13. Reflection: Beyond Capital

This essay considers what’s emphasised and what’s left out of a Roman economic history à la Piketty. In particular, and echoing some of Piketty’s critics, it suggests that another history of the 1%—Piketty’s focus as well as that of many of the essays in this volume—misses an opportunity to interrogate the well-being and economic strategies of the non-elite majority. Posing the Rawlsian question about the status of the worst off, rather than the best, forces us to confront some weaknesses of Piketty’s model, including the assumption of an economically static pre-modernity, and capital as a thing rather than a process. Rawlsian theory also leads us to ask whether the clear inequalities in the Roman world, as described in this volume, were balanced by improved conditions for the majority. The essay briefly re-examines the role of consumption, largely ignored by Piketty but emphasised in many of the articles here, as one possible path to a post-Pikettian ancient economics.