Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations at the New York Times... - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
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Grasping Reality with Both Hands The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist J. Bradford DeLong: Fair, Balanced, RealityBased, and Even-Handed Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 708 0467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu.
Economics 210a Weblog Archives DeLong Hot on Google DeLong Hot on Google Blogsearch October 03, 2010
Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations at the New York Times... Paul Krugman applauds newspaper columnists who know just enough about history to make misleading analogies: Roman Projection: In his column today, Tom Friedman quotes Lewis Mumford on the decline of Rome, and applies it to ourselves. It’s a common trope, and I don’t have any problem with Tom using it... That's a very low bar to set--and leads me to ask: why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Paul then summarizes Adrian Goldsworthy's thesis on the fall of Rome: I do think we should be aware that the Roman Empire was a very different kind of society from anything existing in the modern world, and that when someone draws morals from Rome’s decline, the reality of Rome almost never comes into the thing.... I recently read Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell — and what I really appreciated was the author’s refusal to “modernize” Rome and its concerns. His basic thesis is that civil war was what did it — that Rome’s strength was sapped by the endless series of uprisings as local commanders tried to seize power. And these civil wars, crucially, were not about ideology, or nationalism, or any of the things we might try to project back onto the ancients; they were about http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-at-the-new-york-times.html
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personal ambition, pure and simple. In that case, however, why did the empire have a golden age in the first place? Partly luck — a series of pretty good emperors, partly because a series of childless emperors adopted competent men as their heirs. But also — and here’s where Goldsworthy is gloriously un-PC and willing to see the world as it was — stability rested largely on the lack of meritocracy. As long as only members of old Senatorial families were contenders, the game was relatively limited and stable; once the seemingly pointless role of a hereditary aristocracy had been eroded, it became a deadly free-for-all... Indeed. Especially since Friedman's quote from Lewis Mumford, "[e]veryone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility..." is a libel against the late Romans, many of the best of whom eschewed personal security and willingly accepted mighty and crushing responsibilities for trying to preserve the empire. You would be hard-put indeed to find any evidence at all that the generations of Stilicho, Aetius, Theodosius, Justinian, and Belisarius were any less public-spirited or brave or far-sighted or responsibility-accepting than the generations of Cicero, Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius. I would say that ultimately two things brought down the empire. The first was the repeated heresy-hunt by emperors and patriarchs against fellow Christians--the heresy-hunts against Arians and Monophysites and others so that, when enemies like the successors of Mohammed showed up, nobody in Egypt or Syria wanted to fight to remain in the empire so that they could get persecuted again. The religious tolerance practiced by expanding Islam was a major string to their bow. The second is related to Goldsworthy's musings on the opening-up of the contest for power, but not quite the same. Goldsworthy says that up until 200 or so you had to be a senator to be a field army commander, and so only senators could make a grab for the empire by gaining the loyalty of their field army. Goldsworthy further says that after 200 emperors thought that if they kept senators from army command then they wouldn't have to worry about frontier generals making a bid for power--for who in Rome would agree to be ruled by some upstart whose ancestors had never been a senator? And Goldsworthy says that was a big mistake: it multiplied potential contenders for power and the damage done by civil wars rather than reducing them. I think it is more complicated than that: after all the empire, even in the west, held on for more than 200 years after the purging of the senatorial class from army command. What appears to have