It's amazing what people built 2000 years ago, and sort of depressing too. I went over to a friend's house recently who had gotten a new outdoor hot tub. That thing isn't going to last 3 winters let alone a volcanic eruption.
Isn't it the exact opposite? Every single house in the modern world has running water—it wouldn't be code-compliant, in any functioning country, to not have that. That was a high-status luxury in Rome. (It was even a largesse of the Emperor to be gifted[0] the right to have a private plumbing connection to an aqueduct—something considered highly desirable in that world).
The fact people today build inexpensive plastic Thermae as a novelty object, reflects how thoroughly we've solved all the *actually hard* problems of water infrastructure. The formerly expensive parts are now unimaginably cheap, so, we're exploring new places to cut costs that we previously wouldn't think of.
(It's akin to how computer keyboards are now 10x cheaper and junkier than they were in the 1960's–1980's (?), because, the other problems having been solved, that became a new focus of economization. No one would think twice about paying (the modern equivalent of) $100 for a well-engineered mechanical keyboard, in an era when the corresponding PC went for $5,000. The expensive object reflects an economic difficulty elsewhere; and the expensive Roman stonework baths perhaps reflected the costliness of water in general).
My former house was built in 1927 - it had every modern convenience and was 100% better constructed than the terrible house we live in now that was built 2 years ago that was thrown together in the cheapest ways possible but still cost multiples of the inflation adjusted price of out former home when new.
As a generally smart person with disposable income, I am unable to figure out how to find/purchase higher quality products that are not optimized for obsolescence. Increasingly it seems that _everything_ is as cheap as possible: expensive products are not higher quality, but are instead designed to appeal to the premium market segment.
Largely everything has been solved so instead of some ultra expensive coffee maker just buy a Moka pot, and buy old/used stuff. Every 'scene' alive has associated gear, and of that gear, a small fraction is revered by the ultra-nerds. Find the ultra-nerds and follow them. They really don't like when their stuff breaks.
I've bought a ton of old stuff off eBay and similar sites and antique stores especially with this mentality. I can likely toss a grenade into my living room and most of my stuff will survive. I know my WWII sonar recorder will survive.
I bought a BMW 325is from 1988 and I've put well over 150k miles on it since I bought it a few years ago. Nothing leaks, nothing breaks, nothing squeaks, and it still gets 7.5L/100KM. A 36 year old car I got for $7k. One weekend, a Bentley manual, and youtube, and I was able to fix up the throttle body, replace ball joints, update my steering rack, and offset my wheels how I wanted. (On the flip side if I get into a crash I am insta-dead).
Like I wanted good outerwear but as you said, it's all premium market segment stuff without the quality. So I asked my friend who does bike-packing year round and lives outside what he wears and he gave me an entire notebook of gear, prices, longevity, and especially weights. I've had that jacket for 16 years now.
Same with laptops. Cheap modern $500 laptop, or ancient Thinkpad I can upgrade in an evening for $250, that will last me 10x longer? Infinite examples of this.
Joel - it really is a challenge to find high quality products even at high prices. Moreso at high and reasonable prices. I.E. getting your money’s worth. I hate being ripped off and have spent a lot of time researching producers and manufacturers to identify high quality products.
What I’ve found works is to locate special interest forums where experts talk about the best products, and to look for “whole products”. What I mean by that is to find products with as few “processed” or mass manufactured components as possible. Certainly there are exceptions to this, but as an example compare the copper pots and pans made by https://duparquet.com/ with the “ingredients” used on a typical pan you’d find at Wal-Mart.
The 3mm copper pan costs quite a bit but is made with real materials and skilled human labor. (No affiliation)
The Wal-Mart pan is the cheapest “metal” possible sprayed with a chemical coating and some generic styling and branding Homesense or something.
Certainly you can find some more affordable pots and pans with similar features as the website I shared, but you have to be careful.
Almost all electronics will by definition be planned obsolescence. A pan to cook meals? Like cities and good architecture we figured out how to make great pots and pans, knives, and more a long time ago and there isn’t a whole lot left to do.
Unfortunately population growth has led to a need for cheaper and crappier products especially in the west to maintain a perceived level of lifestyle.
