8 ms·

The ghost of Ancient Rome haunts America

25 points by blueridge 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xhevahir 4y ago
also requires shifting away from the progressive agenda that has made so many cities unliveable: from bans on energy sources such natural gas and a refusal to crack down on crime to the usually miserable state of urban public education. I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda. Probably the biggest factor in the deterioration of urban schools is white flight to those suburbs that Kotlin likes so much and the resulting loss of tax revenue. Edit: I don't see why people are getting so irritated at my using the term "white flight." As far as I can tell it's the only recognized shorthand for this demographic trend.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda. Especially since it's overwhelmingly due to failed social policy and our pathetic social safety net. Neither of which can really be laid at the feet of progressives (though, to some extent, is Democrats' fault! Disastrous '90s welfare reform was done with the support of Clinton and other dems, and they spent a long time supporting the also-disastrous drug war)
  - kfofkrmdpshen 4y ago
    WIC, SNAP, Medicare, and Medicaid were supposed to end poverty. Why didn't they? Why does creating new programs in addition to these solve the problem of poverty when these programs failed? How much money needs to go towards welfare before it will achieve its goal, as a proportion of GDP? How can that money be distributed efficiently, and can you find historical examples of societies solving poverty? What about societies that tried to solve it?
    - rurp 4y ago
      [flagged]
- kfkfofopf 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - hahaxdxd123 4y ago
    I use the term "white flight", I'm apparently a dictator restricting freedom of movement. I come up with a new term, I'm a wokist who wants to destroy the English language. Why don't you just tell me what thoughts I'm allowed to express?
  - eldritch_4ier 4y ago
    Have they not made themselves clear with all the talk about "celebrating fewer whites" in every part of society + "whiteness" itself being a scourge? Change "white" to black or jewish and the intentions are clear: it's not where you're living that upsets them, it's the "living" part.
  - hellisothers 4y ago
    “White flight” is a term that means a specific thing, same for gentrification, neither are meant to represent ALL movement into or out of an area, that’s hyperbole.
- tenpies 4y ago
  > I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda. At this point, "progressive" in the context of education means everything from a Montessori education, to the re-animated body of Paulo Freire teaching a critical pedagogy curriculum as he attempts to brain wash the next generation of Red Guards. Those are two vastly different things, yet they would both be called "progressive" in today's language. Also alarmingly, the people advocating for the latter are the most likely to dress in "progressive" clothes.
- homonculus1 4y ago
  [dead]
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  I think what he’s referring to is the tendency to lower the average result in favor of reducing disparity. Opposing school choice or the famous example of NYC getting rid of honors programs. To be fair, the article is not a criticism of the left. And someone on the left shouldn’t feel too defensive - virtually all major cities have liberal leadership. The source said of any failed policy is going to be a liberal policy.
roody15 4y ago
Agree with the premise here. Not sure what the attraction of downtown urban areas are anymore. I live about 2.5 hours from Chicago... and it is a shell of its former self. Crime is a real problem. What is the draw anymore? Expensive, overly regulated, poor public education, crime, poor public transportation...
- Swizec 4y ago
  > Not sure what the attraction of downtown urban areas are anymore I like the part where they're not the suburbs. Dreadful places those. Can you imagine living in a cookie cutter house surrounded by a useless plot of land that you aren't even allowed to use and where every other person is just a cookie cutter version of yourself? Dreadful. Cities feel alive. It's great.
  - bluSCALE4 4y ago
    Some suburbs are nice. Many are awful, like the ones in Austin, TX. Soulless.
    - miguelazo 4y ago
      Almost all of the new ones are like that. Go look around Phoenix. And they look "nice" for a brief period. Just wait until the legacy costs catch up with them. If you go look at the older master-planned communities in far-flung suburbs, they look as bad if not worse than any urban blight.
      - rootusrootus 4y ago
        > Just wait until the legacy costs catch up with them. How long do we have to wait for that? Going on 120 years here, still doing okay.
        HEmanZ 4y ago
        A pre-war suburb is an entirely different thing than a burb built in the 80s. Generally, urbanists love the prewar burb in America, their criticisms are of the postwar burbs.
sammalloy 4y ago
[flagged]
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  Blue cities in red states have high crime—St. Louis, Atlanta, New Orleans, etc. Red state suburbs and rural areas are safe.
  - labrador 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - eldritch_4ier 4y ago
      Where did you get that from? Sounds like you just have tinnitus.
      - labrador 4y ago
        I read media from the left and the right. That's how I understand the dog whistles from both sides. I'm retired so I have a lot of free time. Look up Marc Elias. I'm an Independent but I'm considering the Forward Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Elias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Elias
        eldritch_4ier 4y ago