killed it in the end was the rise of a set of military politicians who were both Roman generals--hence able to get segments of the Roman army to follow them and know how to use the Roman logistical infrastructure to support their troops--and barbarian war chiefs whose warriors would follow them for "ethnic" and "ethnogenesis" reasons as well. Such leaders turned out to have a big advantage in the fifth century as they combined two sources of power. And in the end some of them decided that they would rather try to be secure as barbarian king of a region carved out of the empire rather than aiming for imperial dominance. Flavius Stilicho, the Vandal. Flavius Aetius, not a Hun but somebody who had been raised among the Huns and had carte blanche to raise Hunnish armies--when he was not fighting Attila, that is. Alaric, King of the Visigoths and also Magister Militum per Illyricum. Theodoric the Amal, King of the Ostrogoths and also Magister Militium per Italiam. That was a change made possible by the (centuries before) purging of the Roman senatorial class from army command. But it was not the same thing. Brad DeLong on October 03, 2010 at 05:17 PM in History, Information: Better Press http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-at-the-new-york-times.html
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Comments Bram Cohen said... Your twitter feed is kind of busted. This post, for example, got tweeted twice. Reply October 03, 2010 at 05:57 PM Keshav Srinivasan said... Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't Mohammed and his successors live many centuries after the fall of the Roman empire? Do you mean Mohammed's predecessors? I was under the impression that the Germanic tribes, not Middle-Eastern people like the Parthians, brought the empire down. Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:00 PM Full Employment Hawk said in reply to Keshav Srinivasan... He is mixing together the fall of the Western Roman empire with the gradual decline of the Eastern Roman Empire. When Rome fell only the Western Roman Empire fell. The Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, lasted for centuries thereafter, and Constantinople itself only fell to the Turks in the 15th century. Constantinople was even strong enough to stop the advance of the Muslims into Eastern Europe. The Muslim army built a huge fleet to attack Constantinople, but Constantinople's secet weapons, Greek Fire and fire ships that used it, burned the Muslim fleet. By the time the Turks came, what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire was too weak to stop them. Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:23 PM Bob Athay said... Nice commentary on PK's blog posting. My reaction to it was much along the same lines but not nearly as well developed. Anyway, a related point is just that any farflung empire built by conquest and maintained by force is going to have trouble maintaining a sense of common identity over time. Instead of asking why the Roman http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-at-the-new-york-times.html
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Empire fell, a better question might be why it held together as long as it did. Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:35 PM Sufferin' Succotash said in reply to Full Employment Hawk... One reason why the Eastern Empire was too weak to stop the Ottomans was the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, which was done not by Muslims but by Venetians. Heh. Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:37 PM save_the_rustbelt said... A little overkill for a clumsy analogy? Apparently the takeff did clear the mountain. Good news. Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:44 PM Alex K. said... Peter Heather argues that "barbarian" invasions bear most of the blame for the fall of Rome. Adrian Goldsworthy wrote his book partly as a counterbalance to Heather -- but that does not establish that Heather was wrong. It's hard to see what kind of political structure would be able to sustain the Roman Empire, since after 376 A.D. there were always non-Roman and militarized troops inside the empire (various tribes of Goths). Combine that with Attila the Hun's craftiness of attacking the empire when he knew that it was weak in a particular region (because of troop deployments in other areas, e.g. the Persian Empire); add the control of North Africa --the important source of grain in the empire-- by the Vandals, plus various other invasions of Germanic tribes, and the miracle is that Rome lasted as long as it did. Heather's thesis seems pretty persuasive to me.
Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:51 PM hartal said... I almost bought Vaclav Smil's recent book on the dis-analogy between the falls of the Roman and American Empires. Probably has a lot to say. Doesn't Peter Temin have a new book on the Roman Empire? Reply October 03, 2010 at 07:11 PM Robert Waldmann said... I agree that Goldsworthy has a serious timing problem. The argument must be that civil wars impoverished the West which made it impossible (or unprofitable ?) to defend with armies paid out of tax revenues. Still compared to the conventional view that Rome fell because of the debauchery of the Julio Claudian emperors he gains a couple of centuries. I think you must distinguish the fall of the empire in the West, which I consider a rational strategic withdrawal by Christians who didn't care about Rome, which was (and is) full of people who consumed and didn't produce (such as me) from the fall in the East. I don't have a sense of all that much civil war over there. I'd say there was more of a problem with a very rigid class system and bureacratic West Asioschlerosis. Of course the evidence suggests that Rome stood when the Gods supported it, and fell when the Romans stopped propitiating their Gods. This was the Roman theory of the risee of the Roman empire. The first Christian emperors tolerated paganism. The traditional ceremonies which Republican Romans were convinced worked so well were
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banned by Theodosius. Rome was sacked withing thirty years. When an economist comes up with a model that manages as well as the Jupiter Victor model, I will take economists' claim to be scientists seriously. Reply October 03, 2010 at 07:35 PM Other Peter T said... While a lot of things contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire - much stronger military pressure in both east and west, environmental decay in Italy, a higher disease burden and so on, the point about the role of the hereditary elite is interesting. One could make a good argument that European systems of hereditary monarchy with fixed rules of succession played a considerable part in minimising civil conflict - there was no point in contending for the throne. Certainly Europe stands out for the number of uncontested successions and successful regencies. Reply October 03, 2010 at 08:15 PM Poco said... Another insidious effect of not trusting your generals is that successful generals were often reassigned, exiled or in extreme cases executed. Belisarius was ping-ponged between various fronts by Justinian, which unnecessarily dragged out the campaign to retake Italy, which ultimately failed when the Justinian plague struck. That plague, and its recurrence over the years, severely eroded the tax-base and placed such an oppressive burden on the survivors that it could well have contributed to the loss of Egypt and Palestine. Gene O'Grady: I agree with you. It's absolutely amazing how many people conflate centuries of Roman history into a single grand narrative of decay. It's absurd when you ponder how many years it involves. If we think of the US as starting with Jamestown in 1607, then in the chronology of Rome we would only be up to 350 BC. There's still 800 years to go before the fall of the western half, another 1000 years after that for the eastern half (or more, if you accept the claims of the new Turkish overlords to being the successors of the Roman emperors). It makes no goddamn sense to use various people's peccadillos over millennia as proof that low moral standards lead to inevitable Imperial decline. Reply October 03, 2010 at 09:44 PM Kat Willow said... Considering the short life-span of most empires, especially Western ones, the question might just as legitimately be "Why did the Roman Empire last so long? There were so many things that brought down Rome: one factor seldom mentioned was that it was OLD: after all, it lasted hundreds of years! Reply October 03, 2010 at 09:47 PM George J. Georganas said... On the heresy hunts in the Southeastern corner of the Mediterranean and religious tolerance of expanding Islam, it is worth thinking why that particular area gave birth to so much heretical growth. May I respectfully submit that the tax burden fell disproportionately on those areas of the empire. Egypt, after all, was the granary of the Empire, East and West. Plus those areas in the Southeastern Mediterranean spanned the trade routes to the rich lands to the east of the Empire. Religious persecution and wars of religion, much as was the case in Europe at the time of the Reformation, was
