10/21/10 10:47 AMSoft Bigotry of Low Expectations at the New York Times... - Grasping Reality with Both Hands

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Grasping Reality with Both HandsThe Semi-Daily Journal of Economist J. Bradford DeLong: Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, and Even-HandedDepartment of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 7080467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu.

Economics 210aWeblog ArchivesDeLong Hot on GoogleDeLong Hot on Google BlogsearchOctober 03, 2010

Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations at the New York Times...

Paul Krugman applauds newspapercolumnists who know just enoughabout history to make misleadinganalogies:

Roman Projection: In hiscolumn today, Tom Friedmanquotes Lewis Mumford on thedecline of Rome, and applies itto ourselves. It’s a commontrope, and I don’t have anyproblem with Tom using it...

That's a very low bar to set--andleads me to ask: why oh why can'twe 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 ofsociety from anything existing in the modern world, and that when someonedraws morals from Rome’s decline, the reality of Rome almost never comes intothe thing.... I recently read Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell — and what Ireally 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 wassapped by the endless series of uprisings as local commanders tried to seizepower. And these civil wars, crucially, were not about ideology, or nationalism, orany of the things we might try to project back onto the ancients; they were about

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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 childlessemperors adopted competent men as their heirs. But also — and here’s whereGoldsworthy is gloriously un-PC and willing to see the world as it was — stabilityrested largely on the lack of meritocracy. As long as only members of oldSenatorial families were contenders, the game was relatively limited and stable;once the seemingly pointless role of a hereditary aristocracy had been eroded, itbecame a deadly free-for-all...

Indeed. Especially since Friedman's quote from Lewis Mumford, "[e]veryone aimed atsecurity: no one accepted responsibility..." is a libel against the late Romans, many ofthe best of whom eschewed personal security and willingly accepted mighty andcrushing responsibilities for trying to preserve the empire. You would be hard-putindeed 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 orresponsibility-accepting than the generations of Cicero, Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius.

I would say that ultimately two things brought down the empire. The first was therepeated heresy-hunt by emperors and patriarchs against fellow Christians--theheresy-hunts against Arians and Monophysites and others so that, when enemies likethe successors of Mohammed showed up, nobody in Egypt or Syria wanted to fight toremain in the empire so that they could get persecuted again. The religious tolerancepracticed 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 forpower, but not quite the same. Goldsworthy says that up until 200 or so you had to bea senator to be a field army commander, and so only senators could make a grab forthe empire by gaining the loyalty of their field army. Goldsworthy further says thatafter 200 emperors thought that if they kept senators from army command then theywouldn't have to worry about frontier generals making a bid for power--for who inRome would agree to be ruled by some upstart whose ancestors had never been asenator? And Goldsworthy says that was a big mistake: it multiplied potentialcontenders 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 onfor 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 politicianswho were both Roman generals--hence able to get segments of the Roman army tofollow them and know how to use the Roman logistical infrastructure to support theirtroops--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 thefifth century as they combined two sources of power. And in the end some of themdecided that they would rather try to be secure as barbarian king of a region carved outof 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 andhad 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 theAmal, King of the Ostrogoths and also Magister Militium per Italiam. That was achange made possible by the (centuries before) purging of the Roman senatorial classfrom army command. But it was not the same thing.

Brad DeLong on October 03, 2010 at 05:17 PM in History, Information: Better Press

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Bram Cohen said...Your twitter feed is kind of busted. This post, for example, got tweeted twice.

Reply October 03, 2010 at 05:57 PMKeshav Srinivasan said...Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't Mohammed and his successors live manycenturies after the fall of the Roman empire? Do you mean Mohammed'spredecessors?

I was under the impression that the Germanic tribes, not Middle-Eastern people likethe Parthians, brought the empire down.

Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:00 PMFull Employment Hawk said in reply to Keshav Srinivasan...He is mixing together the fall of the Western Roman empire with the gradual decline ofthe 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 itselfonly fell to the Turks in the 15th century. Constantinople was even strong enough tostop the advance of the Muslims into Eastern Europe. The Muslim army built a hugefleet to attack Constantinople, but Constantinople's secet weapons, Greek Fire and fireships that used it, burned the Muslim fleet. By the time the Turks came, what was leftof the Eastern Roman Empire was too weak to stop them.

Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:23 PMBob Athay said...Nice commentary on PK's blog posting. My reaction to it was much along the samelines but not nearly as well developed. Anyway, a related point is just that any far-flung empire built by conquest and maintained by force is going to have troublemaintaining a sense of common identity over time. Instead of asking why the Roman

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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 PMSufferin' Succotash said in reply to Full Employment Hawk...One reason why the Eastern Empire was too weak to stop the Ottomans was thesacking of Constantinople in 1204, which was done not by Muslims but by Venetians. Heh.

Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:37 PMsave_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 PMAlex K. said...Peter Heather argues that "barbarian" invasions bear most of the blame for the fall ofRome. Adrian Goldsworthy wrote his book partly as a counterbalance to Heather -- butthat does not establish that Heather was wrong.

It's hard to see what kind of political structure would be able to sustain the RomanEmpire, since after 376 A.D. there were always non-Roman and militarized troopsinside the empire (various tribes of Goths). Combine that with Attila the Hun'scraftiness 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 controlof North Africa --the important source of grain in the empire-- by the Vandals, plusvarious other invasions of Germanic tribes, and the miracle is that Rome lasted as longas it did.

Heather's thesis seems pretty persuasive to me.

Reply October 03, 2010 at 06:51 PMhartal said...I almost bought Vaclav Smil's recent book on the dis-analogy between the falls of theRoman and American Empires. Probably has a lot to say. Doesn't Peter Temin have anew book on the Roman Empire?

Reply October 03, 2010 at 07:11 PMRobert Waldmann said...I agree that Goldsworthy has a serious timing problem. The argument must be thatcivil wars impoverished the West which made it impossible (or unprofitable ?) todefend with armies paid out of tax revenues. Still compared to the conventional viewthat Rome fell because of the debauchery of the Julio Claudian emperors he gains acouple of centuries.

I think you must distinguish the fall of the empire in the West, which I consider arational 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 inthe East. I don't have a sense of all that much civil war over there. I'd say there wasmore 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 fellwhen the Romans stopped propitiating their Gods. This was the Roman theory of therisee of the Roman empire. The first Christian emperors tolerated paganism. Thetraditional 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 Victormodel, I will take economists' claim to be scientists seriously.

Reply October 03, 2010 at 07:35 PMOther Peter T said...

While a lot of things contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire - much strongermilitary pressure in both east and west, environmental decay in Italy, a higher diseaseburden and so on, the point about the role of the hereditary elite is interesting. Onecould make a good argument that European systems of hereditary monarchy with fixedrules of succession played a considerable part in minimising civil conflict - there wasno point in contending for the throne. Certainly Europe stands out for the number ofuncontested successions and successful regencies.

Reply October 03, 2010 at 08:15 PMPoco said...Another insidious effect of not trusting your generals is that successful generals wereoften reassigned, exiled or in extreme cases executed. Belisarius was ping-pongedbetween various fronts by Justinian, which unnecessarily dragged out the campaign toretake Italy, which ultimately failed when the Justinian plague struck. That plague, andits recurrence over the years, severely eroded the tax-base and placed such anoppressive burden on the survivors that it could well have contributed to the loss ofEgypt and Palestine.

Gene O'Grady: I agree with you. It's absolutely amazing how many people conflate centuries of Romanhistory into a single grand narrative of decay. It's absurd when you ponder how manyyears it involves. If we think of the US as starting with Jamestown in 1607, then in thechronology of Rome we would only be up to 350 BC. There's still 800 years to gobefore the fall of the western half, another 1000 years after that for the eastern half (ormore, if you accept the claims of the new Turkish overlords to being the successors ofthe Roman emperors). It makes no goddamn sense to use various people's peccadillosover millennia as proof that low moral standards lead to inevitable Imperial decline.

Reply October 03, 2010 at 09:44 PMKat Willow said...Considering the short life-span of most empires, especially Western ones, the questionmight 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 wasthat it was OLD: after all, it lasted hundreds of years!