        Just letting you know that "there's way more crime in blue cities than red cities" to "I want to disenfranchise millions of voters" is an incredible leap. The more likely conclusion they're drawing is "Democratic policy is a failure and here's the evidence". Most people are normal. Most people aren't radicals trying to remove the right to vote of millions of people - yes even Trump supporters don't want people in cities to lose the right to vote, they just think they are stupid / voting for bad policy.
        4y ago
garbagecoder 4y ago
[flagged]
mo_42 4y ago
Just before the title, there is "opinion". This is also reflected in the text. It seems rather like the preferred future of the author than a thorough analysis.
- giantg2 4y ago
  Yeah, rather brief with points that only vaguely connect.
- trgn 4y ago
  Joel Kotkin has made his career on being an urbanist who champions the suburban development pattern. He's a contrarian in that sense (that's cool!). He's also the archetype of the home owning californian boomer (that's lame!). Over time, he's always shifting the supports of his thesis. For the longest time, it was that urban development was inherently more expensive compared to single family homes. Then it was that the market showed a revealed preference for suburban housing because there was more suburban development (points at sunbelt). Now it is the collapse of urban office real estate. Five years from now it'll be something else.
cmh89 4y ago
This is yet another low-quality opinion piece from this source. People live in cities because suburban and exurban commuter towns are bland. Conservatives have been predicting the death of the city for decades at this point
- coldtea 4y ago
  >because suburban and exurban commuter towns are bland Yeah, while modern cities are full of life and color!
  - 0xcafefood 4y ago
    I see a lot of color on this poop map of San Francisco: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/04/15/mapping-san-franciscos-human-waste-challenge-132562-case-reports-since-2008/?sh=565a8e2a5ea5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/04/15/map...
  - cmh89 4y ago
    There's something people like about having more options than Red Lobster or Olive Garden!
hahaxdxd123 4y ago
IDK man, NYC survived decades where people got randomly shot on the street and there were crack dealers on every avenue. It's also hard to paint a gloomy picture since there are probably 10s of millions of Americans who would move to NYC in a heartbeat if an exodus of families really happened and brought with it a corresponding drop in rents.
- rayiner 4y ago
  It’s important not to confuse the ratio of demand to supply, which is high for cities like NYC, with demand in absolute terms. Only a quarter of Americans want to live in any kind of city, much less the densest, dirtiest city in the country: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americans-pick-country-over-city-suburbs-opinion-poll/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americans-pick-country-over-cit...
  - trgn 4y ago
    The aspirational american city is not the extremes like NYC or SF. It's the verdancy of places like Charleston, New Orleans, Ashville, ... That kind of gentle density and mixed use are wonderful city environments that much more than 25% of people would want to live in. And which is achievable in pretty much any neighborhood build before WW2, if only we allowed for it.
    - HEmanZ 4y ago
      In America, people believe there are only two ways to live: Manhattan high-rise or suburban McMansion. My pet social theory is that an unbelievable amount of our societal woes stem from this false dichotomy in the American mind, and the cities we end up designing because of it.
      - trgn 4y ago
        > My pet social theory is that an unbelievable amount of our societal woes stem from this false dichotomy in the American mind Agreed, it's a failure of imagination. Americans, for whatever reason, cannot make that leap in their mind's eye.
miguelazo 4y ago
Here I thought this would be an article about how (following in the footsteps of Ancient Rome) the US has hollowed out its great cities by squandering too many resources for far too long on imperialist pursuits that only benefit a tiny slice of the population. Instead it's Fox News Grandpa talking points about "progressive" policies in Democratic cities.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  If you find such an article post it; I'd like to read something about that. Maybe it could also address the idea that economies based on exploitation are inherently unstable...
  - TSiege 4y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/edward-j-watts-mortal-republic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/edward-j-wat...
- jfengel 4y ago
  "Rome" has been the go-to comparison to "bad thing happened in this place, and therefore bad things will happen here" for centuries. It's usually as ignorant about Roman history as it is about current events. It's always seeing a point and drawing a curve. It's absurd to think that you could make any predictions based on a single point of comparison -- even if that comparison was actually well-informed, which it rarely is. So I wouldn't even go looking for that article comparing the US to Rome. If you're interested in sociology, you'd want to compare it to many nations over many centuries, and seeing what actual patterns form. Anything less than that is just going to be exhibiting somebody's bias about what they thing the bad things are, and cherry-picking an illustration.
tambourine_man 4y ago
I see the fall of the American empire the same way as the end of Moore’s law, in that I’ve been reading about their imminent demise since I was a kid. What ends up happening is that things mostly change, to the point of being hard to recognize. The Roman Empire is not completely gone, Latin and the Christian faith are extremely influential still.
- rektide 4y ago
  > Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.” Or just more simply, > The Empire never died Are some very big Philip K Dick vibes (quotes) I was lucky to receive at the right time. On these topics. Path dependence is such a wild thing. PKD creating such a psychotronic connection across time & ideas was such a moving & powerful influence.
