8 ms·

And if you really want to boil it down to a single reason, the best candidate would be "becoming militarily dependent on hired mercenaries and then not paying t

And if you really want to boil it down to a single reason, the best candidate would be "becoming militarily dependent on hired mercenaries and then not paying them" rather than something more interesting

comrh 4y ago
I always thought favoring biological heirs was up there too. The Five Good Emperors were all adopted and some of the absolute worst leaders only got there through luck of birth.
- ricree 4y ago
  Probably true, but it was so baked into the system that it was hard to escape. Even the five good emperors chose their successors via adoption, so on paper it was still direct inheritance. For Marcus Aurelius to pass over his son would have been a huge break from tradition. The best attempt to escape this was Diocletian's tetrarchy, but that just led to yet another civil war.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
I can see that happening. Thinking about Canada. The other day I calculated it would take 25 hours of work for the minimum wage worker to afford a weekend camping. And I think that's a pretty good indication we're pretty close collapse. Workers not being paid enough, and out of control inflation is how the soviet system collapsed.
- hengri 4y ago
  Do you think that average people throughout history had the means of going on weekend camping trips.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    IDK. Camping can be very cheap. I went on camping trips all the time as a teenager and I had almost no money. Unless by "camping" you are talking about towing a small mobile home into a paved "campground" with electricity, water, showers and bathrooms.
  - aerostable_slug 4y ago
    I think they were called "hunting / gathering" for most of human history. Heck, non-working pets (e.g. herd guardians, vermin control, etc.) were nearly unknown until relatively recently, because who had the wealth to feed a non-productive mouth?
  - LocalPCGuy 4y ago
    It's more just what they had to do anytime they traveled longer than a day's distance. I'm sure that happened for pleasure, but a trip specifically to camp seems like something that is more relegated to the modern age where you can get to a destination easily without having to just camp along the way.
  - Out_of_Characte 4y ago
    The average person throughout history did not have a refrigerator or global trade. Therefore any decline in todays society is moot.
  - dkarl 4y ago
    I vaguely remember a magazine biography of an Italian scientist who lived near the mountains. In the summer, he liked to strike out on Friday afternoon with a hunk of bread and a hunk of cheese, think about scientific problems while he hiked around in the mountains, sleep under his jacket, and come home on Saturday or Sunday. In his location he didn't need any more material wealth to "go camping" than he needed to stay at home. It might be more the opposite, that only in relatively recent times have people been able to get away for a day or two without doing what we would call "camping." If you were a hunter-gatherer you'd grab a buddy (or not), invent some excuse like checking for game in the next valley, and rough it for a night or two. Now if you fuck off for a weekend you can check into a hotel or an AirBNB.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Based on what/ divided how? Purchasing a tent, utensils, backpack etc ie starting from scratch, or assuming everything already paid for and just 'real costs' ie food, tent-place (ground rent?)? Decathlon.fr or .co.uk prices can be pretty cheap, but I'm not sure where the costs start.
  - dukeofdoom 4y ago
    Based on Canadian Prices, a working guy would spend. And not even going very far from home. Gas $100 Beer $50 Cigs $15 Ontario Park Campsite $59/night x 2 = $120 Firewood 2 x $15 = $30 Some basic sausages and food = $50 Total $375 Min Wage $15/hour. Hours of work = 25 hours Actually it would take more than 25 hours, because most likely that person does not live with Grandma and has shelter / food expenses. So might need to save up for a month, if not months.
    - weaksauce 4y ago
      this is for how many people? because camping trip fees are split usually. i assume 50 dollars in beer is not for one person in a weekend... when I was there right before the pandemic the beer didn't cost anywhere near that.
      - dukeofdoom 4y ago
        One guy definitely can drink a case over a weekend. I dont think you hanged out with many working people. I think most would not bring a 12 pack, but a full case. But even if they did. Last I rember there was $10 covinince charge for getting the campsite tickets online, which you would want to do. Because you will not drive out there without knowing you have a spot if you saved up for a camping trip.
    - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