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most often a thin veil for civil war, the lust for power fuelled by greed and ambition. Reply October 03, 2010 at 10:57 PM Full Employment Hawk said... A good case can be made that an important factor in the fall of the Western Roman Empire was the division of the Roman Empire into a Western and Eastern part, and that the eastern part was richer than the western part, so that the loss of the wealth of the East impoverished the Western Empire. Reply October 03, 2010 at 11:04 PM Mr No-Dachi said... Yeah the post does confuse, Eastern and Western Rome Decline, inter-Christian persecutions and sectarianism are crucial to explaining how the Eastern Empire got sliced out of Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa but not to the West. A lot of the 300 or so explanations don't really contribute, its not Imperial Overstretch (why did the empire last so long?), its not agricultural/economic crisis (indeed the 4th century may have been the peak of Roman prosperity), disease contributes to Arabs success but not that of the Goths and Vandals. My personnal explanation for 476 is based mostly on Heather's explanation, which as Alex.K said empahsises that the Barbarians whether Sassanid Persians or Goths had gotten bigger and stronger in part as a reaction to Roman power-then the Huns turn up and make everything worse which coincides with a cycle of Civil War within the Empire without the emergence of an Aurelian or Diocletian. One should note both Goldsworthy and Heather are reactions to a trend in academia to view the Fall of the Western Roman Empire as not being a violent upheaval but a gradual transformation (there is some validity in the latter interpretation but the truth I think lies closer to the former). Reply October 04, 2010 at 12:31 AM Brad DeLong said in reply to Full Employment Hawk... But then the Eastern Empire falls to the Arabs in the seventh century, leaving only the Anatolian rump of Byzantium... Yours, Brad DeLong Reply October 04, 2010 at 12:35 AM OHOA said... Do you guys actually read the article by Thomas Friedman, which is about how both democrats and republicans have become bamkrupt and useless and how a lot of smart people in Silicon Valley feel that Obama has been a do-nothing president and that Friedman tries to justify with the argument that it is the best anyone could do with our bankrupt political system, (IMO a sad and pathetic partisan apology for a pathetic nincompoop but that is another matter). But at least people of stature like PK and Brad Delong need to read the article and discuss it with sanity and cogency than taking a paragraph out of it and going on about decline of roman empire, with everybody showing off their knowledge or lack thereof, which they have done interminably for last few centuries. Reply October 04, 2010 at 12:44 AM Full Employment Hawk said in reply to Brad DeLong... The Eastern Roman Empire did lose its territory in the Middle East and Egypt, but waxed and waned for centuries, gaining and losing territories and enjoying periods of http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-at-the-new-york-times.html
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prosperity. Gradually it morphed into the Byzantine Empire. Consider, for example the empire in 1025: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_Byzantine_Empire_1025-en.svg Reply October 04, 2010 at 12:47 AM Cranky Observer said... > Do you guys actually read the article by Thomas Friedman, which is about... Undoubtedly, the next six months will be "crucial". Cranky Reply October 04, 2010 at 03:52 AM Peter Whiteford said... Like a couple of people before me on this blog, what struck me is not so much that that the Roman Empire fell but that it lasted so long. Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Napoleon and even the British Empire lasted fractions of the period. The Byzantines clearly conidered themselves to be Romans, and if that's what they thought they were then I'm happy to rely on their judgement. Reply October 04, 2010 at 06:37 AM Barbara said... Just read a great recent book on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But really, the decline was pretty rapid, and though it was a combination of different factors, the overarching one was that the "barbarian" groups eventually realized that they had to unite to have any hope of gaining economic stability. Since they were not allowed to assimiliate into the Roman Empire after its borders were fixed at the Danube and Rhine (to any great degree), and since they faced pressure from the Huns and other groups, they had to take what they could, by making incursions. Spain, then the Balkans, then North Africa and then Gaul . . . until Rome was no longer a real empire in the west. As each region became independent of Rome, its tax revenue fell -- with North Africa being the most important because it was the real bread basket. The other dynamic was that in all cases, Roman wealth was landowning wealth, so that local landowners eventually cast their lot with the local rules, because, of course, you can't take your land with you when the local conditions become unpleasant. Upon reading the book, the only commonality I found with our own situation is as follows: Roman rules knew that accommodation with the barbarians was necessary, but anyone who actually tried to make those accommodations (Stilicho) was immediately excoriated by his political rivals and, usually, assassinated. This meant that any ruler (the effective ruler, not the titular emperor) risked complete ruin by compromising on issues related to barbarians. But as they failed over and over again to renegotiate the political status of the barbarians, the problems for Rome as a result of refusal to compromise became more and more burdensomme, as the barbarians made their own deals -- e.g., taking over Spain and North Africa, resulting in loss of revenue, requiring higher taxes, weakening the army, etc. In our own times, substitute "taxes" for "barbarians" and make the necessary grammatical adjustments. Reply October 04, 2010 at 06:53 AM Gearg said... My take - since there is no right answer - is a) you are absolutely right, especially about http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-at-the-new-york-times.html
