Roman Empire per capita GDP shows the Romans were poorer than any 2015 country
I do not understand why people consider GDP a meaningful indicator of wealth. The United States is a great example of a very real issue with it. Our GDP&#x2F;capita has been skyrocketing. Since just 2000 it has increased by about 17%. However, since 2000 the real median income has increased by less than 1%.<p>It seems like our country, and many others, are optimizing for GDP growth. I assume at some point in the past, it  presumably did correlate to wealth, so this made sense. But I think our attempt (and success) at maximizing GDP has shown that such a correlation was indeed just a correlation, and not a causal relationship. Nonetheless, we continue to focus on GDP, and this is simply bemusing.<p>And now to compare GDP optimized modern nations, to an out of left field ballpark estimate for an ancient empire? I think that&#x27;s clearly not a very reasonable thing to do.