      For someone from the other side of the planet (former USSR), this list feels very weird. I can't imagine paying for a campsite (nobody here does, you just go wherever you want and take whatever place is available), or firewood (you can always find a dry tree trunk somewhere along the road, or there's a friend of a friend who will bring some from his own house). So although our minimum wages are absolutely atrocious by your standards (officially it's around $100 per month IIRC, but I haven't heard of anybody making below $200), half of this list doesn't apply, and the other half is cheaper by 5-20 times (a pack of cigs is ~$1 if I'm not mistaken, a liter of gasoline around 50 cents, etc). Considering all of this, we've been chugging along just fine… or not, actually. Braces yourselves, I guess.
- debesyla 4y ago
  Isn't 25 work hours a really low amount of work? That's just a tiny bit more than 3 work days for whole weekend camping?
  - est31 4y ago
    If the minimum wage worker had free housing, food, electricity, etc. your calculation would make sense. Generally if you are a minimum wage worker who is working full time, a large component of your disposable income goes into those things (living paycheck to paycheck). So having a disposable income at all is a luxury, even if it's 10% of your income. Assuming that 10% figure, you can multiply those 3 days by 1/10% = 10 and you get 30 days of working for one weekend of camping. Not really great.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  My weekends camping rarely cost me more than $20. $1.50 on food per meal. $1 on camping gas or coal for the weekend. $200 of gear, but it will last me 20+ camping weekends. $0 on travel, because I'll be hiking.
  - ssully 4y ago
    It was a viral post from a few weeks back. From what I remember the main cost increase was because of gas prices.
  - kodt 4y ago
    You can hike to the campground from your home?
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  That’s actually a really interesting metric. Cost of living has really shot up in Canada while wages have stagnated. Everyone knows that housing has increased dramatically. This leads to less disposable income obviously. I’m 40 and grew up in Edmonton. Once or twice a year, as a kid and into my late 20s, my family and and/or I did a hotel type vacation in Banff or Jasper once a year, which seemed expensive at the time, and multiple times camping in the Rockies per year, which basically seemed free. My slightly more wealthy friends’ parents had a cabin and boat. Now if I were to live in Edmonton again, I could probably still camp as if it were free but I appreciate your assessment that a minimum wage worked could not. Because I certainly could as a minimum wage worker back in the day. And I probably would never justify a domestic hotel type weekend or week long trip within Canada.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    I’ll take the devil’s position: Your are not owed by nature a footprint on the ground, or a weekend camping. Manille (Manila? Capital of Philippines) has 43079 inhabitants per square kilometer (23sqm per person, including agriculture), China tries to do the same. The key is nature doesn’t owe you democracy, and governments neither. We can store many people vertically if we remove their personality. What I mean is poverty doesn’t make the system itself collapse, it can actually survive pretty far, even thrive while everyone is expunged. After all, USSR only collapsed in 1991, 69 years after Stalin took power, after killing probably 1/4 of its population in gulags.
    - johnwalkr 4y ago
      I don't know why I'm replying to someone who thinks governments don't owe us democracy but people are allowed to complain when things get worse and I would prefer if previous policy didn't disallow increasing density in Canada. Incidentally I live in Tokyo now and it's now cheaper than Vancouver and the density (which is actually not as high as people think[1]) is a positive, not a negative. [1] Just for fun, I checked densities. Tokyo 23 wards (the actual city of Tokyo): 14,500/km^2. Downtown Vancouver: 17,000/km^2. Downtown Edmonton: 5,000/km^2
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- panick21_ 4y ago
  > Workers not being paid enough, and out of control inflation is how the soviet system collapsed. No its not actually. If anything the Soviet system collapsed because the elites didn't really like it that much. The elites had lost interest in preserving the system. Elites didn't like the party discipline. There is a reason why Soviet collapsed and China didn't. Just having demonstrations and unhappy population does magically lead to successful overthrows of governments.
  - dukeofdoom 4y ago