Had a very similar conversation with a plumber last winter. Pipes exploded because of the cold and flooded the basement. Plumber came over to fix the issue and we talked about the tools while working.
Paraphrased statement was something like "The company that makes these tools could make a high quality product that was rust, corrosion, and abrasion resistant. Except they don't. They make me a cheap wrench, that's planned for obsolescence, and rusts after a few months on the job. The company I work for could buy me a high quality set of tools. Except they don't. They buy me whatever's cheap and don't especially care that they have to buy it again in a year. And then they expect me to go to your house and care."
My dad told me that tools were expensive, and were lucrative targets for theft. I inherited that mentality, but over time I realized that tools had gotten rather cheap. I buy tools from the pawn shop, they're cheap as dirt. For example, I bought an electric chain saw for $10. It works fine. A nice toolbox for $5. I can't see a market for stolen tools these days.
Because in a general way you can't say "I want X that will work perfectly until time Y". Instead, Xs are made my a process. That process can cost more or less: more meaning better quality ingredients, higher quality processing, tighter quality controls, whatever. This all yields end results are on a spectrum of quality - a likelihood that the item will last Y time within Z margin of error.
As chain is only as good as its weakest link - many systems will fail with a single broken element. And every time one of those elements breaks, I have a new problem with which to deal. Spend my precious free time figuring out how to do it myself? Try finding someone who will fix it for me, and hope they aren't going to just rip me off?
The example of a home lasting long is especially wild to me. In the US at least, the home is one of the major mechanisms of increasing wealth over lifetime and inter-generational wealth. People frequently buy homes in order to build equity.
Having homes that only last a few decades means that they are worth significantly less, and/or require significant repairs and remodels after relatively short time. I know that when I bought my home, which was made circa 1920, I was really happy that, while old, I could be fairly confident it wasn't about to fall over.
> In the US at least, the home is one of the major mechanisms of increasing wealth over lifetime and inter-generational wealth.
I just don't buy that. Most people who do that seem to ignore the heavy costs of owning a house in the meantime: taxes, repairs, maintenance, insurance, commissions, upgrades, lawn care, pest control, utilities, alarm systems, etc.
I've serially owned houses over the decades. Sometimes I'll look at what I sold them for, when, and compare with their current zillow value. The return on every one is less than if I'd invested the money in the stock market, and that's NOT counting all those major ongoing costs I listed. It's just on the price.
The wealth is also generated by multiplying purchasing power by leveraging against an asset with a mortgage (e.g. when else does a regular person get a $XXXk loan).
Let me put it this way. None of the houses I've bought were bought as an investment. I bought them as places to live in and enjoy. I've lost money on two of them, quite a bit.
Keep in mind that if your house burns down, your generational equity goes up in flames.
The point is that your question should not be "have I made a profit on these houses relative to an index fund" like a speculator.
Your question should be "would I have made a profit on these houses relative to an index fund if I had kept them rented out to tenants 100% of the time at market rates?".
The core to living in a residence you own shouldn't be the asset value, it should be the living. If you're neglecting the market rate for that quality of life in favor of focusing on asset appreciation, you're approaching homeownership in a backwards manner that is ultimately destructive.
I mean, it’s not a foregone conclusion that you’ll do better than otherwise. You could buy when prices are high and sell when prices are low. There is an ongoing calculus also about how long you need to live in a house before you end up saving money; it’s something like, if you sell your house within 5 years buying, assuming prices are equal, you’ll loose money bc of various purchase costs.
I pay less for my mortgage than I did for my apartment, probably approximately 85%. That was last in 2016; in general, I understand that locally rent prices have gone up since then. Of course my mortgage hasn’t, but let’s set that aside. Also, my house is much better than my apartments were, so.
Anyway, the issue is that you have to live somewhere, rent vs mortgage. That’s the difference to consider.
Nothing is a foregone conclusion when investing. And yes, you need a place to live. And the mortgage is only part of your cost to live there, see my previous post.
I just had to fork out a big chunk for a new roof, and another large expense removing a very large tree that decided to lean towards the neighbor's house.