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the effects of Christian intolerance within the empire and b) a problem of succession. As you know, the empire functioned well when succession worked well. I'd say Goldsworthy's book, which I found somewhat dull, picks up right after the important point, that Marcus Aurelius, for all his good points, did not do succession as Trajan or Hadrian did. Rather than pick the best candidate and then adopt him, he handed the job to his son and Commodius is where Goldsworthy starts. The emperor is the guy responsible for those choices. I doubt the empire could have lasted much longer if things went better, unless of course one removes Christianity. Goldsworthy says the competition to become emperor became opened to soldiers and adventurers, which is right, but I'd phrase it more as the competition became focused on power rather than competence. The empire was lucky to have in its early few centuries some amazing successions. I doubt it would have been possible to keep operating a system of selection for competence, coupled with elevation by adoption, but that is what worked best. Reply October 04, 2010 at 07:43 AM RBurns said... Plague hit Rome where it hurt the most - the Legions - particularly at the start of the third century troubles. But it kept coming back and the population of the western empire was significantly smaller in the 5th century than in the 1st. Reply October 04, 2010 at 07:57 AM Erik Lund said... By all means let's attend to Friedman's column. "Hack or bloviator? Discuss." So that's done. Now, about the fall of Rome... Let's start by throwing out self-serving talk about the importance of life in the public service, obsolete Nineteenth Century essentialist crap about ethnic identity, and talk about the "finances" of the Empire as though it consisted of an economic unit. Above all, let's not get tied up in the deep past or the future, but rather focus on how the wheels came off an apparently functional political system at Adrianople in 376. Because make no mistake, that battle was precisely as much a world-transformative event as it has always been seen as being. Emperors do not, as a rule, die in battle. (That there are so many exceptions in the Iraqi theatre tells us something in itself.)When these things happen, it is at least open to consideration that the system was not as functional as we supposed. So what was the Empire? In the crudest sense, a means of generating charisma (or, in new fangled talk, social capital) and ready cash through victory (loot, but mostly redirected war taxation) for the Emperor, generals and soldiers. The Emperor then distributed some of his winnings to those not lucky enough to be at the front, while generals and soldiers built up their own social networks. It's a patronage play, and the civil wars are nothing but struggles over patronage, internal to the system and no threat to its survival. Where was the war/profit centre? In the richest part of the world through which the most important trade routes passed. How things change --Iraq. Who were the enemies? At least from the capture of Valerian, the Sassanians. Oops: problem. The Sassanians are plugged into the Inner Eurasian horse trade, and the Roman Empire is not. No horses, no cavalry. No cavalry, no victories. Anatolia, Nubia and North Africa may produce very small numbers of horses, but with cavalry regiments sometimes approaching 100% year-to-year turnover (I have my technical http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-at-the-new-york-times.html
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quibbles with this, but that's another story), they don't make the numbers. There's only one possible alternative: the cold-blood stud of the North Sea littoral, and, if available, Ireland and the Baltic shore. And horses need to be broken, trained, stabled and matched to riders. So the army needs to be up in the far northwest of Europe, except when it is in Iraq, leaving Pannonia out of it for a moment. No problem, the strategic road running up the Rhine and down the Danube to link up with the old Royal Road is open and available. No wonder that emperors relocate to Cologne with their fisc, and spread the silver coin harvested by Imperial taxation in this region. Only, as the years go by from the turn of the 300s towards the demarche of 376, silver coin comes to buy less and less in this crucial region. Recirculation of silver is impossible without a true imperial economy, instead, while some of the money disappears into the ground, most of it comes to be worn by soldiers, who not surprisingly begin to look for opportunities to leave the frontier zone for provinces where there is silver-denominated deflation driving people