Lead poisoning probably did not cause the downfall of the Roman Empire

And yes, some fields aren’t able to perform the kind of reliable science of physics or chemistry, and so end up with a lot of papers that just collectively oscillate around topics.

But I have a hard time seeing how that’s what the above commenter was suggesting.

A much better approximation to the truth would be something like this:

How not to get published: "Other authors are wrong."

How to get published: "These specific other authors are right, and I have built upon the solid foundation laid by their brilliant work to do this other thing that may or may not have any actual utility or be of interest to anyone."

[UPDATE] I actually did once publish a paper [1] that explicitly described (some of) the reasons that one of the then-leading theories in my field was wrong and how I thought it could be improved. It was more or less the beginning of the end of my career. I don't know if there was any causal relationship between these two events, but there was definitely a temporal one.

And now that I reflect upon it, it wasn't even me who pointed out the problem, I was actually just citing Ralph Hartley who had pointed out the problems seven years earlier. He was, AFAICT, never heard from again either.

[1] https://www.coursehero.com/file/60834776/tlapdf/

Heck, non-working pets (e.g. herd guardians, vermin control, etc.) were nearly unknown until relatively recently, because who had the wealth to feed a non-productive mouth?

It might be more the opposite, that only in relatively recent times have people been able to get away for a day or two without doing what we would call "camping." If you were a hunter-gatherer you'd grab a buddy (or not), invent some excuse like checking for game in the next valley, and rough it for a night or two. Now if you fuck off for a weekend you can check into a hotel or an AirBNB.

Gas $100

Beer $50

Cigs $15

Ontario Park Campsite $59/night x 2 = $120

Firewood 2 x $15 = $30

Some basic sausages and food = $50

Total $375

Min Wage $15/hour. Hours of work = 25 hours

Actually it would take more than 25 hours, because most likely that person does not live with Grandma and has shelter / food expenses. So might need to save up for a month, if not months.

So having a disposable income at all is a luxury, even if it's 10% of your income. Assuming that 10% figure, you can multiply those 3 days by 1/10% = 10 and you get 30 days of working for one weekend of camping. Not really great.

Manille (Manila? Capital of Philippines) has 43079 inhabitants per square kilometer (23sqm per person, including agriculture), China tries to do the same.

The key is nature doesn’t owe you democracy, and governments neither. We can store many people vertically if we remove their personality. What I mean is poverty doesn’t make the system itself collapse, it can actually survive pretty far, even thrive while everyone is expunged.

After all, USSR only collapsed in 1991, 69 years after Stalin took power, after killing probably 1/4 of its population in gulags.

We have been getting fucked for a while now.

The communist governments were put in a position where there were going to have to massacre their own people openly revolting in massive strikes.

I don't think Chinese government would survive another Tiananmen square incident.

We can add to that, after the failed hardliner coup, the country was run by gangsters who didn't even care to pretend they were anything else.

I stand by my opinion regarding the Heraclius era. I would have said Justinian, but one can still see traces of the Roman heritage here and there during his reign, but after Danube limes fell in the late 500s it wasn't the "hellenised" Romans battling the Slavs and Avars, but the Byzantines (yes, I know they were calling themselves the Rhōmaîoi).

Back to Heraclius's reign, once the Arabs came on the scene things were totally, totally different. I know people now like to diss on Pirenne for his Mohammed and Charlemagne and for how he insisted on the disruption, in fact the total destruction, of most of Mediterranean trade caused by their advent on the historical scene, but he was, in essence, right, especially when it comes to the "Western" Mediterranean (not sure how I would exactly define "Western" Mediterranean for that period, hence the quotes). Things were never the same after that. Also, the Byzantine Iconoclasm phenomenon wouldn't have happened without the close contacts with the Arabs, and, again, this is of course my own personal pov, Iconoclasm is totally a non-Roman-like phenomenon.

Still, the effect is the same. A large proletariat with very little income demanding to be fed by the state. With significant political power, based on making up a large percentage of the population in the capital.

It was implemented because it got votes. It's not a coincidence that it was restricted to people who could vote.

You get welfare whenever you expand the franchise too far.

What effect the dole had on the economy seems to be somewhat disputed. Clearly, far-left/marxist academics will want to downplay any effect and liberterian/right wing academics will probably overstate the effect.

Descriptively, it is a fact that inflation started to become a big problem not long after Marcus Aurelius added wine and pork to the dole.

Clearly, there were other factors involved, especially corruption. In fact, I think all factors were contributing to the same net effect, they all reduced the number of people (especially free people) contributing to economically to the economy and specifically the economy of the state.

- Slavery drove down the price of labor, laborers lost their jobs.

- The dole kept the laborers from re-joining the labor market, either as workers or by starting businesses.

- Corruption limited tax income from the upper clases.

- The governement introduced an increasing number of inefficiencies in the economy, by debasing the currency, allowing tax-farming and limiting economic freedoms (for instance, workers were turned into serfs and price controls on goods were introduced). All of which reduced the supply side of the economy.

- A mercenary based military was expensive to maintain, and very unreliable when not paid.

