[HN Gopher] Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
Author : Tomte
Score : 170 points
Date : 2022-02-11 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| charliea0 wrote:
| A very interesting article as usual from this source. I
| particularly enjoyed learning of the marvelous social mechanisms
| which elevated Roman living standards without the technological
| advancement which created the modern world.
|
| It is fascinating as well to compare to the fundamental problem
| of coordination and defections. The accumulated damage to Roman
| society by selfish actors eventually destroyed the institutions
| which produced such wealth.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I particularly enjoyed learning of the marvelous social
| mechanisms which elevated Roman living standards without the
| technological advancement which created the modern world.
|
| Note that this was not at all unique to the Romans. People in
| the Bronze Age were able to use bronze because they had a well-
| functioning system of international trade. The Late Bronze Age
| Collapse disrupted that system and essentially eliminated the
| bronze industry, requiring iron to be used instead. (Iron is
| hard but otherwise not especially desirable. It's also more
| difficult to work. But it has the significant advantage over
| bronze of being available everywhere in the world, where copper
| and tin both require long-distance international trade.)
|
| And a similar thing happened again in the late Middle Ages when
| Genghis Khan more or less unified the Asian land mass. This was
| not great for China, but Europe benefited immensely from his
| suppression of highwaymen in overland trade. (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica )
|
| The more trade is possible within a region (or across a
| region's borders), the richer everyone in that region is.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > the marvelous social mechanisms which elevated Roman living
| standards
|
| How much of it was conquest and slavery? Certainly not all of
| it, but I feel like a lot of it was conquest and slavery and we
| should control for that sort of thing when singing praise.
| akomtu wrote:
| Slavery is the equivalent of cheap oil: it doesn't absolve
| the nation from the need to build something meaningful with
| it.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Building something meaningful doesn't absolve the sins of
| its construction.
|
| The Romans were very good at conquering people and levying
| brutal taxes, but that doesn't add value and we shouldn't
| pretend that it does. They were also good at civil
| engineering, keeping the peace, and other economic
| activities which do add value and we should give them
| credit for it. I'd love to see a historical economic
| discussion that tries to tease apart these factors and
| weigh them against each other.
| 988747 wrote:
| > levying brutal taxes
|
| One of the reasons why Roman empire was so stable was
| that Roman taxes were actually lower and simpler than
| whatever taxes the local kings imposed previously. This
| makes sense if you think about it: Romans only really
| cared about Italy, and they didn't have to extract much
| resources from all the provinces to enrich Italy
| significantly. Previous rulers typically had only their
| small kingdom to tax, so they taxed it heavily.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Were they?
|
| > Romans only really cared about Italy
|
| Yeah, so they famously instituted for-profit tax
| collection: "we'll auction off the right to collect what
| you can!" Are you telling me that the competing
| individuals who were willing to bid the highest amount
| for this privilege were less effective at it than the
| kings who had preceded them?
|
| Historians often talk about Rome's "tenacity" -- the
| fraction of their male population they were willing to
| throw into the meat grinder of a failing war machine, the
| number of people they were willing to nail to trees when
| they risked their lives to complain about taxes, the
| lengths they were willing to go to in order to put down a
| tax rebellion (see: the giant earthen ramp up the walls
| of Masada) and so on. Rome is often credited with being
| _more tenacious_ than their adversaries.
|
| It's not impossible that taxes were generally lower, but
| I tend to suspect there are some serious qualifiers, like
| "in Italy," or "during peacetime," or "for those who the
| Romans were trying to make a positive example of."
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| The qualifier is "during the Roman Empire". The height of
| power of the publicani, and the period when they did most
| of their excesses as tax farmers, was essentially the end
| of of the Republic (and a few years in the beginning of
| the Empire). As the Caesars consolidated power and
| established a centralized buraucracy, they restricted the
| authority of the publicani.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| ... er, eventually.
|
| Rome tried many different kinds of tax policies in it's
| territories. The relatively light touch they finally
| ended up was essentially a reaction of first trying a
| policy so maximally extractive that it could be described
| as genocidal.
| patrec wrote:
| > The Romans were very good at conquering people and
| levying brutal taxes, but that doesn't add value and we
| shouldn't pretend that it does.
|
| How do you think the nice things you seem to enjoy about
| Rome spread around?
| Spellman wrote:
| Considering one of the biggest issues that plagued the Later
| Roman empire was the inability to pay it's legionnaires
| either via coin or freshly conquered land, it's a substantial
| factor to it's rise and decline.
|
| But to me it feels orthogonal to the benefits of increased
| state capacity, trade, and standardized coinage that helped
| provide the Roman Empire it's economic benefits. Yes much was
| built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what
| was the comparative advantage of Rome?
| kiba wrote:
| In the end, it's all about sun-provided energy input. Coins
| or treasury, or freshly plundered lands really represent
| the means by which to convert energy into goods that can be
| consumed whether that's food.
|
| But you can't get more slaves if you don't have more lands,
| but more lands means administration difficulty increases,
| which means you need more soldiers and bureaucrats, who are
| not directly producing food.
| pasabagi wrote:
| One thing people don't really have an intuition for is just
| how chaotic the ancient world generally was. Banditry was
| basically normal, murder was a 'personal matter', civic
| infrastructure investment was generally not a thing, etc.