> In the US at least, the home is one of the major mechanisms of increasing wealth over lifetime and inter-generational wealth.
That's mostly because of land values, not building values. And it's largely not a natural occurrence, but it's due to NIMBYism and property tax regimes designed so that young people will pay for all the services used by retirees.
This is wild. If what you said is true, then there would be no appreciable value to be extracted by flippers. Their entire schtick is built around what you are saying being untrue.
I’m sure you have reasons for believing this, but I cannot fathom it.
Put another way, look at what empty lots sell for, and compare that to what a similar lot with a (not dilapidated) house sells for, in areas where the land values would be similar.
The only exceptions I could imagine perhaps being the places with crazy property values. But, the US is large (so, not just San Francisco)
That's not by definition, although it is how social security works.
Retirees have assets but not income (or they have low income). Younger people are the other way round. So depending on how governments use income taxes vs sales taxes vs property taxes it changes who pays for things.
California is the worst about this because of Prop 13, which basically means if you don't move then your property tax is much lower than it should be and newer residents pay for you.
Who else would pay for retirees, if not the non-retirees?
Most of their assets are paper value, because they are located in stocks, their only home (and they have to live somewhere), etc… that if sold en masse would simply get pennies on the dollar or require expenditures elsewhere.
Why wouldnt you want a house that lasts? It will retain value better, require less maintanance, and yeah, maybe you want to pass it on to future generations. Makes sense to me
For the same reason I want a cast iron skillet to last. Why would I buy cheap garbage cookware and throw it in the dump every few years when a nice dutch oven, skillet, stainless steep pans (etc.) will last me for life and be nicer to use?
Given that I myself bought a house built in 1900 with original wood floors and loved it, I don't think it's unrealistic for someone thirty years from now to want the same. Our needs are unlikely to have changed much... if they don't want it, they can sell it or tear it down. That's up to them!
New homes are a bit of unique version of the "built to last" theme. Most of the individual components are some of the best we've ever had, while some of them are the worst. Modern windows are amazing. Modern insulation is amazing. Insulation is so good, you need less of it in appliances so you gain space inside fridges/ovens even though the unit itself is the same physical size. If you built the house out of something besides #2 pine, homes could be amazing. On top of that, you have nail guns where the builder doesn't even notice (or care) if the nail misses or not. People just don't care about the attention to detail during construction. It's not like they're building their own home.
Services become expensive when the servicepeople have better/more productive things to do, because you need to pay them more to keep them in the industry.
I have triple-pane windows since 2014. No leaks, no fog. Superb comfort. Same with countless friends, colleagues and neighbors.
Almost nobody has been installing single-pane windows around here since early 00s. Double pane is the default. Location is Eastern Europe, if that matters.
I think what you are describing is what the central bank calls hedonics. They substitute one good for another in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation. Otherwise the inflation figure would be much higher than it is. So instead of solid 2x6 studs in the floor, we use engineered struts. I visited Pompeii, I was amazed at how well preserved all the marble was.
Prior to the industrial revolution most people did not live in stone palaces, and I doubt Pompeii was any exception. The population of Pompeii was 10k-20k people and they were probably supported by one or two orders of magnitude more subsistence farmers living in homes that mostly don't exist today.
Currently living in an 1800's converted church. It's ridiculously well insulated and solid. It's -15 outside but with a little fireplace, and $50 in oak slabwood per month, I'm solid in the winter. The upstairs stays 22 and only drops 2 degrees at night. Meanwhile my old condo had a 4 foot "cold front" in front of the floor to ceiling windows.
If it has modern conveniences and is even vaguely up to modern electrical code, that means someone renovated it at one point.
All modern buildings are compliant with building codes and there is very little room for creativity. If you don't like the building then you don't like the code.
You can build better than the code allows would be the point. Code cares about minimum levels of safety, not planned obsolescence or market segmentation. E.g. why not build homes out of concrete instead of wood? Why not use better roofing material than asphalt shingles? Etc.
I'm not sure but I kind of doubt houses are built out of wood entirely because of costs. I live in SV so I assume anyone who owns a house is ultra-rich, but they're all wood.