Reply October 03, 2010 at 09:47 PMGeorge J. Georganas said...On the heresy hunts in the Southeastern corner of the Mediterranean and religioustolerance of expanding Islam, it is worth thinking why that particular area gave birth toso much heretical growth. May I respectfully submit that the tax burden felldisproportionately on those areas of the empire. Egypt, after all, was the granary of theEmpire, East and West. Plus those areas in the Southeastern Mediterranean spannedthe trade routes to the rich lands to the east of the Empire. Religious persecution andwars 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 PMFull Employment Hawk said...A good case can be made that an important factor in the fall of the Western RomanEmpire was the division of the Roman Empire into a Western and Eastern part, andthat the eastern part was richer than the western part, so that the loss of the wealth ofthe East impoverished the Western Empire.

Reply October 03, 2010 at 11:04 PMMr No-Dachi said...Yeah the post does confuse, Eastern and Western Rome Decline, inter-Christianpersecutions and sectarianism are crucial to explaining how the Eastern Empire gotsliced 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 4thcentury may have been the peak of Roman prosperity), disease contributes to Arabssuccess but not that of the Goths and Vandals.

My personnal explanation for 476 is based mostly on Heather's explanation, which asAlex.K said empahsises that the Barbarians whether Sassanid Persians or Goths hadgotten bigger and stronger in part as a reaction to Roman power-then the Huns turnup and make everything worse which coincides with a cycle of Civil War within theEmpire without the emergence of an Aurelian or Diocletian.

One should note both Goldsworthy and Heather are reactions to a trend in academia toview the Fall of the Western Roman Empire as not being a violent upheaval but agradual transformation (there is some validity in the latter interpretation but the truthI think lies closer to the former).

Reply October 04, 2010 at 12:31 AMBrad DeLong said in reply to Full Employment Hawk...But then the Eastern Empire falls to the Arabs in the seventh century, leaving only theAnatolian rump of Byzantium...

Yours,

Brad DeLong

Reply October 04, 2010 at 12:35 AMOHOA said...Do you guys actually read the article by Thomas Friedman, which is about how bothdemocrats and republicans have become bamkrupt and useless and how a lot of smartpeople in Silicon Valley feel that Obama has been a do-nothing president and thatFriedman tries to justify with the argument that it is the best anyone could do with ourbankrupt political system, (IMO a sad and pathetic partisan apology for a patheticnincompoop but that is another matter). But at least people of stature like PK and BradDelong need to read the article and discuss it with sanity and cogency than taking aparagraph out of it and going on about decline of roman empire, with everybodyshowing off their knowledge or lack thereof, which they have done interminably forlast few centuries.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 12:44 AMFull Employment Hawk said in reply to Brad DeLong...The Eastern Roman Empire did lose its territory in the Middle East and Egypt, butwaxed and waned for centuries, gaining and losing territories and enjoying periods of

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prosperity. Gradually it morphed into the Byzantine Empire. Consider, for example theempire in 1025:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_Byzantine_Empire_1025-en.svg

Reply October 04, 2010 at 12:47 AMCranky 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 AMPeter Whiteford said...Like a couple of people before me on this blog, what struck me is not so much that thatthe Roman Empire fell but that it lasted so long. Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Napoleonand even the British Empire lasted fractions of the period. The Byzantines clearlyconidered themselves to be Romans, and if that's what they thought they were thenI'm happy to rely on their judgement.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 06:37 AMBarbara 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, theoverarching one was that the "barbarian" groups eventually realized that they had tounite to have any hope of gaining economic stability. Since they were not allowed toassimiliate into the Roman Empire after its borders were fixed at the Danube andRhine (to any great degree), and since they faced pressure from the Huns and othergroups, they had to take what they could, by making incursions. Spain, then theBalkans, then North Africa and then Gaul . . . until Rome was no longer a real empirein the west. As each region became independent of Rome, its tax revenue fell -- withNorth 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 thatlocal landowners eventually cast their lot with the local rules, because, of course, youcan'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 asfollows:

Roman rules knew that accommodation with the barbarians was necessary, but anyonewho actually tried to make those accommodations (Stilicho) was immediatelyexcoriated by his political rivals and, usually, assassinated. This meant that any ruler(the effective ruler, not the titular emperor) risked complete ruin by compromising onissues related to barbarians. But as they failed over and over again to renegotiate thepolitical status of the barbarians, the problems for Rome as a result of refusal tocompromise became more and more burdensomme, as the barbarians made their owndeals -- e.g., taking over Spain and North Africa, resulting in loss of revenue, requiringhigher taxes, weakening the army, etc.