    Workers going on a mass strike across the Easter Block countries in the "Solidarity" movement in the late 80s is how its generally viewed as being the beginning of the end of the soviet system. The communist governments were put in a position where there were going to have to massacre their own people openly revolting in massive strikes. I don't think Chinese government would survive another Tiananmen square incident.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      > is how its generally viewed Yes and as many historical topics, it a romantic tail that people like to tell rather then a great analysis of the truth. > The communist governments were put in a position where there were going to have to massacre their own people openly revolting in massive strikes. That's what many governments in history did. And that's exactly the point, the reason a state fails is when the elites have not enough reason to defend the current system. When they do, then the army shows up. And in Hungary in 1956 they were willing for example.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    I like Francis Spufford's comment: Stalin was a gangster who thought he was a social scientist. Krushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. Brezhnev and those who came after him were gangsters who only pretended to be social scientists. We can add to that, after the failed hardliner coup, the country was run by gangsters who didn't even care to pretend they were anything else.
paganel 4y ago
It's also how the Byzantine Empire went into its downwards trajectory starting with the late 1000s. In fact, it was a little more complicated, as the Empire had to resort to using mercenaries because its theme system had been basically broken into pieces by the Empire oligarchy and by the Church, so Byzantium having to resort to mercenaries in order to defend itself was mostly, by that time, a consequence of said oligarchy and Byzantine Church doing their thing against the small Byzantine tax-payers. And before someone starts saying that the Roman Empire lived "through" the Byzantine Empire all the way to 1453 I have to say that from my point of view that is only valid until the late 6th-early 7th century, by the end of Heraclius's [1] reign the Byzantine Empire was a thing totally different compared to the Roman Empire. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclius
- mr_toad 4y ago
  The later emperors were also reluctant to rely on armies commanded by native Byzantine generals, who had a long track record of usurpation.
- otter-rock 4y ago
  I can agree that it ceased being the Roman Empire per se, but I don't see it as being that much different from the end of the Roman Kingdom or the Roman Republic. It's still a continuation.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    This exactly. The argument about non continuation are nonsense. Yes of course after 500 years it was different. Look at any state with 500 year and it will not be exactly the same.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  I don't think this is a good argument. The Byzantine Empire was at a peak around 1000 and the main reasons for it decline after that is not mercenaries but rather that Basil didn't have an heir and his daughters were left in power and had no interest in ruling so that only a few decades later the state was disaster. Combine that with the rise of a new powerful enemy and you have a disaster on your hands. New evidence suggest that the Theme system was only barley function for a long time before the decline. In fact, going away from that system is partly why they were so powerful by the year 1000. > by the end of Heraclius's [1] reign I don't agree with that at all. If there is any reasonable point to talk about non-continuation it would be 1204.
renewiltord 4y ago
That sounds a lot like "had cardiac arrest" though. The magic is in the "why" of "not paying them".
trashtester 4y ago
Another, related view is to look at how many was on the dole. During the late empire, around 20% of the population in Rome was effectively on welfare, getting food from the state. Instead of drafting these poeple into the empire, Rome recruited foreigners for the army, while the productivity of the domestic population kept going down. Eventually the state, needing to pay both the welfare receipients and the army, ran out of economic capacity to provide for both groups. Stopping the dole was if possible more dangerous short term than not paying the provicial armies, since the proletariat in Rome/Constantinople could riot instantly, and overthrow any emperor.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  Wasn't the dole only implemented because land ownership had concentrated to a few extremely wealthy individuals? Only a few generations earlier, during the Second Punic War many landowners had either died or had their farms ruined to deny food to Hannibal, allowing the land to be bought at low prices.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Combined with massive influx of slaves from Gaul and other places making latin farm laborers too expensive. Still, the effect is the same. A large proletariat with very little income demanding to be fed by the state. With significant political power, based on making up a large percentage of the population in the capital.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Wasn't the dole only implemented because land ownership had concentrated to a few extremely wealthy individuals? It was implemented because it got votes. It's not a coincidence that it was restricted to people who could vote. You get welfare whenever you expand the franchise too far.
    - davidgay 4y ago
      > You get welfare whenever you expand the franchise too far. So, pray tell, what was the step too far (in no particular order): - women - slaves - non-property owners - non-poll-tax payers - 18 year olds ... and in which of those categories do you fall?