- DragonStrength 4y ago
  Your second point is well taken, but there's a lot of pain in between even if those worried can take refuge in their culture continuing. To your first point, I think this is a case of trying to predict when, not if. The article calls out the year of Edward Gibbon's book: 1776. An Englishman in 1776 would be right to recognize their empire was in decline. Looking to Rome's decline makes sense. But from 2023, we mark the end of the British Empire as about World War II, which makes this smell like analysts predicting a market crash will come without an argument for when.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    Sure, it’s always hard for those in between. And of course, even though the British Empire is no more, we’re writing here in English :)
    - kergonath 4y ago
      > Sure, it’s always hard for those in between. It was not particularly pleasant for most people during the empire. Dickensian London was not particularly great. It was not great either for the rural poor in England, or the locals in India. Or the slaves and small farmers in the Roman Empire. We rarely think about the losers when we idealise an empire. > And of course, even though the British Empire is no more, we’re writing here in English :) And Latin was spoken for centuries after the end of the western Roman Empire, even as the eastern part completely reverted to Greek. These things tend to lag a bit.
cryptonector 4y ago
Looking at things from a world political point of view the right comparison has always been of America to Athens. Thomas Paine said that "what Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude", and he wasn't wrong. The Persians and the Spartans were like the CCP and the USSR, while Athens was like the U.S., the Delian League was like NATO, Athens making Delian League members contribute ships and oarsmen or tribute being not too unlike the U.S. demanding that NATO members spend a certain percentage of GDP on their militaries, Sparta was a super-slave power, but Athens also had slavery, just nowhere near as bad as Sparta and of a fairly different character, etc. In the end Sparta allied with the Persians to defeat the Athenians and thence Athens was a superpower no more. Then the Thebans wiped the Spartans from the face of the Earth. Then the Alexander and his Macedonians wiped the Thebans from the face of the Earth, and that was the end of ancient Greece and the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The analogies to the Peloponnesian wars aren't great if you pick nits about the order of events (Athens and Sparta fought the Persians before they fought each other, but the U.S. fought the USSR and we're in a sort of cold war with the CCP now), but otherwise the resemblance it's truly uncanny. Not that it helps predict the future, mind you, but that so far the resemblance is something else.
TSiege 4y ago
If anyone came here looking for actual analysis of how Roman history can inform us about the situation in the US I would recommend this review of Mortal Republic by Edward J Watts (The book itself is also very good) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/edward-j-watts-mortal-republic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/edward-j-wat...
HEmanZ 4y ago
This screed has almost no use of or understanding of actual Roman Empire history and reads like your Fox News loving (as-opposed-to Washington Post loving) uncle’s Facebook rant.
kergonath 4y ago
Because it’s a well known fact that Rome shrunk because of those damn liberals and their totalitarian walkable cities… There is nothing of substance in that essay. He paints the cities as criminal socialist nightmares and suburbia as carbon-free utopian bliss, which is exactly what he claims “the urbanists” do except with the roles swapped. Yes, urban sprawl is terrible for a lot of reasons. (Some) people like it because they want massive tacky houses but it is still terrible. And it will get more and more terrible as fuel prices increase. It’s also a form of ghettoisation where poor people are stuck in their run down neighbourhoods for a lack of free time, money, and public infrastructure, which leads to the exact problems he pins on evil liberals (concentration of poverty in some areas, crime, lack of investment, etc). He bangs on about crime, putting London and Paris in the same situation as Los Angeles and Chicago (lol), without any thought about long-term trends in crime statistics. I wish Americans could look outside their borders at what is done in the rest of the world instead of wringing their hands as if they were the only ones on earth grappling with this sort of problems. Particularly someone who’s ostensibly paid to think about urbanism for a living. You can have moderately-sized cities that are perfectly liveable, ideal for remote working, with not that much crime and without that endless, soul-destroying suburban sprawl that buries entire countries’ worth of natural ecosystems under asphalt and concrete. It’s not even that difficult. “Rome was once mighty and fell; New York is mighty and therefore will fall” is a tired trope, a non sequitur, and not particularly clever. No argument is given as to how the latter could happen except “the liberals” increasing crime somehow. Rome was sacked several times. New York won’t be eternal, but it is more at risk of rising sea levels and increasingly dangerous storms than barbarians at the gates. Or indeed liberals in the city.
BMc2020 4y ago
Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  That book was published in 2020. You make it sounds like it's fresh off the press.
  - csa 4y ago
    > That book was published in 2020. You make it sounds like it's fresh off the press. That was copy pasta from the by line in the article. Doesn’t make it right, but it at least explains the source.
- miguelazo 4y ago
  Wow, Chapman is still around? I thought it collapsed during the for-profit colleges scandal.

