Prof. Peter Temin

Prof. Peter Temin (Ph.D., M.I.T.) is the Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusets Institute of Technology. His books include The New Economic History (1972), Lessons From the Great Depression (1989), and The Roman Market Economy (2013).

You have written a lot about the economics of the Roman Empire. Were you interested in Rome or economics first, and what brought these two into contact?

I read Moses Finley's book, The Ancient Economy (1973) and been disappointed with the level of economic analysis in it, but I did not start to write about the ancient economy until many decades later.  I hope that my work on ancient economies has enabled others to go further in that field than I could.

What changes have you seen in how economics is taught since you were a student?

Economics now is taught with much more sophisticated mathematics than when I was a student.  This has led to better econometrics and microeconomics, but it has not helped much in macroeconomics.  That is why I wrote a small book on Keynesian economics a few years ago.  And my latest book, The Vanishing Middle Class (2017), is based on a simple model of economic development.