Human Development and Quality of Life in the Long Run: The Case of
Defining Quality of Life
How can we define quality of life? Economic indicators such
as GDP—be it nominal or adjusted for purchasing power (PPP)—are increasingly
recognized as excessively narrow indicators of overall wellbeing. The Human
Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations, launched in 1990, is meant to
address this deficit. It represents a composite measure based on GDP, life
expectancy, and education (determined by adult literacy and school
enrollment ratios) (http://hdr.undp.org/en/humandev/). These criteria tend
to be fairly closely associated—in that rich counties also tend to enjoy
high levels of life expectancy and education—but do not fully match up. Significant divergences between economic output and human development
rankings are particularly interesting because they highlight the limits of
purely economic measurements. Such divergences are captured by subtracting
HDI rank from GDP rank. In some cases, a country’s HDI score greatly exceeds
its GDP ranking, for example in Cuba (+44 ranks), Myanmar (+29), and Albania
(+23). In others it is the other way around, most notably in oil-rich
developing countries such as Equatorial Guinea whose GDP rank vastly exceeds
its HDI score (–90 ranks, in a sample of 182 countries) and more generally
many Middle Eastern countries
In addition, the statistical tables of the annual Human Development Report
(HDR) cover a variety of variables that tend to be correlated with overall
development, such as poverty levels, access to clean water, unemployment,
gender equality in income and political participation, urbanization,
fertility, income inequality, economic growth, public spending on health and
education, and educational attainment levels. Previous editions also
considered other factors such as energy use, deforestation, calorie supply,
political participation, crime rates, personal distress, and human rights. Coefficients of income inequality (Ginis) vary widely: the highest (i.e. most unequal) ones are found in southern Africa (Namibia and Botswana)
followed by numerous Latin American countries, whereas low rates can be
observed both at the very top (Scandinavia) and near the bottom of the
global scale (Ethiopia)
Alternative metrics focus on Gross National Happiness, a concept indebted to
Bhutan’s effort to measure “happiness” rather than GDP (http://gnhusa.org/). There are several dimensions to national happiness: psychological wellbeing,
health, use of time, community vitality, education, culture, environment,
governance, and standard of living. The main goal of this ranking system is
to go beyond economic development by considering quality of life and
preservation of the environment. “National happiness” is not to be confused
with more narrowly conceived ratings of subjective wellbeing in different
countries based on self-reported happiness and life satisfaction, which are
not very closely correlated with economic indicators
The Capabilities Approach, developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and
others, adopts an even broader perspective. It includes capabilities or
“substantive freedoms” that have been categorized as life (especially its
length), bodily health and integrity (including freedom of movement, safety,
and reproductive choices); the ability to think, imagine and reason; the
ability to form emotional attachments; practical reasoning; freedom of
association and from discrimination; interaction with other species; play;
and control over one’s environment (Nussbaum 2000; cf. Nussbaum and Sen,
eds. 1993; Sen 1999).
The desire not to miss important determinants of the quality of life has lead
to increasingly complex and comprehensive indices. Yet what all these
measurements have in common is their presentist focus. Historians are now
called upon to apply these concepts to the past, in order to gain a better
understanding of quality of life and human development in the long run. Given the problems of constructing broadly based indices even for the
present, the empirical challenges of extending them into the past are
painfully obvious. I hope to show, however, that this is an exercise is
Any society with a “deep” historical record would be a
suitable object of investigation. I choose Greece for a number of reasons:
extended historical coverage, reaching back millennia; intense modern
engagement with the evidence; the unusual degree of variability in
socio-political institutions (from city-state ecologies to imperial states
and from democracy to monarchy); and, of course, the genius loci. A
comparative perspective not only extends across different periods of Greek
history but also entails comparison between Greeks and others. My main focal
points are the Greek world in classical antiquity (especially in the sixth
to fourth centuries BCE), the Byzantine period around 1000 CE, and modern
Greece in the decades after independence.
In antiquity, Greece was fragmented among a large number of city-states: well
over a thousand are known (Hansen and Nielsen 2004). These polities formed
what was by far the largest city-state culture in world history (Hansen, ed. 2000). While many were autonomous or fully independent, some were dominated
by other city-states or belonged to federations. Political systems varied
from different kinds of monocracy to oligarchies and democracies. Greeks set
up city-states across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea region.