In our own times, substitute "taxes" for "barbarians" and make the necessarygrammatical adjustments.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 06:53 AMGearg said...My take - since there is no right answer - is a) you are absolutely right, especially about

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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 sayGoldsworthy's book, which I found somewhat dull, picks up right after the importantpoint, that Marcus Aurelius, for all his good points, did not do succession as Trajan orHadrian did. Rather than pick the best candidate and then adopt him, he handed thejob to his son and Commodius is where Goldsworthy starts. The emperor is the guyresponsible for those choices.

I doubt the empire could have lasted much longer if things went better, unless ofcourse one removes Christianity. Goldsworthy says the competition to become emperorbecame opened to soldiers and adventurers, which is right, but I'd phrase it more asthe competition became focused on power rather than competence. The empire waslucky to have in its early few centuries some amazing successions. I doubt it wouldhave been possible to keep operating a system of selection for competence, coupledwith elevation by adoption, but that is what worked best.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 07:43 AMRBurns said...Plague hit Rome where it hurt the most - the Legions - particularly at the start of thethird century troubles. But it kept coming back and the population of the westernempire was significantly smaller in the 5th century than in the 1st.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 07:57 AMErik 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 theimportance of life in the public service, obsolete Nineteenth Century essentialist crapabout ethnic identity, and talk about the "finances" of the Empire as though itconsisted of an economic unit.

Above all, let's not get tied up in the deep past or the future, but rather focus on howthe wheels came off an apparently functional political system at Adrianople in 376.Because make no mistake, that battle was precisely as much a world-transformativeevent 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 initself.)When these things happen, it is at least open to consideration that the systemwas not as functional as we supposed.

So what was the Empire? In the crudest sense, a means of generating charisma (or, innew fangled talk, social capital) and ready cash through victory (loot, but mostlyredirected war taxation) for the Emperor, generals and soldiers. The Emperor thendistributed some of his winnings to those not lucky enough to be at the front, whilegenerals and soldiers built up their own social networks. It's a patronage play, and thecivil wars are nothing but struggles over patronage, internal to the system and nothreat to its survival.Where was the war/profit centre? In the richest part of the world through which themost important trade routes passed. How things change --Iraq. Who were theenemies? At least from the capture of Valerian, the Sassanians.

Oops: problem. The Sassanians are plugged into the Inner Eurasian horse trade, andthe 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 cavalryregiments sometimes approaching 100% year-to-year turnover (I have my technical

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quibbles with this, but that's another story), they don't make the numbers. There's onlyone 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 andmatched to riders. So the army needs to be up in the far northwest of Europe, exceptwhen 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 upwith the old Royal Road is open and available. No wonder that emperors relocate toCologne with their fisc, and spread the silver coin harvested by Imperial taxation inthis region.

Only, as the years go by from the turn of the 300s towards the demarche of 376, silvercoin comes to buy less and less in this crucial region. Recirculation of silver isimpossible without a true imperial economy, instead, while some of the moneydisappears into the ground, most of it comes to be worn by soldiers, who notsurprisingly begin to look for opportunities to leave the frontier zone for provinceswhere 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 vocabularyand the administrative apparatus to know it. Perversely, we moderns, with our abilityto 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 hesteps up demands on the interior for gold.

He also, of course, needs every trooper he can get, even as he cannot pay them. That'swhy he farms out land and taxes to generals. That said, the generals themselves areuneasy given their declining patronage powers. An individual trooper expects to beable to make a profit from campaigning in Iraq. But he is caught in a credit trap. Hehas advanced so much for the maintenance of his horse and harness that he needs tomake money. He has done so on the hope that his general will advance him the moneyneeded to pay off his debt, but at the same time, both he and his general need themoney that they will make in Iraq.

So, if and when this house of cards collapses, if an individual identity rooted in creditrelationships becomes impossible, it is time to take on a new identity. Not "post-Roman," because that identity does not yet exist. Rather, the Empire has alwaysposited 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 untilthe solidus is worth a solidus again. Which, unfortunately, is impossible. How can theman who wears a helmet gilded with money make money by looting the farmers whocannot 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" isunderstandable. It confuses me, too, for all that economists try to explain it.