|
| Empires like the Romans made some basic inroads into these
| problems (although in Rome, murder was still a personal
| matter, banditry was still the norm, etc). Building an
| aqueduct or a road is a massive quality-of-life achievement
| for everybody.
| xapata wrote:
| Comparative advantage isn't necessarily the cause for
| Rome's largeness. If society size follows a log-normal
| distribution, or perhaps a power law, due to the effects of
| preferential attachment (using a network metaphor), then
| the difference between Rome and other societies could be
| entirely random error.
| [deleted]
| Spellman wrote:
| The TL;DR quote:
|
| "Instead, I think the stronger point here ... is that the
| collapse of the Roman Empire in the West - while it was a
| catastrophe for those people living at the time - was less a
| product of 'hoards of barbarians' coming over the frontier ...
| and instead a product of actors within the political system,
| within the empire, tearing it apart out of the pursuit of their
| own interests, deceived by the assumption that something so old
| could never simply vanish...until it did. The consequences of
| their decisions and of their failure to recognize the fragility
| of the clockwork machine that suspended them above the poverty to
| come (and that it was already damaged) were great and terrible."
|
| But I highly recommend walking through all the data and
| discussion of exactly what that clockwork machine was. And then
| think about if/how today's society is different.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's definitely a sobering thought exercise.
|
| The need for growth was important because Roman growth led to
| "civilizing" creative activity and exchange. Growth stopped and
| the activity stopped. The institutions of government/power
| couldn't adapt.
|
| There's alot of parallels. How much economic growth now is
| really squeezing more blood from the rock?
| kiba wrote:
| On the contrary, we have an embarrassment of riches along
| with severe misallocation of resources. We could even be
| richer than our forebearers ever dreamed of.
| ksdale wrote:
| I'm not sure that's the lesson, based on this post, it sounds
| like the institutions were vital to the prosperity more than
| the growth. In a sense, growth is prosperity, but both were
| the result of institutions, and I'm not sure that growth was
| necessary for the maintenance of the institutions. I think
| the big takeaway is that people thought of the institutions
| are sort of an immutable fact of the world, when in reality,
| they were very break-able. Though that is also a sobering
| thought exercise as well.
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| I think the author fails to adequately discuss the impact of
| climate change on the economy. We know from modern history that
| recessions lead to political change. It's not implausible that
| an agrarian economy like that of Rome would be greatly impacted
| by climate change reducing crop yields, causing political
| upheaval. Those actors in the political system didn't just
| decide one day to depart from 200 years of stability to
| overthrow the government, there had to be some motivating
| factor.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Consider that 536, "the worst year in history", fell right
| into the century of steepest decline.
| xeromal wrote:
| Is unchecked corruption not a motivating factor? Greed?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Not just climate - their poor farming practices created
| deserts in North Africa!
|
| As a young student I always was impressed by and admired
| Rome. I think a big part of that was because much of the
| history came from British Imperial types seeking to link to
| past greatness. As I've aged and thought about it though,
| Rome seems like a real horror.
| Spellman wrote:
| I think the shifts in agriculture could definitely spark
| something, but robust political institutions and state
| capacity would have allowed them to weather the issues and
| adapt. Instead political fractures grew into much bigger
| problems bringing instability causing a downward spiral.
|
| Not to mention some of the biggest political shifts that
| happen around that era. The shift to the Late Roman empire is
| marked with a series of assassinations of the Emperor.
| Partially because of consolidation of the position's power
| and prestige. And in contrast other empires to the East and
| West organized and grew in power.
| eerikkivistik wrote:
| There is a wonderful historian who talks in length about Roman
| history with some basic visual aids and animations.
|
| I'll leave a link to the playlist here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9qlNBBoFG4&list=PLODnBH8ken...
|
| I highly suggest taking a look at the episode that covers the
| battle of Alesia for example.
| jq-r wrote:
| A minor nitpick from the article as the author writes that
| amphorae were used only for liquids like wine.
|
| That's incorrect, it was used for all kinds of unpackaged bulk
| good like grains, seeds (say olives), even sea shells. If you're
| transporting goods, you want it in containers; and amphorae were
| the shipping containers (quite literally) of that time. They were
| even used as toilets on ships.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| Amphorae were widespread and commonly used for all sorts of
| things, so much in fact that it seems there was a "standard"
| set of sizes and manufacturing processes, and there's one
| notable mound in Rome [0] made primarily with one type of
| amphora that, the theory goes on to explain, was too burdensome
| to recycle, so it was simply discarded in an orderly manner.
| This is pretty much in line with the standardization that
| happened with modern freight containers and allowed a
| substancial economic benefit, so the comparison is really on
| point.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| I've always been irked by the "continuity" argument. The collapse
| of the Roman imperial system must have had a massive effect on
| the way of life of normal people. The archaeological evidence
| presented in this article backs that up.
|
| The chart of average femur length over time is really interesting
| - especially the fact that it tracks the ups and downs of Roman
| political stability. However, I wish that there were error bars
| on the plot. The plot tells a nice story and matches what one
| would expect, but without error bars, I'm not sure whether to
| believe it.
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