Modelling the Quest for Status in Ancient Greece: Paying for Liturgies
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Modelling the Quest for Status in Ancient Greece: Paying for Liturgies George Tridimas1 Received: 31 May 2020 / Accepted: 27 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The substantive view of the ancient economy argues that social considerations and especially the quest for status featured prominently in ancient Greece. Paying for liturgies, the private finance of public expenditure by wealthy individuals, offered the opportunity to acquire status by choosing the level of contributions to outperform rival providers. Effectively, liturgies were a system of finance of public provision through redistributive taxation sidestepping state administration of taxes and expenditures. Applying the insights of the economic approach to status, the paper examines status competition in ancient Athens and compares paying for liturgies with a hypothetical system of explicit income taxation of the rich. It is concluded that status seeking increased aggregate provision of public goods. The results formalise important aspects of substantivism and illustrate the value of formal economic analysis in the investigation of the ancient Greek economy. Keywords Ancient Greek economy · Substantivism · Status · Liturgies · Public provision · Taxation JEL Classification D62 · H23 · H41 · N34 Abbreviations D62 Externalities H23 Redistributive effects H41 Public goods N34 Economic history-welfare, income, wealth
“The best men choose one thing above all, the everlasting fame of mortals; the many gorge themselves like cattle” Heraclitus ca 500 BC https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/ * George Tridimas [email protected] 1
Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, University of Ulster, Shore Road, Antrim BT37 0QB, UK
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Homo Oeconomicus
1 Introduction People care about status, their relative position in society, because of the honour it carries and because it brings wealth and power. Vying for status and being jealous of each other, people enter social contests whose results establish the position of the elites in political and social hierarchies. It does not come as a surprise to read that notions of status, glory, honour and envy were fixtures of the values of the ancient Greek society, as the opening quote says. The present paper studies status seeking by integrating economic, political and social factors and shows how competition for individual status may improve social outcomes. Although the focus is ancient Greece the analysis of the paper is of broader interest as it studies important aspects of status seeking behaviour. According to the prominent ancient historian Moses Finley the ancient decision-maker strived to maximise status rather than income or profits. But Finley saw status as “an admirably vague word with considerable psychological element” (1979:51). He continued: “a model of economic choices … in antiquity would give considerable weight to this factor of status. I do not say it was the only factor that it weighed equally with all members of any order or status-group, nor do
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