comrh 4y ago

I always thought favoring biological heirs was up there too. The Five Good Emperors were all adopted and some of the absolute worst leaders only got there through luck of birth.

ricree 4y ago
Probably true, but it was so baked into the system that it was hard to escape. Even the five good emperors chose their successors via adoption, so on paper it was still direct inheritance. For Marcus Aurelius to pass over his son would have been a huge break from tradition. The best attempt to escape this was Diocletian's tetrarchy, but that just led to yet another civil war.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

I can see that happening. Thinking about Canada. The other day I calculated it would take 25 hours of work for the minimum wage worker to afford a weekend camping. And I think that's a pretty good indication we're pretty close collapse. Workers not being paid enough, and out of control inflation is how the soviet system collapsed.

hengri 4y ago
Do you think that average people throughout history had the means of going on weekend camping trips.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  IDK. Camping can be very cheap. I went on camping trips all the time as a teenager and I had almost no money. Unless by "camping" you are talking about towing a small mobile home into a paved "campground" with electricity, water, showers and bathrooms.
- aerostable_slug 4y ago
  I think they were called "hunting / gathering" for most of human history. Heck, non-working pets (e.g. herd guardians, vermin control, etc.) were nearly unknown until relatively recently, because who had the wealth to feed a non-productive mouth?
- LocalPCGuy 4y ago
  It's more just what they had to do anytime they traveled longer than a day's distance. I'm sure that happened for pleasure, but a trip specifically to camp seems like something that is more relegated to the modern age where you can get to a destination easily without having to just camp along the way.
- Out_of_Characte 4y ago
  The average person throughout history did not have a refrigerator or global trade. Therefore any decline in todays society is moot.
- dkarl 4y ago
  I vaguely remember a magazine biography of an Italian scientist who lived near the mountains. In the summer, he liked to strike out on Friday afternoon with a hunk of bread and a hunk of cheese, think about scientific problems while he hiked around in the mountains, sleep under his jacket, and come home on Saturday or Sunday. In his location he didn't need any more material wealth to "go camping" than he needed to stay at home. It might be more the opposite, that only in relatively recent times have people been able to get away for a day or two without doing what we would call "camping." If you were a hunter-gatherer you'd grab a buddy (or not), invent some excuse like checking for game in the next valley, and rough it for a night or two. Now if you fuck off for a weekend you can check into a hotel or an AirBNB.
InCityDreams 4y ago
Based on what/ divided how? Purchasing a tent, utensils, backpack etc ie starting from scratch, or assuming everything already paid for and just 'real costs' ie food, tent-place (ground rent?)? Decathlon.fr or .co.uk prices can be pretty cheap, but I'm not sure where the costs start.
- dukeofdoom 4y ago
  Based on Canadian Prices, a working guy would spend. And not even going very far from home. Gas $100 Beer $50 Cigs $15 Ontario Park Campsite $59/night x 2 = $120 Firewood 2 x $15 = $30 Some basic sausages and food = $50 Total $375 Min Wage $15/hour. Hours of work = 25 hours Actually it would take more than 25 hours, because most likely that person does not live with Grandma and has shelter / food expenses. So might need to save up for a month, if not months.
  - weaksauce 4y ago
    this is for how many people? because camping trip fees are split usually. i assume 50 dollars in beer is not for one person in a weekend... when I was there right before the pandemic the beer didn't cost anywhere near that.
    - dukeofdoom 4y ago
      One guy definitely can drink a case over a weekend. I dont think you hanged out with many working people. I think most would not bring a 12 pack, but a full case. But even if they did. Last I rember there was $10 covinince charge for getting the campsite tickets online, which you would want to do. Because you will not drive out there without knowing you have a spot if you saved up for a camping trip.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    For someone from the other side of the planet (former USSR), this list feels very weird. I can't imagine paying for a campsite (nobody here does, you just go wherever you want and take whatever place is available), or firewood (you can always find a dry tree trunk somewhere along the road, or there's a friend of a friend who will bring some from his own house). So although our minimum wages are absolutely atrocious by your standards (officially it's around $100 per month IIRC, but I haven't heard of anybody making below $200), half of this list doesn't apply, and the other half is cheaper by 5-20 times (a pack of cigs is ~$1 if I'm not mistaken, a liter of gasoline around 50 cents, etc). Considering all of this, we've been chugging along just fine… or not, actually. Braces yourselves, I guess.