Another way to see the factors above, is that as the population (both upper and lower classes) were granted privileges during good times, these were seen as irrevocable rights by an increasingly entitled populace, while the comprehension of what goods and services were needed to make these benefits possible was lost to most people.

Gradually, the state was running out of money, and had to debase the currency and increase taxes to remain solvent. Both types of actions would only privide temporary relief. The debasement caused inflation, and tax increases led to corruption going up and production going down.

Eventually, the government ran out of ways to continue to pay the mercenaries. At that point, it was too late to convince the idle citizenry to go back to productive work or to serve in the army, as that part of Roman culture had died out.

Eventually, the collapse had to come. As barbarians took control at the borders, the economy collapsed, causing massive unrest in the entitled population. Partisan groups started clashing in the streets. Invasions, civil wars, utilities (such as aquaducts) shutting down and eventually an unstable food supply caused disease, hunger and death. At first, the population was going down slowly, then quickly. Over a few centuries the population of 1 million had become 30000.

In a 1000 years, maybe historians will have the same discussions about Western Civilization's collapse. Was it smog from coal plants, corruption of the leaders, mass migrations or simply the whole population becoming lazy and entitled that caused the collapse?

You did indeed mention "three aspects". But merely mentioning a thing proves nothing. For instance, you say that the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity had an effect on the practice of slavery, which had an effect on commerce. Plausible, for sure. But Christian Rome didn't abolish slavery or slave-trading, or anything like that. Do you have evidence that what changes Christianity brought to the institution of slavery in the Roman Empire actually harmed its economy?

Again, you mention lending. Many Christians have been opposed to lending at interest, or to lending at (what they see as) excessive interest. But so far as I can tell the Roman Empire did not abolish or greatly restrict lending when it became Christian. Constantine himself set a maximum interest rate of 12%, which doesn't seem unreasonably low, and it seems that that stayed in place for at least the next couple of centuries. (And, in particular, until after the fall of the Western empire.)

So I think you need more detail and more evidence for the claim you're making.

Also: "Christianism"? The usual term is "Christianity", as I'm sure you know. People sometimes make a distinction between "Islam" the religion and "Islamism" the political ideology, but if you make a similar distinction then it seems to me that what the Roman Empire converted to was Christianity rather than Christianism. Are you making that distinction, or some other distinction, or are you just hoping that your choice of wording will annoy Christians?

(I am not a Christian and think it's very plausible that the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity was bad for it and for the world. Also, possibly, for Christianity. So I'm not making the criticisms I do out of a desire to support Christianity and suppress criticism of it.)

This whole theory came from the 60s where Marxist historiography was very popular and really is not based on much.

It just basically taking the Marxism 101 and plastering it over the historical empire and the source base for it is a few political speeches.

Modern history that looks this can almost universally not verify many of these claims based on the sources used. Making incredibly complex economic argument to analyses a society where we have almost 0 visibility on economic data is quite a tall order.

By the time the empire was at maximum size, the Roman citizenship was very broad and while large scale slave agriculture was still a thing the majority of the empire was not large scale slave agriculture. Certainty far less so then it was in late Republic where the amount of slaves compared to the amount of citizenship was far higher.

The reality is that by 300-400 century Roman was a pretty advanced economy that had a very significant private sector, banking, a mix of all kinds of agricultural system and a huge amount of trade. Modern research suggest analyzing Rome as some elite land based economy is a really bad idea.

> Another interesting point was that the adoption of Christianity made the elite even bigger with the whole Church apparatus now living the life and putting even more pressure on the system.

This fails to account for the fact that Paganism also had many state sponsored position and that the state spent a lot on religious festivals. Both in Rome and all over the empire.

Also, it has to be considered that Christianity only became relevant by the point where the problems of the Western empire were already very apparent and the constant civil wars of the 300rd century caused massive problems.

In effect, Christianity is really more the result of the Roman instability then the cause.

To me, "rationalism" means one of two things. When talking about the history of philosophy, it's the opposite of "empiricism", the idea that we can know important things by means of pure reason without observation of the world around us. When not talking about the history of philosophy, it means something like "trying to believe things to whatever extent there are evidence and reasoned arguments supporting them, and no further" (notable subtype 1: "rationalist" used to be a common term for a particular sort of atheist; notable subtype 2: "rationalist" these days often means "person who hangs out on the Less Wrong website").

But you're talking about "a strong organizational and legal structural framework", which is the sort of thing that might be designed rationally or that highly rational people might turn out to like, but having one versus not having one doesn't seem like the sort of thing I would want to call "rational" or "rationalism", and it doesn't seem particularly opposed to Christianity as such.

When the Roman empire embraced Christianity it didn't abandon the idea of the "res publica", or stop having an elaborate code of law. The only specific thing you point to is that it stopped imposing extra taxes on Christians and murdering them when they wouldn't pay, which seems to me a good thing however wrong Christians are (I agree that they are very wrong), and not obviously "irrational" in any sense I recognize.

I do not see how the stories in the Bible are any more irrational than the stories told in the Roman polytheist traditions about their gods. Could you explain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit_and_the_Pendulum