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A very interesting article as usual from this source. I particularly enjoyed learning of the marvelous social mechanisms which elevated Roman living standards w

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.

jjoonathan 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  Slavery is the equivalent of cheap oil: it doesn't absolve the nation from the need to build something meaningful with it.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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 5y ago
        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."
        zipswitch 5y ago
        There is, naturally, a Roman proverb along the same lines: qui vincit non est victor nisi victus fatebur. It translate s as "The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so."
        Tuna-Fish 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        ... 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 5y ago
      > 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?
    - cracrecry 5y ago
      By that measuring stick, you must have a really bad opinion of the USA because they are what they are from conquering most of their territories and exterminating its native population, and that was done yesterday. The biggest country in the World, Russia did that expansion in 1500, and Germany wanted to replicate the Americans in WWII. Is the prosperity of the US independent from having a virgin country with bast resources and no population? Certainly it is not, (North)Americans could have a big number of children to replace the exterminated native population and exploit its bast resources and automate everything because there were few workers to do the job. In other places of the world automation was more expensive(China, India) than just using workers, so it did not happen. Population skyrocketing meant a healthy young population and economy to prosper. People got rich killing buffaloes or cutting down millennial forrest or gold(that had been extracted and depleted on other parts of the world for milenia) and not to talk about Industry being financed by(very expensive at the time) sugar and cotton cultivated by slaves in the South.
      - tjr225 5y ago
        > By that measuring stick, you must have a really bad opinion of the USA because they are what they are from conquering most of their territories and exterminating its native population There have been large movements in the USA directed exactly at this multiple times over the last 3 decades. How would this be remarkable at all if the grandparent felt that way?
- Spellman 5y ago
  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?
  - xapata 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      Rome was unusually superior to its rivals. Chinese, Indian and Persianate empires occurred again and again. Rome happened once and was never reassembled. Great big plains where you can grow lots of food are a much better foundation for an enduring empire than a sea where almost all of the connecting land masses has mountains nearby. I’m not aware of anything similar to the Punic Wars happening elsewhere until the Hundred Years’ War. That’s staggering levels of state and popular commitment to war, for a very long time. Rome was in fact special.
      - xapata 5y ago
        There's always a winner in hindsight. Explaining why the winner won is easy, but predicting who will win is hard.
      - xapata 5y ago
        BTW, at the time, I think being on great big plains would have been worse. Sea transport was, what, 20x cheaper than land transport? Rome couldn't possibly have supported a million residents if it weren't on the sea and able to extract grain from across the Mediterranean.
- codyb 5y ago
  If you read the three articles it appears when the Roman Empire was strongest it was more peaceful for those within its borders (50 million people stretching from North Africa up through Europe and East through the Balkans) than it was before the empire (endemic warfare) or after the start of its decline (smaller, more frequent conflicts).
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> 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 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.
- syntheweave 5y ago
  I agree. The thing defining modern nation-states is the use of accounting methodology(quantities of ships, bars of iron, population demographics etc.) to define power in terms of assets on hand and gains from trade, which gradually recast military forces into the previously unrecognized role of "defending property" and therefore enforcing rules of trade. Likewise, early-modern chattel slaves were different from Roman-era slaves precisely because of the heavy influence of market coordination forces: they had fewer rights, were freed less frequently, and were conveniently redefined from "human" to "product" through the development of racism. These things made the early-modern version of the institution easier to coordinate and therefore (speculatively - not that I've seen a formal advancement of this theory) more productive. But it would take the Industrial Revolution for labor efficiency to become recognized in earnest. The pre-modern states, including Rome, had much more haphazard accounts and focused on tributary economics(how to extract more from the population or continue adding to conquests). Defense of property was strictly a thing for nobles or local militia, thus invaders looting cities was a normal occurrence through the medieval period. The Roman state was above the rest in applying a bureaucracy to the task of being the best at managing conquests - and it shows in the quality of Roman engineering, city planning and record keeping. Ghengis Khan achieved a similar, if short-lived, degree of coordination during the conquests, but lacked follow-up institutions that would have turned it into a longer-lived empire like Rome.