I begin my discussion by considering economic indicators. The view that
classical Greece was well developed by pre-modern standards has recently
been gaining ground (Ober 2011). However, attempts to determine ancient per
capita GDP even in the broadest outlines are necessarily fraught with great
uncertainties. Modern studies have primarily focused on the Roman Empire
(see Scheidel and Friesen 2009 for a discussion of existing scholarship and
a new estimate). Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE has also attracted
some attention (Aperghis 2004; Bedford 2007; Foldvari and Van Leeuwen 2010). The economist Takeshi Amemiya estimates a mean of 1,043 liters of wheat
equivalent per capita for 220,000 inhabitants of Athens in the fourth
century BCE (Amemiya 2007). This compares favorably with a rate of around
900 liters for the (much larger and more diverse) Roman Empire in the second
century CE (Scheidel and Friesen 2009), an estimate that in turn effectively
rules out a much lower estimate of 550 liters for classical Athens proposed
by Daniel Jew (Jew 1999).
Change over time is even more difficult to determine. Scholars hold that
economic conditions were the culmination of several centuries of growth, not
just in absolute terms (with a larger population and therefore larger
output), but also in relative terms. According to one guesstimate, per
capita consumption in the Greek world may have risen by between 50 and 100%
between 800 and 300 BCE (Morris 2004). Archaeological evidence suggests that
Greek house sizes also increased over time: Ian Morris has observed a 350%
increase in median house size from 800 to 300 BCE (Morris 2004, 2005).
It is fair to admit that all these estimates are fairly shaky. Better
evidence is available regarding real incomes, established by relating
nominal wages of workers to the cost of basic goods such as wheat. As I have
argued in earlier work, wage laborers in Athens received daily wages
equivalent to about 8–9 liters day in the late fifth century BCE and
equivalent to 13–16 liters in the late fourth century BCE (Scheidel 2010a). These values are well above the range of about 4–6 liters per day that is
commonly observed in ancient and medieval economies. This indicates that the
Athenian working population was unusually well off in real terms. These
findings are consistent with the fact that historically elevated real wages
(albeit to a lesser degree) are also found on the Aegean island of Delos in
the third century BCE.
The distribution of wealth and income are more difficult to assess. Democratic Athens is often regarded as a relatively egalitarian economy. Modern estimates vary: while some have estimated that 7.5% of Athenians
owned 30% of all land or that 9% owned 35% of all land (Osborne 1992;
Foxhall 2002)—rates which would be extremely egalitarian by historical
standards (Morris 1994)—, others have made a case for more pronounced
inequality (Jew 2009). Geoffrey Kron finds that inequality in house sizes
was much less pronounced in well-attested Greek cities than in
nineteenth-century England (Kron forthcoming).
Mogens Hansen has forcefully argued that urbanization rates were high, with
about half of all Greeks residing in ‘urban’ settlements, a startling claim
that is nevertheless supported by reported population numbers and
archaeological evidence of town size (Hansen 2006). If true, this
reconstruction implies that as many as 30% of all Greeks may have lived in
settlements of 5,000 inhabitants or more (Ober 2011). This is very roughly
twice the rate observed in the Roman Empire, for example.
All these observations converge in pointing to relatively high levels of
development, even if some indicators are more difficult to interpret than
others. For instance, urbanization rates should not simplistically be
equated with the degree of division of labor and economic development per
se: many Greek city-dwellers would have been farmers. In this case, it is
perhaps more important to consider the cultural and life-style consequences
of high nucleation rates: they increased civic interactions, fostered shared
experiences, and favored the accumulation of human capital. High nucleation
rates were also conducive to investment in urban infrastructure: temples and
theaters that drew people together and created shared identities come to
Levels of physical wellbeing are more difficult to assess. Despite claims
that average life expectancy rose up to the classical period (Morris 2004),
any such notion is based on skeletal data whose interpretation remains
highly contested. Body height is another indicator of wellbeing, reflecting
as it does both (net) nutrition and disease loads (cf. Steckel 2009). Although it has been claimed tha t ancient Greeks were relatively tall, this
notion is based on small samples (Kron 2005). Given that ongoing work on the
ancient Roman world has shown how much our understanding depends on
methodology and sample size, it is too soon to form an opinion on conditions
in the ancient Greek world: nonetheless, this line of inquiry is certainly
worth pursuing. Much the same is true of bone health: the frequency of
cranial and dental lesions can be taken as suggestive of nutritional status
and health, and work on the ancient Roman world has revealed a great deal of
geographical differentiation (Gowland and Garnsey forthcoming). Once again
much work remains to be done for Greece, especially in order to supersede
Lawrence Angel’s older studies in this area (cf. Keenleyside and Panayotova
2006, and see now esp. Schepartz et al., eds. 2009). Such data are
potentially of particular importance because physical wellbeing need not be
related to GDP in a straightforward manner: for example, economic
development that encourages urbanization may intensify density-dependent
diseases and thus reduce physical wellbeing.