25 points by blueridge 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

also requires shifting away from the progressive agenda that has made so many cities unliveable: from bans on energy sources such natural gas and a refusal to crack down on crime to the usually miserable state of urban public education. I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda. Probably the biggest factor in the deterioration of urban schools is white flight to those suburbs that Kotlin likes so much and the resulting loss of tax revenue. Edit: I don't see why people are getting so irritated at my using the term "white flight." As far as I can tell it's the only recognized shorthand for this demographic trend.

yamtaddle 4y ago
> I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda. Especially since it's overwhelmingly due to failed social policy and our pathetic social safety net. Neither of which can really be laid at the feet of progressives (though, to some extent, is Democrats' fault! Disastrous '90s welfare reform was done with the support of Clinton and other dems, and they spent a long time supporting the also-disastrous drug war)
- kfofkrmdpshen 4y ago
  WIC, SNAP, Medicare, and Medicaid were supposed to end poverty. Why didn't they? Why does creating new programs in addition to these solve the problem of poverty when these programs failed? How much money needs to go towards welfare before it will achieve its goal, as a proportion of GDP? How can that money be distributed efficiently, and can you find historical examples of societies solving poverty? What about societies that tried to solve it?
  - rurp 4y ago
    [flagged]
kfkfofopf 4y ago
[flagged]
- hahaxdxd123 4y ago
  I use the term "white flight", I'm apparently a dictator restricting freedom of movement. I come up with a new term, I'm a wokist who wants to destroy the English language. Why don't you just tell me what thoughts I'm allowed to express?
- eldritch_4ier 4y ago
  Have they not made themselves clear with all the talk about "celebrating fewer whites" in every part of society + "whiteness" itself being a scourge? Change "white" to black or jewish and the intentions are clear: it's not where you're living that upsets them, it's the "living" part.
- hellisothers 4y ago
  “White flight” is a term that means a specific thing, same for gentrification, neither are meant to represent ALL movement into or out of an area, that’s hyperbole.
tenpies 4y ago
> I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda. At this point, "progressive" in the context of education means everything from a Montessori education, to the re-animated body of Paulo Freire teaching a critical pedagogy curriculum as he attempts to brain wash the next generation of Red Guards. Those are two vastly different things, yet they would both be called "progressive" in today's language. Also alarmingly, the people advocating for the latter are the most likely to dress in "progressive" clothes.
homonculus1 4y ago
[dead]
nonethewiser 4y ago
I think what he’s referring to is the tendency to lower the average result in favor of reducing disparity. Opposing school choice or the famous example of NYC getting rid of honors programs. To be fair, the article is not a criticism of the left. And someone on the left shouldn’t feel too defensive - virtually all major cities have liberal leadership. The source said of any failed policy is going to be a liberal policy.