out of the money economy -and driving tax revenues downwards. Not that the Emperor knows, or cares about this. He lacks the conceptual vocabulary and the administrative apparatus to know it. Perversely, we moderns, with our ability to dig up and collate late Imperial hoards, may be in a better situation to understand it. What the Emperor knows is that _gold_ is still buying its worth on the frontier, and he steps up demands on the interior for gold. He also, of course, needs every trooper he can get, even as he cannot pay them. That's why he farms out land and taxes to generals. That said, the generals themselves are uneasy given their declining patronage powers. An individual trooper expects to be able to make a profit from campaigning in Iraq. But he is caught in a credit trap. He has advanced so much for the maintenance of his horse and harness that he needs to make money. He has done so on the hope that his general will advance him the money needed to pay off his debt, but at the same time, both he and his general need the money that they will make in Iraq. So, if and when this house of cards collapses, if an individual identity rooted in credit relationships becomes impossible, it is time to take on a new identity. Not "postRoman," because that identity does not yet exist. Rather, the Empire has always posited an alternate identity that is allowed to recoup its losses by looting the Empire: "the barbarian." Thus the solution. Everyone must become a barbarian, and loot until the solidus is worth a solidus again. Which, unfortunately, is impossible. How can the man who wears a helmet gilded with money make money by looting the farmers who cannot pay the taxes that gilded that helmet in the first place? The confusion between "gold," (which the soldier is looking for), "silver," (which he wears), and "money" is understandable. It confuses me, too, for all that economists try to explain it. Confusion irremediable demands a new solution, which not surprisingly is put in play by the region that has paid the most in taxes and benefitted the least from Imperial military patronage --North Africa. There is only so far that the towns of the Maghrib can afford to take the export-driven economies with which they earn the silver needed to pay taxes. What happens when North Africa suddenly proclaims itself a "Vandal" barbarian state? It is not the end of the Empire in the west. That slow dissolution only ended the day the last Greek-speaking monastery in Rome was dissolved, after 1453, I think. It _is_
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the end of the Emperor in the west, however. For now. Because the Crusades will bring him back. Reply October 04, 2010 at 08:22 AM Maynard Handley said in reply to Bob Athay... "Anyway, a related point is just that any far-flung empire built by conquest and maintained by force is going to have trouble maintaining a sense of common identity over time. Instead of asking why the Roman Empire fell, a better question might be why it held together as long as it did." The more relevant point for our time is surely why "we" continue to feel that the fall of Rome was a tragedy. The medieval christians had their own theories about this, but these are irrelevant to us. The point matters because it suggests that, at the end of the day, humans (even supposedly well-educated humans) are swayed more by the idea of alpha-dog displays of grandeur and conquest than by numbers and common sense: when people think back to the Roman Empire, they always imagine they're lord of the villa, not a slave in the mines or galleys. Which in turn should make one more than a little pessimistic about the whole democratic enterprise. Reply October 04, 2010 at 08:54 AM old scotsman said... I'm with Maynard. All empires fall (yes, it's possible that the sun will not rise tomorrow, but not worth talking about) so why lament the fall of Rome and why use it as a Rorschach test for our political opinions? History can be used to support almost anything. That's why economics fails as a science. Daniel Okrent wrote a very nice book on Prohibition, Last Call. The Volstead fiasco, however, is not a guide to wise policy toward Cannabis. With Obama, Clinton and other "split the difference" middle of the roaders, we might expect a policy of Cannabis legalization west of the Mississippi only. Reply October 04, 2010 at 09:11 AM marcel said... The thesis of Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire is that the empire was doing just fine until it got hit by a series of plagues all over the place. (I read this over a year ago, so I don't recall the details esp. well, but as I recall...) This led to a large drop not only in manpower for the armies and farms, with obvious results, but also taxes. These plagues lasted for a couple of generations and unfortunately happened just before the rise of Islam. The eastern provinces, including N. Africa, were much more valuable economically than the western/northern ones, so when the emperor (don't recall which one, presumably Justinian) recognized the need for substantial retrenchment, that was the obvious place to retrench to. Unfortunately, that was also where a vital, expansive new religious movement was located. Reply October 04, 2010 at 09:12 AM the idler said... Why did the Roman Empire fall? The lack of wealth enhancing productivity gainscheap slave labor rendered technological innovation unnecessary. The static economy could not yield enough tax revenue to maintain an army adequate to the task of maintaining the borders of the Empire. Reply October 04, 2010 at 09:28 AM Bob Athay said in reply to Maynard Handley... http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-at-the-new-york-times.html