Education, the third principal variable in the HDI, is very difficult to
measure. In the standard work on this topic, William Harris conjectures a
literacy rate of 5 to 10% for classical Athens, a rate which he considers
“remarkably high” by ancient standards. At the top end of the educational
spectrum, Athens in particular afforded exceptional opportunities for
education, both because of the growth of philosophical schools and thanks to
the symbiotic relationship between democratic culture and rhetorical skills
(Ober 1989). More generally, Josiah Ober has recently posited connections
between democracy, learning, and innovation in classical Athens (Ober
Moving on to auxiliary indicators of human development, we find that some of
them are fairly easy to measure, albeit in an impressionistic rather than a
quantitative way. In terms of political rights and participation rates,
Athens and many other Greek poleis score highly by historical standards. Republicanism was the norm, and democracy may have become more common over
time (Hansen and Nielsen 2004 and work in progress by David Teegarden).
Other cultural indicators are less favorable. Although rule egalitarianism
was popular among adult male citizens, power asymmetries between the sexes
and between free and slaves were considerable. The status of women varied
across different city-states: while Athenian women remained under lifelong
guardianship (Sealey 1990), Spartan women enjoyed greater freedoms (Pomeroy
2002); the former situation may have been more common. Slave ownership was
rife in much of the ancient Greek world (Garlan 1988; Fisher 1993). Athenian
society, at least, did not provide for regular enfranchisement of manumitted
slaves, unlike ancient Rome. In this respect, Athenian and perhaps Greek
rules more generally bore greater resemblance to the antebellum South with
its separation of slaves and freed slaves from the citizenry. Consideration
of the slave population also affects our understanding of economic
inequality: once slaves enter the equation, property and income inequalities
necessarily rise, the more so the more slaves were being held. In this
context it is worth noting that in the United States in 1850, mean per
capita wealth was the same in the northern and southern states, but average
per capita wealth of the free population of the South was 50% higher than in
the North (Wright 2006). This raises the question how much the appearance or
substance of Greek economic development owed to the exploitation of slave
labor and the asymmetries and inequalities involved in this process.
Moreover, we must bear in mind the logical corollaries of high rates of
political mobilization and participation, especially in the military sphere. Military and political mobilization were inextricably intertwined: they
reinforced one another in a feedback loop (Scheidel 2005; Pritchard, ed. forthcoming). Classical Athens was an extreme case, both in terms of the
scale of popular political participation and in terms of military manpower
losses. According to one reconstruction, during the Peloponnesian War
(431–404 BCE) the number of adult male citizens in Athens fell from 47,000
to 13,000, or from 60,000 to 24,000 partly due to a plague that had been
exacerbated by siege conditions and partly because of battle fatalities
(Hansen 1988). Regardless of the precise numbers, these losses must have had
massive social repercussions, greatly raising the numbers of widows and
orphans and making it difficult for young women to find spouses: bigamy was
temporarily authorized as an emergency measure. And although the Athenian
experience in the Peloponnesian War may have been unusual, war was endemic
within the Greek city-state culture, and so were high rates of military
participation that could lead to serious losses. Anticipation of such losses
would have favored preemptive femicide (Scheidel 2010b) and/or large age
gaps between spouses at first marriage (Pomeroy 1997), both of which must be
understood as markers of gender inequality.
