Before btc there was the denarius

 By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.

Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim’s not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome’s unraveling, and much more.

Here is an excerpt with some economics:

COWEN: Say, when the government is clipping the silver coins and lowering their silver content, as we now know in economic theory, this will imply at least some inflationary pressure. Are there Roman writers who understood that and laid it out, or they’re just vague public complaints about government clipping the coins?

BOWES: They’re not so much clipping them as they are minting them with less silver, which amounts to the same thing. It’s just a little bit classier and harder to detect. Absolutely, people know that they’re doing this. What I think is most interesting and what we’re all still wrestling with is, from even before Nero onwards, Roman emperors recognized the advantage to the fisc to basically producing coins with less silver.

Then they start to have silver problems, and they start really pulling the silver out of their coins, and nobody cares. That is to say, people care, and they notice, but the convenience of the Roman coin of the realm, the denarius, which is made with silver, outweighs—that’s a little bit of a pun—the actual silver content of that coin, and so people are willing to just suck it up and deal, and they keep using it.