Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent

Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. 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.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded February 2nd, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:06 - Roman Housing
00:08:28 - What Early Roman Christians Actually Believed
00:16:29 - Roman Economic Thought
00:18:39 - Roman Banking and Money Practices
00:28:48 - The Economics of Roman Slavery
00:31:56 - What Held The Roman Empire Together
00:36:46 - Roman Cookery
00:39:17 - The Romans as Masters of Scale
00:42:05 - Rome's Contact with Asia
0043:59 - The Vesuvius Challenge
00:45:13 - Ancient Carthage and the Fall of Rome
0049:43 - The Realities of Doing Archaeology
00:57:15 - Touring the Roman Empire
01:00:42 - Outro