A ‘plague’ comes before the fall: lessons from Roman history

Their mutations are random, but its proverbial throwing gazillion bunch of stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks. Their numbers and short life span give them maybe 100 million? evolution speed advantage compared to humans. Maybe much more. Think how humans would change in say 100,000 generations.

Plenty of people died of COVID19 who were by no measure "weak" (other than susceptibility to COVID19) and your language suggests that viruses act upon some sort of generically less well-adapted genotype. Viruses kill people who are more susceptible to the effects of the virus (which may also differ from person to person). Those people may have previously been judged "strong".

"Weak" and "strong" are incredibly poorly chosen words to use in discussing susceptibility to disease.

The thing about endemic diseases is that we get them over and over and over. Eventually it gets you.

I was really hopeful at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that we would start taking the flu more seriously. There was essentially no flu season that year because of the precautions taken for COVID; we are actually removing one of the strains from flu vaccines next year because it went extinct.

Things have changed since 2019. In 2023, only around 1.5% of deaths were from the flu; of course, another 1.5% of deaths were from COVID. So as things stand now, instead of a 2.5% chance that we will eventually be killed by our major endemic respiratory disease, there's a 3% chance we will eventually be killed by one of our two major endemic respiratory diseases.

That's an interesting point, right? I don't know that we have so much control over our attention, living in the age we do. Mass media and advertising, the two pillars of a massive propaganda machine (in a sense of building consensus) continue to pump out opinions, which shape our perception of reality.

In that sense, our attention to the pandemic did not have a chance to develop organically, but it was rather guided and instrumented by the mechanisms in place. The relatively smaller subset of society that controls them (not in a conspiratorial way, but in a practical "business pays for minutes of airtime / ad impressions" way) gets to decide how we perceive world events.

I'd posit (given historical datasets and what we see in wastewater) that the level of infection across communities is roughly comparable to the past few years (why wouldn't it be? nothing's changed after all in our behaviour). It's only in public perception that the pandemic has diminished.

The statistics and cause of death was attributed to COVID if you simply had presence of the virus in your body regardless how you died.

The virus was especially good at killing the elderly. It’s plausible that once those people in the population died, naturally the kill rate went died.

However the mortality rate normalized as the total number of infections rose. It mostly killed off people in groups that were high risk. That's almost tautological - the people in those groups may not even have known they were high risk prior to COVID though.

In other words: if the purpose of the response to COVID was to prevent deaths, we largely failed. If the purpose of the response was to contain CoV-2, we definitely failed. In retrospect, the function if not the purpose of the response was to delay the spread and enable immunization from vaccines. I wouldn't call it a success, especially not globally due to the hesitance to waive patent restrictions for poorer countries, but it was less of a failure than the other two possible purposes of the response.

Of course the problem is that while the rightwing meme of "is it FROM COVID or WITH COVID" is already difficult enough to deal with, measuring the impact of COVID on patients who did not die is even more difficult because we not only can't fully know what variables we're looking for but those variables are also likely to be extremely difficult to isolate, especially given the stress of being in a pandemic, news coverage about the pandemic and the measures enacted as a response to the pandemic.

I feel like we don’t sufficiently acknowledge that a mass-trauma event also made the entire damn species more irrational and reactive, and that’s going to be our reality for a generation.

Instead we saw countries stepping over each other to buy last minute supplies from China because they had eliminated their stockpiles for "efficiency", politicians opportunistically demonstrating defiance in order to make a name for themselves and subsidies being tailored to the specific niche interests of major industries while public services were told to exercise "individual responsibility" instead of receiving additional funds. We clapped for the nurses and then went back to cutting the public health budget because the economy was tanking while a few lucky businesses redistributed societal wealth into their pockets.

Nobody demonstrated leadership. Anyone who did was kneecapped by opportunists. Even the EU couldn't commit to a joint plan without having individual member states decide they're special and allowed to do backroom deals to break the same rules they just agreed to. The only thing any politician could agree on was that the economy had to "keep running" at any cost.