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'The more relevant point for our time is surely why "we" continue to feel that the fall of Rome was a tragedy.' You've got a good point here. As for humans being "swayed more by the idea of alpha-dog displays of grandeur and conquest than by numbers and common sense": true enough, I'm sorry to say. But every alternative to the democratic enterprise has been shown to produce worse results. Reply October 04, 2010 at 11:16 AM Full Employment Hawk said... The Roman Empire was permanently divided into the Eastern and Western empires in 395. I took less than a century after that for the Western Roman Empire to fall. The loss of the wealth from the eastern part of the Roman empire needs to be given a much bigger role in explaining why the Western Roman Empire fell. The Eastern Roman empire having shed itself of the financial drain of supporting the Western empire lasted for many centuries after that. Reply October 04, 2010 at 11:51 AM Sock Puppet of the Great Satan said... "You would be hard-put indeed to find any evidence at all that the generations of Stilicho, Aetius, Theodosius, Justinian, and Belisarius were any less public-spirited or brave or far-sighted or responsibility-accepting than the generations of Cicero, Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius." IIRC the first wave of the black death, the Justinian plague, put paid to Justinian's plans to reconquer the Western Empire. If it wasn't for fleas, rats and germs, we might have skipped the Dark Ages. Reply October 04, 2010 at 01:22 PM sm said... I studied the fifth century for a very long time, and I think it comes down to a definition of terms: what we mean by Roman, what we mean by Empire, what we mean by Fall. Surely it is an unusual situation when a power based in central Italy controls everything worth controlling between Scotland and Iraq. We might then ask what special circumstances allowed that central Italian power to overawe potential power centers in Spain, France, North Africa, and the Balkans. The Romans had many Imperial capitals at various times, including once in northern England, northern France, northern Italy, Antioch in Syria, in various places in the Balkans and in Anatolia. None of them were able to restore the boundaries of the second century A.D. either. Surprise! It might be worth thinking why again and again cities and powers based in central Iraq have been able to control very large areas. And what changed to make that seem extremely unlikely to ever happen again. Finally, those who want to insist on the unique catastrophe caused by military defeats and poor policies in the fifth century often seem to ignore the catastrophes of the third century which were very destructive, but were still reversed. Was the empire of Diocletian a new empire or not? Was it a Roman Empire? By what standard? Reply October 04, 2010 at 01:46 PM Erik Lund said in reply to sm... Indeed. The political systems of the Roman first, second, third and fourth centuries are all the systems of that time. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations-at-the-new-york-times.html
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Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations at the New York Times... - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
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What makes the events following the Battle of Adrianople different is the collapse of Roman taxation power in the west. The empire survived as idea and ideology, but that was the end of it as a state. So the question here is: how did it lose the taxation power? If the crisis of the third century was as bad as it is portrayed as being, how could the Roman fisc possibly have survived? That's why I'm inclined to see it as more of a period of rough politics. But what makes the events following the Battle of Adrianople persistently _interesting_ is the trope of the Volkerwanderung, which instantiates the idea of ethnic essentialism in a period of history too remote for it to be attacked by those blasted pollsters who keep ruining our noble dream of nation states in modernity. Reply October 04, 2010 at 02:04 PM postescript said... In my abundant spare time, I'm reading Julius Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul. Some people don't know that not only was he a great general and politician, but also an excellent writer. They don't make larger than life figures the way they used to.... It's strange that Italy has an abundance of these guys. Reply October 04, 2010 at 05:58 PM postescript said... The problem with Krugman's comments about meritocracy is that it wasn't entirely accurate. Cicero was a self-made