Most of Europe builds primary residence houses out of concrete air bricks of some kind or just plain bricks. Wood is used mostly for roof support. Wooden houses are usually built for vacation places.
Don't forget to adjust for survivor bias. You don't see all the terrible houses that they built in the 1920's because, well, they didn't last. But you better believe that then just like now plenty of people were throwing together houses in the cheapest way possible.
I mean, the insulation of a modern house is clearly better than your house stuffed with horse hair in the 20s, also using 10 times the wood to build a house I suppose is better…
I don't think they are lamenting the fact that these things have reduced in price but rather significantly in quality as well.
There is something to be said about price reductions, but at some point the quality lowers to a point where it has become a waste of resources as the product you bought will seize working within a short time frame.
I've always made this unfortunate experience with shoes.
With good care, 100 Euro sneakers would last me about 2 years.
A pair of handcrafted leather shoes I bought 12 years ago are still going strong. While the leather shoes were almost 4 times the price, they've paid for themselves at this point.
Obligatory mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory "The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory that people in poverty have to buy cheap and subpar products that need to be replaced repeatedly, proving more expensive in the long run than more expensive items. The term was coined by English fantasy writer Sir Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, illustrates the concept with the example of boots. The theory has been cited with regard to analyses of the prices of boots, fuel prices, and economic conditions in the United Kingdom."
> Every single house in the modern world has running water...reflects how thoroughly we've solved all the actually hard problems of water infrastructure.
It's worth pointing out that even in the US, the richest nation on Earth, millions of Americans don't have access to clean, safe. drinkable water. We still have a lot of hard problems in water infrastructure that need to be solved. It's not only problems in the engineering of those systems, but also in the management of those systems as much of our existing infrastructure is both inadequate in terms of meeting our current and projected needs and literally falling apart and at risk of failure.
We're way ahead of Rome in a ton of areas, but we're still nowhere near where should be. Look at our grades:
OP assumign that everyone in ancient rome had a house like this. Trying to compare his $10000 friend’s hot tub extension with a $40,000,000 estate. Lol
> That thing isn't going to last 3 winters let alone a volcanic eruption.
Could it have been a case of survivorship bias? I.e., perhaps jankier facilities have been built at Pompeii but simply did not make it at all or were not prioritized for excavation?
There were no plastic ones but there were very probably some wooden ones, or other luxurious wooden items which were destroyed without a trace and we'd never know
I mean, they certainly knew how to make wooden water containers: they wrote it down. This context is dye-making rather than baths,
- "...This water is boiled with an equal quantity of pure water, and is then poured into large wooden reservoirs [original: "piscinas ligneas"]. Across these reservoirs there are a number of immovable beams, to which cords are fastened, and then sunk into the water beneath by means of stones; upon which, a slimy..."
“People” often fancy themselves to be smarter than they are and capable of judging others wrong based on their limited information and passing knowledge, as well as what they have decided to be true rather than what is fact. Things like “because things were made of stone, all things were made of stone”, or “because some things survived the tests of time, all things were built better”.
It is exactly the bias that was pointed out by the commentor.
I highly, highly doubt that the ratio of durable to perishable baths, spas and jacuzzis is now higher or even similar to what it was back then. Will we ever know for sure ? No, of course not.
Wealthy Romans had a bit of a culture-boner for leaving a lasting legacy, maintaining the dynasty, and that sort of thing, and conversely often relied on ancestral clout to borrow credibility from. I don't think anyone today would try to base their credibility on being the distant relative of Ben Franklin in the way an upstart roman might invoke their familiar relationship with Scipio Africanus.
Makes sense they built stuff to last in such an environment.
Other thing would not be expected in a war driven society, where being a legionary was quite common, and very few managed to return back (alive) to civil life after doing their part on the assigned legion.
> In some accounts of the Roman triumph, a companion or public slave would stand behind or near the triumphant general during the procession and remind him from time to time of his own mortality
Not really, that's the resource that disappeared faster than anything, being the simplest to get. Mediterranean forests have never been particularly dense, already the Greeks were moving lots of wood on the sea from the best locations. Stone was easier to get from the areas around Rome.