roody15 4y ago

Agree with the premise here. Not sure what the attraction of downtown urban areas are anymore. I live about 2.5 hours from Chicago... and it is a shell of its former self. Crime is a real problem. What is the draw anymore? Expensive, overly regulated, poor public education, crime, poor public transportation...

Swizec 4y ago
> Not sure what the attraction of downtown urban areas are anymore I like the part where they're not the suburbs. Dreadful places those. Can you imagine living in a cookie cutter house surrounded by a useless plot of land that you aren't even allowed to use and where every other person is just a cookie cutter version of yourself? Dreadful. Cities feel alive. It's great.
- bluSCALE4 4y ago
  Some suburbs are nice. Many are awful, like the ones in Austin, TX. Soulless.
  - miguelazo 4y ago
    Almost all of the new ones are like that. Go look around Phoenix. And they look "nice" for a brief period. Just wait until the legacy costs catch up with them. If you go look at the older master-planned communities in far-flung suburbs, they look as bad if not worse than any urban blight.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      > Just wait until the legacy costs catch up with them. How long do we have to wait for that? Going on 120 years here, still doing okay.
      - HEmanZ 4y ago
        A pre-war suburb is an entirely different thing than a burb built in the 80s. Generally, urbanists love the prewar burb in America, their criticisms are of the postwar burbs.

sammalloy 4y ago

[flagged]

Georgelemental 4y ago
Blue cities in red states have high crime—St. Louis, Atlanta, New Orleans, etc. Red state suburbs and rural areas are safe.
- labrador 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - eldritch_4ier 4y ago
    Where did you get that from? Sounds like you just have tinnitus.
    - labrador 4y ago
      I read media from the left and the right. That's how I understand the dog whistles from both sides. I'm retired so I have a lot of free time. Look up Marc Elias. I'm an Independent but I'm considering the Forward Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Elias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Elias
      - eldritch_4ier 4y ago
        Just letting you know that "there's way more crime in blue cities than red cities" to "I want to disenfranchise millions of voters" is an incredible leap. The more likely conclusion they're drawing is "Democratic policy is a failure and here's the evidence". Most people are normal. Most people aren't radicals trying to remove the right to vote of millions of people - yes even Trump supporters don't want people in cities to lose the right to vote, they just think they are stupid / voting for bad policy.
        4y ago

garbagecoder 4y ago

[flagged]

mo_42 4y ago

Just before the title, there is "opinion". This is also reflected in the text. It seems rather like the preferred future of the author than a thorough analysis.

giantg2 4y ago
Yeah, rather brief with points that only vaguely connect.
trgn 4y ago
Joel Kotkin has made his career on being an urbanist who champions the suburban development pattern. He's a contrarian in that sense (that's cool!). He's also the archetype of the home owning californian boomer (that's lame!). Over time, he's always shifting the supports of his thesis. For the longest time, it was that urban development was inherently more expensive compared to single family homes. Then it was that the market showed a revealed preference for suburban housing because there was more suburban development (points at sunbelt). Now it is the collapse of urban office real estate. Five years from now it'll be something else.