man, as were several generals that rose to prominence, such as Marcus Agrippa, who was Caesar Augustus's general, J. Caesar's nephew. The aristocracy did dominate, but there was room to social climb, if you will. Reply October 04, 2010 at 06:10 PM r.d. said... DeLong's second explanation seems reasonable. His first seems like a pretty gratuitous swipe against Christianity. The Arabs did not conquer the West (476 is long before 632), nor did they cause the fall of the Byzantine Empire except conceivably in some incredibly remote way (it fell about 800 years after Muhammad). Moreover, the Arabs conquered various peoples, some Christian, some not. Their conquests were extraordinarily vast, stretching from about Spain to India at their greatest extent. It seems like this Islam/Christianity theory has little explanatory power. I might add that the Western empire was already declining in a sense while Christians were still a fairly weak group (perhaps the 3rd century). -r.d. Reply October 04, 2010 at 10:18 PM Ron Calitri said... I haven't reached the middle of the Roman Empire in my second youth of historical studies yet; but for the build-up recommend Beckwith's "Empires of the Silk Road." The Roman Empire remains on the periphery, even during its few centuries. As to the political causation issue, I'm just now reading A.B. Bosworth, "The Legacy of Alexander," where everything is falling apart, between the "Inheritors." That pretty much puts paid to anything unique from a period 8 centuries later. In Bosworth's story, The Army has just decided not to follow through on Alexander's "Last Plans," including the conquest of Carthage, against whose economic sphere the Greeks had long been rubbing. Keeping it simple, that was left to the Roman Republic a century later. The changes, or non-changes at the beginning, that laid the board. In the long term, only the macroeconomic system, in the broad sense is at issue, who
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deals with whom, is at issue. By the 5th. century, though the Med + periphery had been globalized for millennia, there were simply no more advantages to be wrung from long-distance trade, that in order to be sustainable, needed to be packaged at Roman scale. Local means had become more sufficient to local ends, and trade intricacy had progressed, though that is a bit over-simplistic. There are more similarities of the Roman period with today, than differences. More people understand the similarities; but also the crowd has grown, its means of thought unchanged. People evolved for this, to take account of events through excesses of emotion. Sadly, the skills of emotional manipulation remain expensive. Silicon Valley Pirates indeed.! Water-balloon fights between fraternities on campus! If all goes right in CT, we shall have Wrestling in the Senate! Reply October 05, 2010 at 11:42 AM Nathanael said... "And these civil wars, crucially, were not about ideology, or nationalism, or any of the things we might try to project back onto the ancients; they were about personal ambition, pure and simple." aaaaand how is this different from the problems we face today? Pray tell, Professor DeLong. From what I can tell, those inciting trouble may use ideology as a cover, but the total incoherence of their ideology betrays the truth: it's about personal power, period. Reply October 05, 2010 at 12:34 PM Peter Kauffner said... There was general depopulation, decline in trade, and deurbanization from about 150 to 750. You can't explain all that in term of non-senators getting military commands. The climate cooled -- it's called the Dark Ages Cold Period. This meant lower agricultural productivity and a smaller surplus to feed the cities. Vegetius writes about how the soldiers lost discipline, stopped wearing armor, and stopped carrying the heavy full-body rectangular shields identified with the classical Roman army. Cavalry was no match for fully armored Roman infantry. Only when the quality of the infantry declined did the Romans turn to cavalry. As for silver, Rome did not have a silver standard. For stuff you might buy at the market, the price was given in sestertius, which was a brass coin whose value was not affected by Nero or whoever debasing the silver coinage. Reply October 07, 2010 at 02:31 AM Comment below or sign in with TypePad
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Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations at the New York Times... - Grasping Reality with Both Hands
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10/21/10 10:47 AM
Preview
Economics Is not a Morality Play
economics DeLong
Me:
New York Times (blog) - Sep 28, 2010 Brad DeLong catches someone wondering if I am actually advocating war as a solution to our problems. Against stupidity, the gods themselves … ... Related Articles » « Previous Next »
Economists: Juicebox Paul Mafia: Krugman Ezra Klein Mark Thoma Matthew Cowen and Yglesias Tabarrok Spencer Chinn and Ackerman Hamilton Dana Brad Setser Goldstein Dan Froomkin
Moral Philosophers: Hilzoy and Friends Crooked Timber of Humanity Mark Kleiman and Friends Eric Rauchway and Friends John Holbo and Friends
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