Survivorship bias. The only artifacts we see are the ones that were meant to last. Those Romans who did not build for eternity have not been remembered, which distorts our view of thier society. It is akin to classic car enthusiasts who think cars were made better way back when. They think that because they only see the survivors. They do not see all the junk that history has rightly forgotten.
Something like 90% of romans did not live in cities. Survivorship bias again. We judge them buy the solid cities, or lord's manor houses. We have lost the mud/brick/wood farms where the vast majority lived.
I'm sorry, but you're getting into "I'm smart and want to argue a point" territory.
Nothing of that applies to Pompeii, as it was buried by a volcano, and everyone and everything that wasn't taken as the people were runnung away stayed as it was. It's basically the Pripyat of Classical Antiquity
> That thing isn't going to last 3 winters let alone a volcanic eruption.
He can have a hot tub that could survive a volcanic eruption, he just has to to pay for it. Is your friend willing to allocate the resources, or is he happy with 'good enough'?
There were money lenders (argentarii) but they were just individuals setting up stall in the local forum. If you exhausted your credit with one argentarius you just went and found another who didn't talk to the first.
They had… bank-like things, but in general they’d have been quite local; if your city is in the process of being destroyed, the prospects of your bank are poor.
Roman bank offering geo redundance is probably not what I was thinking about this morning.
"italia-south-1 was hit by a volcano yesterday, we are failing over to dalmatia-west-1 until issues are resolved. There may be some latency with obtaining coins today."
It is hard to build a distributed banking system without reliable accounting, and reliable accounting in Europe only became possible with the import of Indian/Arabic positional numeric system.
We underestimate just how much of a burden on arithmetics the previous systems were. Too unwieldy.
On a similar note, I believe that for the same reason, the Chinese language will never achieve mass adoption in the rest of the world. The script is too complicated and reaching effective literacy takes much longer than with Latin characters.
That's interesting that it implies that they had concepts of zero and place-value number systems. I can imagine Romans complaining about people sticking with the Roman number system as they converted numbers to and from their abacus.
So they did not really have place value system. Or at least logical leap from abacus to place value. Instead they had 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 and summed or deducted these. Sometimes in stylistic ways.
That is precisely the problem. Abacus sorta works, but arithmetics is much more efficient for the same purpose, and gives you ability to do calculations that can't be done using an abacus.
It is a difference similar to the one between a horse and a car.
While, with the exception of China, Bronze Age civilisations didn’t have _coins_, they did sometimes have some concept of money.
From the Code of Hammurabi (~1750BCE):
> If a man rents a boat of 60-[kur] capacity, he shall give one-sixth [of a shekel] of silver per day as its hire.
At this point, a shekel is a unit of weight, not a coin, but is already being used as, effectively, money. Coins were initially more a convenience thing than anything else.
Primitive banking-type activity is also showing up in this time period; institutions, mostly temples, taking deposits and lending with interest. And really, for most of the world (Ancient India did have some _slightly_ more sophisticated bank-like behaviour), that’s more or less where it stayed til the 17th century or so.
Romans produced so many coins that you can buy genuine Roman coins relatively cheaply online. They are found absolutely everywhere in the ancient port cities and Rome itself, every construction project will unearth a ton of lower denomination coins.
The bronze age wasn't. The way it worked seems to be that there was a guy who knew what you wanted, knew what you produced, and knew people who could produce what you wanted, and he supplied you with it, and wanted what you could produce in return. Acting as a sort of intermediary between everybody else.
Because somebody claimed that you can't have organized society without banking, while for a long part of history there were organized societies without MONEY.
You can definitely have organized society without banking, but AFAIK there was no organized society without some form of taxation, and few organized societies without long-distance trade (only in isolated places).
I'm convinced that most of the victims found are part of the working/slave class. So I can't help but fantasize that they had gone through their already evacuated owner's possessions thinking the world was ending, they died clutching whatever they could grab.
Something to acknowledge. Slightly wanted to mock because of how predictable it is that they're holding money while they died. And that the priority seemed like it was the coins and jewelry.
However, even in the modern era, somebody with a "bug out bag" or a "Wake Up, Stuffs Happening (WUSH) bag" still includes "cash" as one of the main includes in the top priorities [1]
When you said something about things never changing, I thought you were going with the part where they think she (30s) could be the rich man's (50s) wife.