debesyla 4y ago
Isn't 25 work hours a really low amount of work? That's just a tiny bit more than 3 work days for whole weekend camping?
- est31 4y ago
  If the minimum wage worker had free housing, food, electricity, etc. your calculation would make sense. Generally if you are a minimum wage worker who is working full time, a large component of your disposable income goes into those things (living paycheck to paycheck). So having a disposable income at all is a luxury, even if it's 10% of your income. Assuming that 10% figure, you can multiply those 3 days by 1/10% = 10 and you get 30 days of working for one weekend of camping. Not really great.
londons_explore 4y ago
My weekends camping rarely cost me more than $20. $1.50 on food per meal. $1 on camping gas or coal for the weekend. $200 of gear, but it will last me 20+ camping weekends. $0 on travel, because I'll be hiking.
- ssully 4y ago
  It was a viral post from a few weeks back. From what I remember the main cost increase was because of gas prices.
- kodt 4y ago
  You can hike to the campground from your home?
johnwalkr 4y ago
That’s actually a really interesting metric. Cost of living has really shot up in Canada while wages have stagnated. Everyone knows that housing has increased dramatically. This leads to less disposable income obviously. I’m 40 and grew up in Edmonton. Once or twice a year, as a kid and into my late 20s, my family and and/or I did a hotel type vacation in Banff or Jasper once a year, which seemed expensive at the time, and multiple times camping in the Rockies per year, which basically seemed free. My slightly more wealthy friends’ parents had a cabin and boat. Now if I were to live in Edmonton again, I could probably still camp as if it were free but I appreciate your assessment that a minimum wage worked could not. Because I certainly could as a minimum wage worker back in the day. And I probably would never justify a domestic hotel type weekend or week long trip within Canada.
- eastbound 4y ago
  I’ll take the devil’s position: Your are not owed by nature a footprint on the ground, or a weekend camping. Manille (Manila? Capital of Philippines) has 43079 inhabitants per square kilometer (23sqm per person, including agriculture), China tries to do the same. The key is nature doesn’t owe you democracy, and governments neither. We can store many people vertically if we remove their personality. What I mean is poverty doesn’t make the system itself collapse, it can actually survive pretty far, even thrive while everyone is expunged. After all, USSR only collapsed in 1991, 69 years after Stalin took power, after killing probably 1/4 of its population in gulags.
  - johnwalkr 4y ago
    I don't know why I'm replying to someone who thinks governments don't owe us democracy but people are allowed to complain when things get worse and I would prefer if previous policy didn't disallow increasing density in Canada. Incidentally I live in Tokyo now and it's now cheaper than Vancouver and the density (which is actually not as high as people think[1]) is a positive, not a negative. [1] Just for fun, I checked densities. Tokyo 23 wards (the actual city of Tokyo): 14,500/km^2. Downtown Vancouver: 17,000/km^2. Downtown Edmonton: 5,000/km^2
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
panick21_ 4y ago
> Workers not being paid enough, and out of control inflation is how the soviet system collapsed. No its not actually. If anything the Soviet system collapsed because the elites didn't really like it that much. The elites had lost interest in preserving the system. Elites didn't like the party discipline. There is a reason why Soviet collapsed and China didn't. Just having demonstrations and unhappy population does magically lead to successful overthrows of governments.
- dukeofdoom 4y ago
  Workers going on a mass strike across the Easter Block countries in the "Solidarity" movement in the late 80s is how its generally viewed as being the beginning of the end of the soviet system. The communist governments were put in a position where there were going to have to massacre their own people openly revolting in massive strikes. I don't think Chinese government would survive another Tiananmen square incident.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    > is how its generally viewed Yes and as many historical topics, it a romantic tail that people like to tell rather then a great analysis of the truth. > The communist governments were put in a position where there were going to have to massacre their own people openly revolting in massive strikes. That's what many governments in history did. And that's exactly the point, the reason a state fails is when the elites have not enough reason to defend the current system. When they do, then the army shows up. And in Hungary in 1956 they were willing for example.
- vintermann 4y ago
  I like Francis Spufford's comment: Stalin was a gangster who thought he was a social scientist. Krushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. Brezhnev and those who came after him were gangsters who only pretended to be social scientists. We can add to that, after the failed hardliner coup, the country was run by gangsters who didn't even care to pretend they were anything else.

