am SICK TO DEATH of seeing it happen again and again in history, each generation, none of them, it seems, learning anything from horrors of their cyclical, seemingly endless bickering.
"Economists rarely argue that technology is a tool to expand the middle class."
I know economists don't think about that. Usually it is sociologists or philosophers who do. This doesn't make it an assumption simply because economists don't think about that. That technology should be used for the benefit of the people who use it is a given, since if it weren't for the benefit of people, it wouldn't be used. That technology should benefit the majority of society by its use is also a given. Philosophers would argue that it is not morally acceptable for the elite to use a technology for their advantage only. I can see, though why you wouldn't, for if you don't see that all political systems have as their main intention to maintain and have the majority of their populations thrive, you could not see that technology should be used to maintain and / or increase the distribution of wealth to the middle class.
Standards of living.
For me, standards of living relate to how well Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs are fulfilled in a population. I would say that standard of living does not have anything to do with technology level. For example, whether a home is heated by electricity or a wood-burning fireplace makes no difference. All that's important is that there is a home. Do you own yours outright? Or do you have a mortgage?
"Starvation rations and 1 smelly loincloth"
really, yell. Do you really think that is indicative of all that the average "slave" in Ancient Greece had?
Actually Arfee the Democrats were the slave owners and a Republican ended slavery.
So how liberal of them would be more appropriate.
Also in England it was the Church that successfully fought to end slavery.
![[TI] Primo](https://imperialconflict.com/forum/img/avatars/711.jpg)
Ancient Greece is too vague, even after your clarification. Ancient Greece was a series of city states as such, which all had their own laws, habbits and ways, surely you can't just throw them on one heap and say they are more or less egalitarian.
It's like asking if Europe is thinking more or less about blueberries.
I specifically referred to ancient Greece in 300 BC. Now, can we get on with what is important, and find out why we don't have improved, but, rather, worsened wealth inequality in our societies.
Don't people believe that the majority should have the majority the wealth in any given society?
What weight in gold were slaves valued at back then, on average?
Might be more wealth was at the top than you think also.
Btw that death of slaves thing. I heard Sparta killed a lot of slaves, and Athens was not so pretty with them as well...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
That is what taught me at age 7 that equality does not work
Zarf BeebleBrix,
Am I to take it that these levels of trolling are acceptable on this forum? This seems rather extreme to me.
Are we really to believe that xeno syndicated is [wonderful]? The paper he cites analyzes a minority of the population. He's comparing the analysis of a privileged minority in ancient history with gross aggregates today. I refuse to believe that anybody who would choose to read (this is questionable) and post to an international politics forum could be so stupid as to repeatedly post statements _so_ outrageously ignorant and embarrass themself.
"(the FACT that we have not improved, but, rather, deteriorated in our levels of egalitarian wealth distribution from ancient times)"
This statement, which he repeats many times, is absolutely refuted by his own linked paper. It's not arguable. The only way to even make this statement is to have absolutely no understanding of the paper he linked. Who reads academic literature and posts to forums when he literally doesn't understand what he's posting? Nobody, I'd like to think. So he's got to be a troll.
He goes on to mention Sparta, which had a massive slave population. And no, nobody on earth (save xeno) thinks that these "slaves" were often middle-class land-owners who chose to be indentured servants for decent wages and conditions. In fact, that would make them not slaves at all. These were slaves.
And more like this:
"really, yell. Do you really think that is indicative of all that the average "slave" in Ancient Greece had?"
As if poor hygiene and wardrobe are terrible things to allege were average. Nevermind that the lifespan of those forced into mines wasn't so long.
And more:
"I specifically referred to ancient Greece in 300 BC. "
False. His initial post makes no reference to era. Additionally, as has been pointed out ad nauseum, ancient Greek city-states had different forms of government, and the area cannot be generalized as a whole.
He's obviously trolling. No human being choosing to post to a politics forum is this [magnificent].
No... he is just that [constructive] with his posts.
When he has an idea, no logic, no evidence, no reasoning can change his view.
His worldview denies common sense and historical evidence.
Been that way for a few years.
[off topic, if anything it belongs in the Ideas forum and would possibly be closed there too ]
He always 'rebuilds' the argument as well.
He could claim the Earth is really square shaped. Then we fly him up to see the curve, and he will say it was until yesterday.
So we then try to show him how square means no ocean travel... he says clearly some minor rounding on the edges.
So we finally find a video from WWII that shows a very high plane showing the curvature of space... we think we have him... and he says clearly propoganda from the party in question.
His worldview requires him to be correct. He can never admit a flaw. [not a nice thing to suggest]
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