What did I expect? I don't know, to be honest. But I expected something more coherent and closer to the lies we were told about the state and what it is good for. But what shocked me more is how after the mask came off and revealed that it's all always been false advertising, we simply went back to normal. But this already happened before, e.g. after the Wikileaks and Snowden revelations. I shouldn't be surprised that people prefer to forget.

The acute phase death rate may have dropped off (and the data collection has most definitely dropped off, stopped entirely, or became obfuscated, so it's hard to know for sure), but we know for a fact that about 15% of those who get sick, get a long-term sickness that ranges from seriously inconvenient to severely debilitating. We know this from collected data [1], not some statistical models.

My inner cynic concludes that in for-profit healthcare systems, having a growing proportion of the population be chronically ill is actually the optimal scenario: you can dole out treatments and medicines at high prices, and as long as your patients don't die or get better, it's a very profitable proposition. I'm not saying we're doing this consciously like some comic-book villain, but the incentives are aligned exactly so.

1: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article...

The Spanish Flu became as bad as it was because of a hot war - one of the hottest actually: WWI[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Timeline

For anyone wonder, H. G. Wells in The War of the Worlds

* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10445439-for-so-it-had-come...

* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/621562-by-the-toll-of-a-bil...

Very contagious diseases which are rarely mortal never go away. Like chicken pox

Not very contagious diseases which are always mortal don't spread far away. Like ebola and maybe the original pest. They require a reservoir lest they vanish forever.

Very contagious and always mortal diseases are self limited, they kill whole populations. One of the downsides of a global community is that almost the whole humanity is one population.

Self sufficient populations are found in the north pole. And in some island east of India called "Sentry island". I hope there are more

This explanation has some extremely obvious flaws. The world is still full of people who meet all the criteria of being particularly vulnerable to coronavirus. I doubt I’d be able to leave my house without seeing somebody who’s extremely obese or old.

The claim that "survivors become more immune than they were before" is an outright lie, contradicted by an ever-growing body of research. Covid-19 does not grant you lasting immunity - it weakens the immune system, it causes neurological damage, and affects the cardiovascular system in a dramatic way.

The initial policy interventions were heavy-handed in a time of chaos and relative ignorance -- and there's no place for them now. There's opportunity now to go after the method of transmission in a more systemic way, legislating "clean air" efforts to make indoor spaces less of a breeding/spreading grounds for airborne pathogens.

Some of us avoided being infected until we first got vaccinated.

Sea/river transport has been available since the first monkey climbed on a floating log and it was already widespread, cheap and convenient even 2k years ago.

> Covid wasn’t even that bad relative to other pandemics in the past.

Do you not see how these two statements contradict each other? What did you expect to see if the mitigations had worked?

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/09/fact-sheet-end-of-...

> CDC COVID-19 data surveillance has been a cornerstone of our response, and during the PHE, HHS had the authority to require lab test reporting for COVID-19. At the end of the COVID-19 PHE, HHS will no longer have this express authority to require this data from labs, which will affect the reporting of negative test results and impact the ability to calculate percent positivity for COVID-19 tests in some jurisdictions. Hospital data reporting will continue as required by the CMS conditions of participation through April 30, 2024, but reporting will be reduced from the current daily reporting to weekly.

You mean the collection and reporting of data, right? That's what's gone away?

What would've made the virus itself go away?

It's also true that disease, as with many other pathologies, tends to observe Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics: things get worse under pressure.

Overexploitation of natural resources (soil depletion, deforestation, elimination of megafauna, depletion of watersheds and aquifers, exhaustion of mineral resources) all contribute to a general weakening of the civilisation which invokes these circumstances. It's worth noting that the Western Roman Empire at the time of its collapse was not generally in a state of pervasive famine.

And Harper isn't giving a One True Way response, he is carefully, with a great deal of historigraphic and scientific evidence building the case that, as I noted above, civilisations and pathogens co-evolve. (My expansion of that to networks or systems and pathologies generally is my own armchair contribution, though based on my own observations of numerous examples at first hand myself.)

As much as I appreciate and respect Socrates, he (as with virtually all pre-Baconian philosophers) relied strongly on reason and extremely unsystematic chosen exemplars to posit hypotheses, many of which have since proven greatly mistaken. (His student's student Aristotle polished this to a fine art.) Baconian science is empirical, Socrates is best known for an interrogative technique.

