Bakunin’s Reviews > The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece > Status Update

Ober makes a good case for why the greek flourishing: "as a result of fair rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs" I was also unaware of how egalitarian the Greek were. The low gini coefficient was a bit of a surprise for me.

Fantastic! To quote Tyler Cowen: "You can think of this book as how an economist might think about ancient Greece". Focuses on institutions and provides an in depth analysis of new data from over a thousand city-states. The consumtion rate of these city states provide a picture of how affluent the poleis were in comparison to modern states.