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SUMMARY:Income Inequality around the Year Zero: Quantitative Insights from
  Chinese Literary Sources - Michele Bolla (Cambridge)
DTSTART:20240226T130000Z
DTEND:20240226T140000Z
UID:TALK211468@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:113473
DESCRIPTION:Today long-run inequality trends are a well-established\, cent
 ral research topic of academic research. A truly long-run perspective\, ho
 wever\, was only recently achieved\, when late medieval and early modern t
 imes were added to the picture through intense archival research. Estimate
 s for earlier periods are inherently "shakier"\, with wider margins of err
 or resulting from the reliance on archaeological proxies and mixed literar
 y sources.\n\nI construct estimates of income inequality for Han-dynasty C
 hina at its demographic peak (ca. 2 CE)\, which official sources described
  as severely unequal. In fact\, those sources\, when combined with compara
 tive evidence\, allow to infer that inequality extraction was unexceptiona
 l in late Former Han times - at least\, by pre-industrial standards. The q
 uantitative methods employed here are similar to those underlying the most
  recent estimates for the early Roman Empire. However\, I take steps to ac
 count for regional variation within the Han Empire\, which is absent in wi
 dely accepted figures for Rome and\, I argue\, is essential for long-run\,
  comparative debates on inequality in human polities.
LOCATION:Room 9\, Faculty of History
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