Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is a summary of the episode:
Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Survival of the Ninety PercentTyler calls it perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life – shoes, bricks, pottery, and the like – he reveals a picture of an ordinary Roman who could clearly afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothing, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns found thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, he says, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it going – and when it was revealed, Rome broke with it.
Tyler and Kim discuss what might surprise a modern visitor to a venerable Roman home, what ancient Roman Christianity really looked like, why the Romans never developed formal economic thinking, what provincial lending reveals about the Roman empire, whether there are any similarities to earlier markets, why the Romans continued to use coins as the empire declined, the Roman slave economy, or what Roman recipes were, Roman inventors. Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim is not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the useful things of the world’s archeology, how the vast factories along the Tiber Valley were not discovered until twenty years ago, when he was going to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what he thinks is ultimately the reason for the discovery of Rome, and much more.
Here is an excerpt from economics:
COWEN: It says, when the government mints silver coins and lowers their silver content, as we now know from economic theory, this will mean at least some inflationary pressure. Did any Roman scribes understand that and put it down, or are they just vague public complaints about government minting of coins?
KINGS: They don’t cut themselves as much as they pretend to with small silver, which is about the same thing. It’s very small and hard to see. Of course, people know they are doing this. What I think is very interesting and what we all still grapple with is that, from and before Nero onward, the Roman emperors saw a financial benefit in producing coins with less silver.
Then they start having silver problems, and they really start taking silver out of their money, and nobody cares. I mean, people care, and they notice, but the utility of a Roman coin in a place, a denarius, made of silver, exceeds—that’s a bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, so people are willing to just pick it up and make it, and keep using it.
There is inflation, and inflation, now we can say, because of the great Egyptian paper, it tends to rise very slightly during the first century, the second century, the third century, but it is not equal to the amount of silver issued in coins. People basically still trust their money, which really shows the extent to which the government has convinced the people, by simply supporting the use of the common people’s coin, that the coins work and that they will reverse their coins, even though they are de-mining the silver.
COWEN: Why were there so many loans? You would think that banks would be more economical, offer better terms, just like I wouldn’t lend money to my friends, I would go to the bank. Why didn’t the Roman Empire change that way?
KINGS: The Roman Empire confuses us, I think, because on the one hand, it looks like a big country that should do things that big states do. The great state of Rome is really the mask of the kingdom of friends and family. You borrow money from friends and family. Banks, as they exist, are really nothing more than friends and family, so even if you have real banks, they are often run by one family.
The distinction you make between borrowing from a bank and borrowing from your family is not very clear in a country where the bank is your family, or the bank is your friend’s family. It’s not that the Romans don’t use banks, they use banks. We can see the very rich Romans using banks. It is very difficult to see the 90 percent who use banks, and they seem to be more likely to make mistakes in a close circle of people they know, which again, is not such a big difference. In a world where there is no FDIC, where the bank is not guaranteed and not protected by the state in the way our banks are, the distinction between bank and family, bank and friends, is not so clear.
Fascinating and engaging throughout, definitely recommended. You can buy Kim’s excellent book here.
