When It All Began

Wealth disparity and economic inequality are not exclusively modern phenomena, but have been recurring features of human societies since antiquity. The research of Mattia Fochesato, Associate Professor of Economic History at the Bocconi Department of Social and Political Sciences, gives substance to this observation, by reconstructing the causes and dynamics of inequality in the ancient world. Currently, Fochesato is collaborating on various research projects studying inequality in the Roman era.

"Together with a team of archaeologists from other Italian and European universities, our research focuses specifically on Northern Italy during the Iron Age and the Roman period, with the aim of investigating the role played by technological change and its effects on productivity and access to and distribution of resources both before and during the development of this major Mediterranean civilization," explains the professor. An important element of the analysis are political transformations, which already in ancient times had a profound impact on institutional structures and power relations between groups, thus also on the distribution of human and material resources within society.

Sources and Indirect Indicators

One of the most complex aspects of their work is the scarcity and incompleteness of economic data, which is therefore measured through a number of indirect indicators. Anthropometric data from burials, which provide information on diet and health conditions, are, for example, the basis for reconstructing measures related to the quality and quantity of nutrition, and more generally, the quality of life. "Surface area of dwellings is used instead as the primary indicator of household wealth, often in combination with mathematical models that, by using paleo-botanical data, allow us to estimate the agricultural productivity of an ancient community and, more generally, its economic wealth."

Measuring Inequality

In the studies by Fochesato and colleagues, the estimates of inequality, which economists frequently formulate by using the Gini index (a number comprised between 0, perfect equality, and 1, concentration of resources in a single owner), are often subject to uncertainty and error due to the fragmentary nature of the sources. "For this reason, in my most recent work," adds the professor, "I proposed an approach that does not focus solely on estimating point values, but rather on the development of statistical methods that enable us to obtain credible intervals for our estimates."

Interpreting Ancient Inequality

Despite these difficulties and the inherent limitations of the nature and availability of data from the ancient past, Fochesato and his colleagues have contributed to a deeper understanding of ancient societies, "showing how inequalities are the result of historical processes in which the interactions between technological change, institutional variables and demographic and environmental factors play a fundamental role."