This isn't to say that some of the suggestions made by Socrates and other philosophers are necessarily wrong. But it is quite rare for same to have been grounded in anything remotely resembling what we'd now call scientific knowledge, a phrase whose apparent redundancy is best resolved by noting that "science" now means not merely knowledge but the systematic approach of observing, deducing, testing, and validating hypotheses, something Socrates did not practice, and Harper has.

Which isn't to say that the shallow interpretation of Harper's narrative might not also be false. But for a third time, that's not my point, the co-evolution of systems and pathologies is, and I'd hope that at least some of my readers here have managed to grasp that concept despite my own bungled attempts to express it.

The term "confidence man" came into general usage following publication of a novel by that title by Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame). It is set on the first great interstate highway of the United States: the steamboat-plied Mississippi River. Harking back to Roman (and Greek) times, I find it quite telling that Mercury (or Hermes) is the god of messages, travel, roads, merchants, thieves, and cunning, amongst others. There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery.

(It's difficult to be fooled by those one lives closely with in small communities for long periods of time. Those may be scoundrels or be known to be untrustworthy but rarely gain confidence in Melville's sense.)

Another curious relationship I suspect about telecommunications is that they effectively reduce reliance on social factors of trust. Mind that this may increase overall societal trustworthiness in many cases, but it's through the replacement of, well, just plain raw trust (unevidenced belief) through monitoring, assessments, and independent validation. In an age before telegraph and jet airlines (or even steamships and railroads), once someone was out of eyesight and earshot, they were lost to direct control or monitoring until either they returned or an emissary could reach them, whether for hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Merchants, diplomats, ships' captains, colonial governors, and the like all operated autonomously for periods of time which would strike us as utterly alien today. Many of the practices, and much of the language used in communications, seems to me to have arisen to express, reinforce, or establish trust in such circumstances. Post-telegraphic language became, well, telegraphic (short, abbreviated, costing or paid by the word) not only due to the expense of the medium, but, carrying over to even non-telegraphic correspondence, because long sustained absences or periods of incommunicado no longer occurred.

(This is one topic touched on in The Control Revolution by James Beniger (1986): <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2549490M/The_control_revolut...> Not to be confused with another excellent book of the same title by Andrew Shapiro, addressing the nascent Internet and World Wide Web. Which, come to think of it, also addresses the themes of trust and communications.)

Prior to the 20th century, and even in through the first half of same, famine's population reductions frequently ranged from 10% to 90% over fairly wide areas. It's useful to keep this in mind as contrasted to several major famines of the past roughly 50--60 years, including Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, and the like, which dire as they've been, pale by comparison.

As Communist China's Great Leap Forward and ensuing Great Famine are often mentioned in this context, it's worth noting that a roughly comparable famine had occurred only about 20 years earlier, under the Republic of China, not to mention several similarly-scoped famines in the 19th century. The incidence of famine seems somewhat independent of political structure, and has arguably stopped under Communist Chinese rule. (I draw no causal inference here, just note the fact.)

Ireland saw its population fall by half during the Great Potato Famine of ~1840--1850, through a combination of direct deaths and migration, and only matched its pre-famine population within the past decade. (I've had to consciously note that this fact has changed recently, the fact that the population hadn't recovered was so profound.)

As to impacts: past civilisations were often far less complex and hence less dependent on highly specialised technical skills. We live in a world in which a relatively modest pandemic resulted in global disruptions of trade, commerce, finance, and governance. The global "bus factor" seems to be quite low. In a world in which 90%+ of the population tended farms or herds, and interdependence between towns and villages, let alone nation-states, tended to be fairly low, gave for somewhat greater redundancy. Ironically, the combined impacts of reducing populations (and hence pulling back from the famine frontier itself), as well as increased labour bargaining power and the liberation of property ownership often meant a comparative flourishing of civilisations following a major famine or plague. This is much discussed in the context of Europe's Black Death (25%--50% population reduction over roughly a decade).

If you narrow the geographic scope and widen the temporal scope, the tolls were much higher than 50%.