cmh89 4y ago

This is yet another low-quality opinion piece from this source. People live in cities because suburban and exurban commuter towns are bland. Conservatives have been predicting the death of the city for decades at this point

coldtea 4y ago
>because suburban and exurban commuter towns are bland Yeah, while modern cities are full of life and color!
- 0xcafefood 4y ago
  I see a lot of color on this poop map of San Francisco: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/04/15/mapping-san-franciscos-human-waste-challenge-132562-case-reports-since-2008/?sh=565a8e2a5ea5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/04/15/map...
- cmh89 4y ago
  There's something people like about having more options than Red Lobster or Olive Garden!

hahaxdxd123 4y ago

IDK man, NYC survived decades where people got randomly shot on the street and there were crack dealers on every avenue. It's also hard to paint a gloomy picture since there are probably 10s of millions of Americans who would move to NYC in a heartbeat if an exodus of families really happened and brought with it a corresponding drop in rents.

rayiner 4y ago
It’s important not to confuse the ratio of demand to supply, which is high for cities like NYC, with demand in absolute terms. Only a quarter of Americans want to live in any kind of city, much less the densest, dirtiest city in the country: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americans-pick-country-over-city-suburbs-opinion-poll/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americans-pick-country-over-cit...
- trgn 4y ago
  The aspirational american city is not the extremes like NYC or SF. It's the verdancy of places like Charleston, New Orleans, Ashville, ... That kind of gentle density and mixed use are wonderful city environments that much more than 25% of people would want to live in. And which is achievable in pretty much any neighborhood build before WW2, if only we allowed for it.
  - HEmanZ 4y ago
    In America, people believe there are only two ways to live: Manhattan high-rise or suburban McMansion. My pet social theory is that an unbelievable amount of our societal woes stem from this false dichotomy in the American mind, and the cities we end up designing because of it.
    - trgn 4y ago
      > My pet social theory is that an unbelievable amount of our societal woes stem from this false dichotomy in the American mind Agreed, it's a failure of imagination. Americans, for whatever reason, cannot make that leap in their mind's eye.

miguelazo 4y ago

Here I thought this would be an article about how (following in the footsteps of Ancient Rome) the US has hollowed out its great cities by squandering too many resources for far too long on imperialist pursuits that only benefit a tiny slice of the population. Instead it's Fox News Grandpa talking points about "progressive" policies in Democratic cities.

jessaustin 4y ago
If you find such an article post it; I'd like to read something about that. Maybe it could also address the idea that economies based on exploitation are inherently unstable...
- TSiege 4y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/edward-j-watts-mortal-republic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/edward-j-wat...
jfengel 4y ago
"Rome" has been the go-to comparison to "bad thing happened in this place, and therefore bad things will happen here" for centuries. It's usually as ignorant about Roman history as it is about current events. It's always seeing a point and drawing a curve. It's absurd to think that you could make any predictions based on a single point of comparison -- even if that comparison was actually well-informed, which it rarely is. So I wouldn't even go looking for that article comparing the US to Rome. If you're interested in sociology, you'd want to compare it to many nations over many centuries, and seeing what actual patterns form. Anything less than that is just going to be exhibiting somebody's bias about what they thing the bad things are, and cherry-picking an illustration.

tambourine_man 4y ago

I see the fall of the American empire the same way as the end of Moore’s law, in that I’ve been reading about their imminent demise since I was a kid. What ends up happening is that things mostly change, to the point of being hard to recognize. The Roman Empire is not completely gone, Latin and the Christian faith are extremely influential still.

rektide 4y ago
> Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.” Or just more simply, > The Empire never died Are some very big Philip K Dick vibes (quotes) I was lucky to receive at the right time. On these topics. Path dependence is such a wild thing. PKD creating such a psychotronic connection across time & ideas was such a moving & powerful influence.
DragonStrength 4y ago
Your second point is well taken, but there's a lot of pain in between even if those worried can take refuge in their culture continuing. To your first point, I think this is a case of trying to predict when, not if. The article calls out the year of Edward Gibbon's book: 1776. An Englishman in 1776 would be right to recognize their empire was in decline. Looking to Rome's decline makes sense. But from 2023, we mark the end of the British Empire as about World War II, which makes this smell like analysts predicting a market crash will come without an argument for when.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  Sure, it’s always hard for those in between. And of course, even though the British Empire is no more, we’re writing here in English :)
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > Sure, it’s always hard for those in between. It was not particularly pleasant for most people during the empire. Dickensian London was not particularly great. It was not great either for the rural poor in England, or the locals in India. Or the slaves and small farmers in the Roman Empire. We rarely think about the losers when we idealise an empire. > And of course, even though the British Empire is no more, we’re writing here in English :) And Latin was spoken for centuries after the end of the western Roman Empire, even as the eastern part completely reverted to Greek. These things tend to lag a bit.