Alternatively, you can consider how ancient our modern taps and valves look, and not in a bad way. Sometimes engineering problems get solved once and don't have a pressing need to be revisited.
Exactly. You can see this in all sorts of things. Sure an clean sheet design of a adjustable wrench or semi trailer coupling generic roller chain or whatever other 100yo item might net a few % improvement in some areas by no longer having to design to the manufacturing tech and material costs of 100 years ago but often times the ecosystem that standardization enables is worth more than a couple percent of improvement somewhere.
Came here to post almost the same. Always have this impression from modern media that Roman civilization was thatch roofs and aqueducts with maybe a hole in the wall that poured water out or a well you went to the local square.
May have been that way for the poor, or the less status enabled, like many commenters have noticed. Yet it's still a dissonance that such high quality piping, boiler rooms, insulated engineered waterworks, and other similar ideas were available. Even if in limited quantities.
>Archaeologists have discovered a sumptuous private bathhouse - potentially the largest ever found there - complete with hot, warm and cold rooms, exquisite artwork, and a huge plunge pool.
Essentially this Roman luxury mansion has an indoor replica of a typical communal Roman bath place.
Communal Roman bath normally has three section hot, warm and cold, and the latter so called frigidarium normally come with a pool [1].
The ancient Egyption, is as ancient to Roman, as to our modern world to Roman, and the rich ancient Egyptions typically have pool inside their luxury mansions.
Fun facts early ancient Egyptions didn't call their kings Pharaoh only the later ancient Egyption kings are called Pharaoh literally meaning "Great House" that almost certainly has pool inside their mansion or palace since swimming is one of their favorite free time or sport activities [2].
As for the modern world, when my friends and relatives who're recently retiring with excess money to spend, the first thing they did are installing permanent private pools inside their new renovated retirement houses.
It seems in house pools are human innate luxury craving items that common across time and culture.
also shows - how on a basic comparison some rich people back then lived way better than some poor folks do today in terms of assets. though in terms of relative access to goods poor folks today are better off.
> though in terms of relative access to goods poor folks today are better off.
What's that meant to imply? The people starving today certainly aren't better off than those wealthy Romans were. Not in any way other then a theoretical "if they stopped being poor" sense.
The information (history/discoveries) can be distributed throughout the world and not dependent on one place anymore.
Past that, we'll have to leave the planet.
Quick note for anyone who hasn't visited, and has an interest in western civilization: Pompeii, and the somewhat more impressive nearby Herculaneum are well worth visiting at least once. It's really not possible to have the experience remotely from pictures or videos, not the same as being physically immersed. Best to avoid the high summer due to heat and load, but go then if you have no alternative. Herculaneum in particular is never that busy because harder to get to and less publicity.
Kind of depressing how some people two millennia ago had bigger homes than most people alive today. Then again, if they were alive today their homes would be 10x the size.
The home in question is thought to have belonged to the wealthiest family around - which, for a society where economics are generational and local, practically means super-rich.
In modern societies such super rich people flock to major cities, but in pre-industrial societies relocating would leave familial assets under-attended. Accordingly a well adjusted wealthy person would arrange for an excellent standard of living adjacently to their possessions
From what I understand it, affluent Romans typically moved back and forth between countryside villas in the summer, and a smaller residence in the city during the winter.
Also Roman economics were not really very local. The Romans had a large road network and were very mobile and traded even farther. You have for example Pelagius, a figure in church history, who was born in Britain and died in Egypt.
And in turn if you take random/average/low-income citizen and compare their situation (like their home) with what equivalent has now, their situation would be much better nowadays.
Even if you compare homes of ultrawealthy then and now I expect that most would take homes of XXI century.
There are plenty of smaller houses in Pompeii. Another thing to consider is that the ash covered basically the first floor of buildings, while the upper floors were either blown away by blast or pillaged by later generations. So there could have been one or two upper floors of accommodation for poorer people no longer visible. Also possible there were lower quality buildings on the town outskirts that haven't survived. Archeology understandably focuses on the larger villas.
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