Civic institutions helped resolve conflict within communities in a
non-violent fashion, although their efficacy remains debated (Cohen 1995;
Herman 2006). At the same time, we observe a high incidence of violent
political struggle (“stasis”) within communities (Gehrke 1985). Again, high
levels of political mobilization raised the stakes and fatality rates of
such conflicts because they tended to draw in a larger proportion of the
population than would have become involved in more traditional
In order to make sense of this jumble of contradictory outcomes, it is
helpful to compare conditions in ancient Greece to those in other pre-modern
cultures. Most of the latter conformed to Ernest Gellner’s famous model of
the “agro-literate polity” where a stratified, horizontally segregated
ruling class lorded it over laterally insulated communities of agricultural
producers (Gellner 1983), a model that is not applicable to the classi cal
Greek polis (Morris 1991). Take, for example, Egypt under Persian (sixth to
fourth century BCE) or later Macedonian (fourth to first century BCE) and
Roman (first century BCE to seventh century CE) rule, a region for which
relevant information is relatively amply available. Some differences to
ancient Greece are clear. Recorded real wages for workers were much lower
(Scheidel 2010a) and inequality in property-ownership could be massive
(Bagnall 1992). Political rights were absent. Mean life expectancy was very
low, lower perhaps than in Greece, due to ecological circumstances such as
the aggressive disease environment and the high population densities of the
Nile valley and oases (Scheidel 2001). In this scribal culture, literacy
rates were probably lower than in Greece.
By contrast, gender inequality was less pervasive (Rowlandson, ed. 1998) and
slavery less common. There was less organized violence: military service was
performed by professionals, and wars rarely occurred in Egypt proper. Other
factors also merit consideration. Environmental degradation would not have
been a major concern in Egypt, where the soil was constantly revitalized by
the annual inundation; it may well have been a more serious matter in
Greece, where deforestation and soil erosion caused problems. Were
foreigners or slaves in Greece subject to greater discrimination than
marginalized groups in Egypt? Did Greeks or Egyptians expose more unwanted
babies? Did Greeks or Egyptians enjoy greater effective freedom of movement? Did the Greeks derive more benefits from their civic infrastructure than
Egyptians derived from pooling resources to maintain irrigation systems?
If we focused on the key HDI indicators of GDP, longevity, and education,
ancient Greece could be said to have enjoyed greater human development than
ancient Egypt. Yet if we pay more attention to gender, slavery, safety, or
the environment, we get a different impression. Needless to say, we have no
real way of telling whether Greeks were “happier” than Egyptians—we should
beware of answers based on Hellenophilic bias. We might be inclined to
surmise that civic involvement gave Greeks a stronger sense of control over
their destiny, but the price, in exposure to violence, could be dramatic. Again, we ought to be wary of addressing such issues intuitively, guided by
the biases inherent in a modern western perspective.
If we were to add more societies into the mix, we would encounter different
configurations (Scheidel 2006). In the ancient Roman case, for instance, we
would observe similarly high military casualties; more political rights than
in most pre-modern polities but fewer than in classical Athens; more
inequality than in ancient Greece but less gender discrimination and a
better water supply, at least in the city of Rome itself.
Alternatively, we may look at later periods of Greek history. By 1000 CE,
Greece and the Aegean were part of the Byzantine Empire. Relative stability
had been restored after the near-failure of the eastern half of the Roman
Empire, and wars and invasions had abated at least within the Aegean core. Branko Milanovic has attempted to determine average incomes and income
inequality in this period (Milanovic 2006). Unskilled wages equaled
approximately 200 liters of wheat per month, or 6.5 liters per day. This
rate is notably lower than that observed in classical Athens. Milanovic sets
Byzantine per capita GDP at between $680–770 in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars,
similar to the Roman Empire (Scheidel and Friesen 2009).
Urbanization was lower than it had been in ancient Greece, with perhaps
closer to 10% residing in cities of 5,000 and more, rather than 30% as in
antiquity (Milanovic 2006). Tenancy was frequent and gradually crowded out
smallholding; land rents were substantial (Lefort 2002). Feudal relations
were developing in this period and aristocratic power was growing (Harvey
1989). Income inequality was considerable, surely higher than in classical
Greece: in Milanovic’s (admittedly highly schematic) model, 90% of the
population are thought to have lived near subsistence as farmers, tenants
and urban marginals.