Confusion irremediable demands a new solution, which not surprisingly is put in playby the region that has paid the most in taxes and benefitted the least from Imperialmilitary patronage --North Africa. There is only so far that the towns of the Maghribcan afford to take the export-driven economies with which they earn the silver neededto 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 daythe 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 AMMaynard Handley said in reply to Bob Athay..."Anyway, a related point is just that any far-flung empire built by conquest andmaintained by force is going to have trouble maintaining a sense of common identityover time. Instead of asking why the Roman Empire fell, a better question might bewhy 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 ofRome was a tragedy. The medieval christians had their own theories about this, butthese are irrelevant to us.

The point matters because it suggests that, at the end of the day, humans (evensupposedly well-educated humans) are swayed more by the idea of alpha-dog displaysof grandeur and conquest than by numbers and common sense: when people thinkback to the Roman Empire, they always imagine they're lord of the villa, not a slave inthe mines or galleys. Which in turn should make one more than a little pessimisticabout the whole democratic enterprise.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 08:54 AMold scotsman said...I'm with Maynard. All empires fall (yes, it's possible that the sun will not risetomorrow, but not worth talking about) so why lament the fall of Rome and why use itas a Rorschach test for our political opinions?

History can be used to support almost anything. That's why economics fails as ascience. Daniel Okrent wrote a very nice book on Prohibition, Last Call. The Volsteadfiasco, however, is not a guide to wise policy toward Cannabis. With Obama, Clintonand other "split the difference" middle of the roaders, we might expect a policy ofCannabis legalization west of the Mississippi only.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 09:11 AMmarcel said...The thesis of Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the RomanEmpire is that the empire was doing just fine until it got hit by a series of plagues allover the place. (I read this over a year ago, so I don't recall the details esp. well, but asI recall...) This led to a large drop not only in manpower for the armies and farms, withobvious results, but also taxes. These plagues lasted for a couple of generations andunfortunately happened just before the rise of Islam. The eastern provinces, includingN. Africa, were much more valuable economically than the western/northern ones, sowhen the emperor (don't recall which one, presumably Justinian) recognized the needfor 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 AMthe idler said...Why did the Roman Empire fall? The lack of wealth enhancing productivity gains-cheap slave labor rendered technological innovation unnecessary. The static economycould not yield enough tax revenue to maintain an army adequate to the task ofmaintaining the borders of the Empire.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 09:28 AMBob Athay said in reply to Maynard Handley...

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'The more relevant point for our time is surely why "we" continue to feel that the fall ofRome 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 andconquest than by numbers and common sense": true enough, I'm sorry to say. Butevery alternative to the democratic enterprise has been shown to produce worseresults.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 11:16 AMFull Employment Hawk said...The Roman Empire was permanently divided into the Eastern and Western empires in395. I took less than a century after that for the Western Roman Empire to fall. Theloss of the wealth from the eastern part of the Roman empire needs to be given a muchbigger role in explaining why the Western Roman Empire fell. The Eastern Romanempire having shed itself of the financial drain of supporting the Western empirelasted for many centuries after that.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 11:51 AMSock Puppet of the Great Satan said..."You would be hard-put indeed to find any evidence at all that the generations ofStilicho, Aetius, Theodosius, Justinian, and Belisarius were any less public-spirited orbrave 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'splans to reconquer the Western Empire. If it wasn't for fleas, rats and germs, we mighthave skipped the Dark Ages.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 01:22 PMsm said...I studied the fifth century for a very long time, and I think it comes down to adefinition of terms: what we mean by Roman, what we mean by Empire, what wemean by Fall.

Surely it is an unusual situation when a power based in central Italy controlseverything worth controlling between Scotland and Iraq. We might then ask whatspecial circumstances allowed that central Italian power to overawe potential powercenters in Spain, France, North Africa, and the Balkans. The Romans had manyImperial capitals at various times, including once in northern England, northernFrance, northern Italy, Antioch in Syria, in various places in the Balkans and inAnatolia. 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 Iraqhave been able to control very large areas. And what changed to make that seemextremely unlikely to ever happen again.

Finally, those who want to insist on the unique catastrophe caused by military defeatsand poor policies in the fifth century often seem to ignore the catastrophes of the thirdcentury which were very destructive, but were still reversed. Was the empire ofDiocletian a new empire or not? Was it a Roman Empire? By what standard?