paganel 4y ago

It's also how the Byzantine Empire went into its downwards trajectory starting with the late 1000s. In fact, it was a little more complicated, as the Empire had to resort to using mercenaries because its theme system had been basically broken into pieces by the Empire oligarchy and by the Church, so Byzantium having to resort to mercenaries in order to defend itself was mostly, by that time, a consequence of said oligarchy and Byzantine Church doing their thing against the small Byzantine tax-payers. And before someone starts saying that the Roman Empire lived "through" the Byzantine Empire all the way to 1453 I have to say that from my point of view that is only valid until the late 6th-early 7th century, by the end of Heraclius's [1] reign the Byzantine Empire was a thing totally different compared to the Roman Empire. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclius

mr_toad 4y ago
The later emperors were also reluctant to rely on armies commanded by native Byzantine generals, who had a long track record of usurpation.
otter-rock 4y ago
I can agree that it ceased being the Roman Empire per se, but I don't see it as being that much different from the end of the Roman Kingdom or the Roman Republic. It's still a continuation.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  This exactly. The argument about non continuation are nonsense. Yes of course after 500 years it was different. Look at any state with 500 year and it will not be exactly the same.
panick21_ 4y ago
I don't think this is a good argument. The Byzantine Empire was at a peak around 1000 and the main reasons for it decline after that is not mercenaries but rather that Basil didn't have an heir and his daughters were left in power and had no interest in ruling so that only a few decades later the state was disaster. Combine that with the rise of a new powerful enemy and you have a disaster on your hands. New evidence suggest that the Theme system was only barley function for a long time before the decline. In fact, going away from that system is partly why they were so powerful by the year 1000. > by the end of Heraclius's [1] reign I don't agree with that at all. If there is any reasonable point to talk about non-continuation it would be 1204.

renewiltord 4y ago

That sounds a lot like "had cardiac arrest" though. The magic is in the "why" of "not paying them".

trashtester 4y ago

Another, related view is to look at how many was on the dole. During the late empire, around 20% of the population in Rome was effectively on welfare, getting food from the state. Instead of drafting these poeple into the empire, Rome recruited foreigners for the army, while the productivity of the domestic population kept going down. Eventually the state, needing to pay both the welfare receipients and the army, ran out of economic capacity to provide for both groups. Stopping the dole was if possible more dangerous short term than not paying the provicial armies, since the proletariat in Rome/Constantinople could riot instantly, and overthrow any emperor.

MereInterest 4y ago
Wasn't the dole only implemented because land ownership had concentrated to a few extremely wealthy individuals? Only a few generations earlier, during the Second Punic War many landowners had either died or had their farms ruined to deny food to Hannibal, allowing the land to be bought at low prices.
- trashtester 4y ago
  Combined with massive influx of slaves from Gaul and other places making latin farm laborers too expensive. Still, the effect is the same. A large proletariat with very little income demanding to be fed by the state. With significant political power, based on making up a large percentage of the population in the capital.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Wasn't the dole only implemented because land ownership had concentrated to a few extremely wealthy individuals? It was implemented because it got votes. It's not a coincidence that it was restricted to people who could vote. You get welfare whenever you expand the franchise too far.
  - davidgay 4y ago
    > You get welfare whenever you expand the franchise too far. So, pray tell, what was the step too far (in no particular order): - women - slaves - non-property owners - non-poll-tax payers - 18 year olds ... and in which of those categories do you fall?