Ruins of the 1%: Inequality Worse in 21st Century America than 2nd Century Rome?

New research by Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen suggest that income inequality in the United States today is slightly worse than in the Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE. Their article in Journal of Roman Studies is a good overview of debates on how to measure ancient Rome's GDP, wages, and income distribution. It's also a bit dizzying, but this is not easy stuff to calculate, given the absence of regular economic data.

By their calculations, 10% of the population went hungry, 74% had income 1-1.5 times basic subsistence, and 14% had a 'respectable' income between 1.7 and 10 times basic subsistence. The top 1.5% controlled 15-25% of total income, the next 10% another 15-25%, while the bottom 90% split the remaining half or so of all income. This works out to a Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality, with 1 being perfect inequality and 0 being perfect equality) of 0.42-0.44. By this measure the Roman Empire was actually less unequal than some other pre-modern societies, like 18th-century Britain or France (0.52-0.59) - but only because these societies were richer overall. (You need larger surpluses to foster larger inequality.)

Tim de Chant at Per Square Mile (a fantastic geography blog) places this research in context, noting that the Gini coefficient of the United States is now 0.45 and rising: more unequal than a pre-modern empire famous for its oligarchs and mass enslavement. He concludes on a sobering note:

Schiedel and Friesen aren’t passing judgement on the ancient Romans, nor are they on modern day Americans. Theirs is an academic study, one used to further scholarship on one of the great ancient civilizations. But buried at the end, they make a point that’s difficult to parse, yet provocative. They point out that the majority of extant Roman ruins resulted from the economic activities of the top 10 percent. “Yet the disproportionate visibility of this ‘fortunate decile’ must not let us forget the vast but—to us—inconspicuous majority that failed even to begin to share in the moderate amount of economic growth associated with large-scale formation in the ancient Mediterranean and its hinterlands.” 

Let us never forget: most ruins are ruins of the 1%. An Occupy Archaeology movement would have to include field survey and rural settlement studies in its call to arms.

Thursday Links

The Magdalenburg Iron Age tomb complex in Germany is a map of the lunar cycle and constellations (Past Horizons). Ridiculously cool.

A photographer sneaks into China's deserted fake Disneyland (Reuters). China has reached the heritage singularity, full of ruins of a future that won't actually happen.

Antiquity has published a rock art analysis of Johnny Rotten's graffiti on the walls of the Sex Pistols'    old flat on Denmark Street in London.  "Deconstruction of the graffiti...presents a layering of time and changing relations." Yep folks, punk is dead...

Packard's Ghosts

Just before I got on the plane for Istanbul, I prevailed on a professor friend of mine to come with me to Detroit's abandoned Packard factory. Built 1907-1909 by Albert Kahn, it was maybe the world's first large reinforced concrete building. Now abandoned, its millions of square feet of empty space are a great place to watch the archaeological process at work.

Acres of rooftops are now home to tiny wetlands, complete with grass and birds:

Little forests are gradually wrestling the factory to the ground:
Leading to wonderfully atmospheric fourth-floor ruins.
Sometimes it takes on almost a Classical air:

The ruins of Detroit are, more and more, becoming sites of memory and nostalgia for white Michiganders who yearn for their lost industrial glory. Places like Packard are wonderfully well-documented with wonderful Flickr sets like this one, from my friend (and birthday twin) Pat. (I've put my own photos up here out of sheer vanity, but he's a much better photographer.) The old factory even gets the occasional weird recreational use - some people even organized a croquet game there once, in full Edwardian costume!

Ruin of the Day

I came across this lovely ruin last fall, while riding my bicycle from Washington to Philadelphia. I like how the lawn around it is lovingly groomed.

Archaeology in Fiction: “Naked and Defenseless as All Dead Things”

Fast forward to Earth, billions of years in the future. The resources of the world have been used and reused, and the sun itself is dying. Severian, the protagonist and narrator, flees from his pursuers by climbing down an eroded cliff-face:

In Saltus, where Jonas and I stayed for a few days and where I performed the second and third public decollations of my career, the miners rape the soil of metals, building stones, and even artifacts laid down by civilizations forgotten for chiliads before the Wall of Nessus ever rose. This they do by narrow shafts bored into the hillsides until they strike some rich layer of ruins, or even (if the tunnelers are particularly fortunate) a building that has preserved some part of its structure so that it serves them as a gallery already made.

What was done with so much labor there might have been accomplished on the cliff I descended with almost none. The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain. Fossil bones protruded from the surface in places, the bones of mighty animals and of men. The forest had set its own dead there as well…

At one point, only slightly less than halfway down, the line of the fault had coincided with the tiled wall of some great building, so that the windy path I trod slashed across it. What the design was those tiles traced, I never knew; as I descended the cliff I was too near to see it, and when I reached base at last it was too high for me to discern, lost in the shifting mists of the falling river.

- Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lictor

Gene Wolfe’s four-volume Book of the New Sun is a fun read for the classicist – his forest of Greek and Latin neologisms (like “chiliad”, for 1,000 years) give the story an air of strange antiquity, and a good excuse to bust out Lidell and Scott to track down his more obscure coinages. According to the author, the books are a ‘translation from a language which has not yet come into existence’, just one of many ways Wolfe hints that time is not a linear as it seems.

In this world, geology and archaeology are not much different. A giant cliff is made of archaeological deposits; the earth itself is a gigantic archaeological site. There is no wilderness, nowhere that people have not lived or touched, no difference between natural and cultural landscape. (The concept of ‘natural landscape’ is an oxymoron anyhow, since the idea of ‘landscape’ is a cultural construct – but that’s another discussion.)

I like this passage because it captures something very real about how we experience ruins. We get a glimpse of some fragment as we pass through. We know there’s a pattern there, some larger story, but can’t quite put it together no matter how much we puzzle over it. At the same time, much of its power is in its fragmentary state, the fact that the ruin is a tangent from another world. A bit of four-dimensional geometry that breaks up the fabric of time, and shocks us out of our assumptions about our surroundings.

Wolfe describes the past as “naked and defenseless”, and in a sense it is. Archaeologists have had to grapple much less with the politics of their discipline – and especially its colonialist and imperialist baggage – because our subjects are dead and cannot resist us when we speak for them. Yet at the same time, ruins destabilize our present, and force us to account for their unexpected presence at our shoulder. That’s the contradiction of archaeology: it is a way of orienting and rooting ourselves, but it is also the source of disorientation and confusion. We resolve it with stories about the past, but under those stories are material things that will never tell us whether our tales are right or wrong.

Celebrity Cribs: Abandoned Edition

Between the economic downturn and the vicissitudes of celebrity life, there’s been a lot of news about abandoned buildings lately, including lots of examples of creative reuses of urban landscapes. (The Foreclosed Backyards National Skate Park, anyone?)

Downturns hit the rich and famous, too. As a delightful side effect, we get to see the very beginnings of the archaeological process at work in a few now-abandoned cribs of powerful people. These houses provoke a rich set of feelings: voyeuristic pleasure, combined with the beauty of decay, and the poignancy of a fall from grace.

Take Mike Tyson’s mansion in the Firelands of northern Ohio. The TV is busted, the indoor pool green and scummy. For some reason I’m reminded of touring a medieval keep somewhere in Ireland – the same sense of exotic opulence and privilege, now emptied of its power and open to prying eyes. Tyson's lawyer made Illicit Ohio take down their full photoset, but there's lots of copies floating around the web.



Fergie’s former palatial manse in Berkshire (this is the non-singing Duchess (of York), and the English Berkshire) now lies in not-so-picturesque ruins, with some photos courtesy of the intrepid reporters at the Daily Mirror. What a hideous carpet.


The granddaddy of them all, and by far the most bizarre and breathtaking, is Michael Jackson’s former home at Neverland. Stop what you’re doing right now and spend some time looking at my friend Tunnelbug’s story and photos from the place. Astonishing how it is beautiful and totally insane at the same time.


It seems pretty unlikely that these structures will be preserved as well as the great celebrity cribs of the past – our modern mania for tearing down and rebuilding makes the chances pretty slim that Neverland will be the new Domus Aurea or Masada for some lucky archaeologist in 4009 CE. I guess we'll just ahve to imagine those future ruins into being.

The Pleasure of Ruins in Chongyecheon, Seoul

Some weeks ago, The Vigorous North posted this scarcely believable article about a river in the center of Seoul. Once covered by two 10-lane freeway decks, it has now been daylighted and turned into a delightful urban park. (The mayor who made this happen either has giant political cojones, or automotive politics is quite different in Korea.)

However, traces of the highway were left standing in the middle of the new park, as a reminder of the past:

(Ben Harris-Roxas)

This gesture has such a delicate aesthetic. The pillars of the former freeway remind us of the past in the midst of a radical change in the urban landscape. It takes restraint to leave traces of an undesirable past for future generations. I think they achieved a nice balance here.

I can't imagine such a thing happening in the United States. Most green-minded folks carry around a lot of guilt and self-righteousness about the freeways that are the signature monuments of our civilization, and would gleefully eradicate them without a backward glance.

The whole project raises some interesting questions about authenticity, archaeology, and place. When you daylight a historic river like the Chongyecheon, is it still the same stream in an existential sense? Are the ruined pillars of the highway archaeological monuments? The architects chose the shape and location of ruins, but they are still physical evidence of past land uses. They sit in a fascinating grey area between the archaeological site and the architectural folly.