Reply October 04, 2010 at 01:46 PMErik Lund said in reply to sm...Indeed. The political systems of the Roman first, second, third and fourth centuries areall the systems of that time.

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What makes the events following the Battle of Adrianople different is the collapse ofRoman taxation power in the west. The empire survived as idea and ideology, but thatwas 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 theRoman fisc possibly have survived? That's why I'm inclined to see it as more of aperiod 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 ofethnic essentialism in a period of history too remote for it to be attacked by thoseblasted pollsters who keep ruining our noble dream of nation states in modernity.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 02:04 PMpostescript said...In my abundant spare time, I'm reading Julius Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul. Somepeople don't know that not only was he a great general and politician, but also anexcellent writer. They don't make larger than life figures the way they used to.... It'sstrange that Italy has an abundance of these guys.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 05:58 PMpostescript said...The problem with Krugman's comments about meritocracy is that it wasn't entirelyaccurate. Cicero was a self-made man, as were several generals that rose toprominence, such as Marcus Agrippa, who was Caesar Augustus's general, J. Caesar'snephew. The aristocracy did dominate, but there was room to social climb, if you will.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 06:10 PMr.d. said...DeLong's second explanation seems reasonable. His first seems like a pretty gratuitousswipe against Christianity. The Arabs did not conquer the West (476 is long before632), nor did they cause the fall of the Byzantine Empire except conceivably in someincredibly remote way (it fell about 800 years after Muhammad). Moreover, the Arabsconquered various peoples, some Christian, some not. Their conquests wereextraordinarily vast, stretching from about Spain to India at their greatest extent. Itseems like this Islam/Christianity theory has little explanatory power. I might add thatthe Western empire was already declining in a sense while Christians were still a fairlyweak group (perhaps the 3rd century).

-r.d.

Reply October 04, 2010 at 10:18 PMRon Calitri said...I haven't reached the middle of the Roman Empire in my second youth of historicalstudies 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 thepolitical causation issue, I'm just now reading A.B. Bosworth, "The Legacy ofAlexander," where everything is falling apart, between the "Inheritors." That prettymuch 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 theGreeks had long been rubbing. Keeping it simple, that was left to the Roman Republica century later. The changes, or non-changes at the beginning, that laid the board. Inthe 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 hadbeen globalized for millennia, there were simply no more advantages to be wrung fromlong-distance trade, that in order to be sustainable, needed to be packaged at Romanscale. Local means had become more sufficient to local ends, and trade intricacy hadprogressed, though that is a bit over-simplistic.

There are more similarities of the Roman period with today, than differences. Morepeople understand the similarities; but also the crowd has grown, its means of thoughtunchanged. People evolved for this, to take account of events through excesses ofemotion. Sadly, the skills of emotional manipulation remain expensive.

Silicon Valley Pirates indeed.! Water-balloon fights between fraternities on campus! Ifall goes right in CT, we shall have Wrestling in the Senate!

Reply October 05, 2010 at 11:42 AMNathanael said..."And these civil wars, crucially, were not about ideology, or nationalism, or any of thethings we might try to project back onto the ancients; they were about personalambition, pure and simple."

aaaaand how is this different from the problems we face today? Pray tell, ProfessorDeLong. From what I can tell, those inciting trouble may use ideology as a cover, butthe total incoherence of their ideology betrays the truth: it's about personal power,period.

Reply October 05, 2010 at 12:34 PMPeter Kauffner said...There was general depopulation, decline in trade, and deurbanization from about 150to 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 loweragricultural productivity and a smaller surplus to feed the cities. Vegetius writes abouthow the soldiers lost discipline, stopped wearing armor, and stopped carrying theheavy full-body rectangular shields identified with the classical Roman army. Cavalrywas no match for fully armored Roman infantry. Only when the quality of the infantrydeclined did the Romans turn to cavalry. As for silver, Rome did not have a silverstandard. 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 thesilver coinage.

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Me: Economists:

PaulKrugmanMark ThomaCowen andTabarrokChinn andHamiltonBrad Setser

Juicebox

Mafia:

Ezra KleinMatthewYglesiasSpencerAckermanDanaGoldsteinDanFroomkin

Moral

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