jjoonathan 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
Slavery is the equivalent of cheap oil: it doesn't absolve the nation from the need to build something meaningful with it.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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."
      - zipswitch 5y ago
        There is, naturally, a Roman proverb along the same lines: qui vincit non est victor nisi victus fatebur. It translate s as "The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so."
      - Tuna-Fish 5y ago
        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 5y ago
      ... 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 5y ago
    > 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?
  - cracrecry 5y ago
    By that measuring stick, you must have a really bad opinion of the USA because they are what they are from conquering most of their territories and exterminating its native population, and that was done yesterday. The biggest country in the World, Russia did that expansion in 1500, and Germany wanted to replicate the Americans in WWII. Is the prosperity of the US independent from having a virgin country with bast resources and no population? Certainly it is not, (North)Americans could have a big number of children to replace the exterminated native population and exploit its bast resources and automate everything because there were few workers to do the job. In other places of the world automation was more expensive(China, India) than just using workers, so it did not happen. Population skyrocketing meant a healthy young population and economy to prosper. People got rich killing buffaloes or cutting down millennial forrest or gold(that had been extracted and depleted on other parts of the world for milenia) and not to talk about Industry being financed by(very expensive at the time) sugar and cotton cultivated by slaves in the South.
    - tjr225 5y ago
      > By that measuring stick, you must have a really bad opinion of the USA because they are what they are from conquering most of their territories and exterminating its native population There have been large movements in the USA directed exactly at this multiple times over the last 3 decades. How would this be remarkable at all if the grandparent felt that way?
Spellman 5y ago
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?
- xapata 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    Rome was unusually superior to its rivals. Chinese, Indian and Persianate empires occurred again and again. Rome happened once and was never reassembled. Great big plains where you can grow lots of food are a much better foundation for an enduring empire than a sea where almost all of the connecting land masses has mountains nearby. I’m not aware of anything similar to the Punic Wars happening elsewhere until the Hundred Years’ War. That’s staggering levels of state and popular commitment to war, for a very long time. Rome was in fact special.
    - xapata 5y ago
      There's always a winner in hindsight. Explaining why the winner won is easy, but predicting who will win is hard.
    - xapata 5y ago
      BTW, at the time, I think being on great big plains would have been worse. Sea transport was, what, 20x cheaper than land transport? Rome couldn't possibly have supported a million residents if it weren't on the sea and able to extract grain from across the Mediterranean.
codyb 5y ago
If you read the three articles it appears when the Roman Empire was strongest it was more peaceful for those within its borders (50 million people stretching from North Africa up through Europe and East through the Balkans) than it was before the empire (endemic warfare) or after the start of its decline (smaller, more frequent conflicts).

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> 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 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.

syntheweave 5y ago
I agree. The thing defining modern nation-states is the use of accounting methodology(quantities of ships, bars of iron, population demographics etc.) to define power in terms of assets on hand and gains from trade, which gradually recast military forces into the previously unrecognized role of "defending property" and therefore enforcing rules of trade. Likewise, early-modern chattel slaves were different from Roman-era slaves precisely because of the heavy influence of market coordination forces: they had fewer rights, were freed less frequently, and were conveniently redefined from "human" to "product" through the development of racism. These things made the early-modern version of the institution easier to coordinate and therefore (speculatively - not that I've seen a formal advancement of this theory) more productive. But it would take the Industrial Revolution for labor efficiency to become recognized in earnest. The pre-modern states, including Rome, had much more haphazard accounts and focused on tributary economics(how to extract more from the population or continue adding to conquests). Defense of property was strictly a thing for nobles or local militia, thus invaders looting cities was a normal occurrence through the medieval period. The Roman state was above the rest in applying a bureaucracy to the task of being the best at managing conquests - and it shows in the quality of Roman engineering, city planning and record keeping. Ghengis Khan achieved a similar, if short-lived, degree of coordination during the conquests, but lacked follow-up institutions that would have turned it into a longer-lived empire like Rome.