Life expectancy is empirically unknown (Laiou-Thomadakis 1977 shows how
little is known about demography). Educational attainment was probably very
limited given extensive ruralization. Popular military commitments were low:
with general military service long a thing of the past, even professional
armies were increasingly replaced by ethnic mercenaries (Treadgold 1995). Political rights had likewise long disappeared: as so often, military and
political mobilization went hand in hand. Some benefits may have accrued
from this: age gaps between spouses appear to have been smaller than in
antiquity (Laiou-Thomadakis 1977), and for this reason, as well as thanks to
far lower casualties, widows and orphans ought to have been much rarer than
in classical Greece.
Athens, our main focus for the ancient period, had become a relatively
marginal town (Kazanaki-Lappa 2002). Although the eleventh and twelfth
centuries witnessed a boom in church building—reminiscent of earlier
investments in community infrastructure—identified houses from this period
tend to be modest and made of shoddy materials. Grain was grown within the
old city walls. To highlight the contrast to the classical period, it is
worth quoting from the writings of Michael Choniates, metropolitan bishop of
Athens from 1182 to 1204. He referred to Athens as a place that had lost
“the very shape of a city and the form and state that define cities” and was
oppressed by “an oligarchy bent on enriching itself.” Even allowing for
hyperbole and nostalgia for its famous past, the differences from the
classical period are palpable.
More importantly, these snippets are illustrative of general conditions:
strong elite power and high inequality; lower real incomes; lower
urbanization and attendant opportunities; no effective political involvement
paired with low exposure to organized violence. Conditions had become much
more similar to those in other traditional societies, such as ancient Egypt
as described above. Oppression was more common, but belief in the afterlife
may have been stronger as well. Once again we face a complex configuration
of circumstances that defies straightforward assumptions about quality of
Even this very limited survey helps us discern a few correlations. Elevated
levels of development in terms of real income and reduced inequality tended
to be associated with the strength of civic institutions, which were in turn
associated with exposure to violent death. Other connections are far less
clear: health, for example, may well have varied independently of any of
these other factors.
Finally, a quick look at more recent conditions. Greek GDP and income
inequality in the mid-nineteenth century have not been studied in great
detail. Real per capita GDP between 1833 and 1860 fluctuated between 100 and
140 drachmas in 1860 constant prices (Kostelenos 2001), equivalent to 520 to
730 liters of wheat (Pizanias and Mitrophanis 1991). This is roughly the
same as in the Roman Empire and less than in classical Athens. Moreover,
despite some per capita growth in late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, annual GDP (in constant prices) did not consistently exceed these
levels until after 1925. In the 1850s and 1860s, around 25% of the
population lived in settlements of 2,000+, fewer—and perhaps only half as
many—as in classical Greece. Mean life expectancy at birth stood at around
36 years between 1860 and 1880, with an infant mortality rate of close to
20% (Valaoras 1960). While it is hard to say whether or to what extent this
improved on antiquity, it is clear that any differences from the ancient or
Byzantine periods would have been modest. As late as in 1910, the majority
of the population (60%) was classified as illiterate (Flora 1973), a rate
that must have been even higher in older cohorts given that by then 70% of
military recruits were literate (Mishkova 1997). Participatory political
institutions developed only gradually: constitutions appeared from 1822
onward; the franchise was extended to all adult males in 1864; and a
republic was first established from 1924 to 1935.
We find both continuities and discontinuities between the ancient, medieval,
and modern periods of Greek history, all of which can be expected to have
had consequences for human development, quality of life, and “gross national
happiness.” Drastic transformations occurred only afterwards: the 2009 HDR
ranks Greece twenty-fifth in the world.
What is the point of this exercise? It shows that the
problems we currently face in determining quality of life are not new: we
also encounter them in engaging with the distant past. They are not merely
empirical problems—of how to find out or how to measure—but methodological
ones, of how to weigh different aspects of the human existence. This survey
also shows that the application of modern criteria to the historical record
has its uses. It suggests that particular institutional arrangements have
side effects that can be simultaneously beneficial and detrimental to the
quality of life: political and military mobilization and even slavery fall
in this category. History reveals that there are many different
configurations of the manifold determinants of wellbeing. It is only by
appreciating the depth of the historical record that we can arrive at a
better understanding of the complexities inherent in the concept of “quality
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