cryptonector 4y ago

Looking at things from a world political point of view the right comparison has always been of America to Athens. Thomas Paine said that "what Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude", and he wasn't wrong. The Persians and the Spartans were like the CCP and the USSR, while Athens was like the U.S., the Delian League was like NATO, Athens making Delian League members contribute ships and oarsmen or tribute being not too unlike the U.S. demanding that NATO members spend a certain percentage of GDP on their militaries, Sparta was a super-slave power, but Athens also had slavery, just nowhere near as bad as Sparta and of a fairly different character, etc. In the end Sparta allied with the Persians to defeat the Athenians and thence Athens was a superpower no more. Then the Thebans wiped the Spartans from the face of the Earth. Then the Alexander and his Macedonians wiped the Thebans from the face of the Earth, and that was the end of ancient Greece and the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The analogies to the Peloponnesian wars aren't great if you pick nits about the order of events (Athens and Sparta fought the Persians before they fought each other, but the U.S. fought the USSR and we're in a sort of cold war with the CCP now), but otherwise the resemblance it's truly uncanny. Not that it helps predict the future, mind you, but that so far the resemblance is something else.

TSiege 4y ago

If anyone came here looking for actual analysis of how Roman history can inform us about the situation in the US I would recommend this review of Mortal Republic by Edward J Watts (The book itself is also very good) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/edward-j-watts-mortal-republic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/edward-j-wat...

HEmanZ 4y ago

This screed has almost no use of or understanding of actual Roman Empire history and reads like your Fox News loving (as-opposed-to Washington Post loving) uncle’s Facebook rant.

kergonath 4y ago

Because it’s a well known fact that Rome shrunk because of those damn liberals and their totalitarian walkable cities… There is nothing of substance in that essay. He paints the cities as criminal socialist nightmares and suburbia as carbon-free utopian bliss, which is exactly what he claims “the urbanists” do except with the roles swapped. Yes, urban sprawl is terrible for a lot of reasons. (Some) people like it because they want massive tacky houses but it is still terrible. And it will get more and more terrible as fuel prices increase. It’s also a form of ghettoisation where poor people are stuck in their run down neighbourhoods for a lack of free time, money, and public infrastructure, which leads to the exact problems he pins on evil liberals (concentration of poverty in some areas, crime, lack of investment, etc). He bangs on about crime, putting London and Paris in the same situation as Los Angeles and Chicago (lol), without any thought about long-term trends in crime statistics. I wish Americans could look outside their borders at what is done in the rest of the world instead of wringing their hands as if they were the only ones on earth grappling with this sort of problems. Particularly someone who’s ostensibly paid to think about urbanism for a living. You can have moderately-sized cities that are perfectly liveable, ideal for remote working, with not that much crime and without that endless, soul-destroying suburban sprawl that buries entire countries’ worth of natural ecosystems under asphalt and concrete. It’s not even that difficult. “Rome was once mighty and fell; New York is mighty and therefore will fall” is a tired trope, a non sequitur, and not particularly clever. No argument is given as to how the latter could happen except “the liberals” increasing crime somehow. Rome was sacked several times. New York won’t be eternal, but it is more at risk of rising sea levels and increasingly dangerous storms than barbarians at the gates. Or indeed liberals in the city.

BMc2020 4y ago

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter.

Buttons840 4y ago
That book was published in 2020. You make it sounds like it's fresh off the press.
- csa 4y ago
  > That book was published in 2020. You make it sounds like it's fresh off the press. That was copy pasta from the by line in the article. Doesn’t make it right, but it at least explains the source.
miguelazo 4y ago
Wow, Chapman is still around? I thought it collapsed during the for-profit colleges scandal.