The consequences are difficult to de-correlate from the other effects of colonization, but no it wasn't pretty.

Read carefully :)

Do you though? I'm not sure.

Social mobility certainly has benefits, it motivates etc. Equally, it would seem advantageous for the weak-aristocrat to fall, making way for new blood.

Certainly we've seen the end of formal feudal aristocracy. The French Revolution started a wave of royalty-ending power. Today, while monarchies and aristocracy dukes, barons etc) still exist, they are not major factors. (With the exception of the UK where they lack political power but are still wealthy.)

The second generation of wealth, the industrialists, also wax and wine. Competition comes from within and without. Large brands have faltered, new industries have risen, and fallen, but social structures have remained solid since ww2.

There is clearly economic mobility, but wealth concentration seems less obvious in Europe (although a trip to Monaco might weaken my argument.)

What Europe has is a bit more discretion. Mysql, Nokia, Skype, etc and plenty more are, or were, European. But you don't see those founders in the press, and outside very narrow communities you don't know who they are.

Which I suppose brings me back to your point. I think you are correct, but I'd add that the stability of society as a whole acts as a good framework for that mobility. I'm not sure the American system of massive disparity is ultimately good.

Western rome kept feuding with itself and hiring germanic tribes as mercenaries. After a while, the germanic mercenaries were thoroughly trained in fighting western romans, and eventually western rome pissed off germanic mercenaries and lost the resulting war.

Eastern rome didn't have as many germanic tribes as neighbors, and they had less infighting to begin with.

One of the major reasons earlier-rome had so much military success was that they conquered their neighbors before said neighbors successfully copied all their (really quite amazing) military doctrines.

(I am not a historian, don't quote me on this)

the empire had incorporated new peoples for hundreds of years, through both violent conquest and people migrating in

= immigration is the only reason there was an empire in the first place, and that it lasted as long as it did - it's not like the Roman Empire was constituted of pure Latin OG Romans, lol. (heck, even their founding myths were that they were NOT Latins - it took conflicts for Latins to be recognized and gain citizenship)

so you can't just cherry pick a single time germanic peoples migrated in (as they had successfully many times) and say LOOK IMMIGRATION IS WHY THE EMPIRE COLLAPSED, it's ridiculous

and even if you insist on doing that, again, what's the takeaway? if your policy rests on there being no migration, in a world where there is migration and there's nothing you can do about that, it's a bad and doomed policy - successful polities are the ones with the ability to roll with and take advantage of it, not the ones that stick their head in the sand in some misguided attempt to remain static and hermetically sealed off from the world

It's called: "Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity"

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172187/es...

nitpick but ...

noble robber knights spelled it "their towers". even the peasants (those rare few who could read and write) would never have spelled it "there towers" :)

The form of society that is more efficient will always win out in the end. Same as companies that can produce goods more efficiently under free market capitalism will always dominate.

As I said the big difference is that serfs could also keep part of what they produce. They have incentives to work harder while slaves do not have any.

Feudal lords couldn't just do with them as they wanted. Yes, they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also got the protection of the lord in times of war.

Slavery was replaced as the dominant form for doing agriculture. Slavery still exists to this day but I don't see how this is relevant. We are talking broad stroke tendencies over a very long, long time. The more efficient forms of productions will always win out in the end. It shouldn't really be controversial that slave labor is not very efficient.

> By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs without land had become commonplace.

Historians today don't use the term "dark ages" because in reality they weren't that dark.

> The important part is incentives to work harder. Slaves only have the incentives to avoid the whip. They do not own what they produce. They need to be closely supervised and micromanaged. In contrast many forms of serfdom allowed to the serfs to keep some of the stuff they produced so they had incentives to work more efficiently.

Serfs often were provided a bit of land of their own that they could cultivate for themselves.

Note that many people point out rightfully that where were many forms of serfdom and some where closer so slavery while others were more free. Also the development of big cities only really happened towards the end of the medieval period so it was a longer process and not like immediate benefit.

> Isn't the entire narrative basically: Roman prosperity -> bad times -> rediscovery of classic values (renaissance) -> parity with the Romans 1000 years later?

Yes that is the narrative created by renaissance people to explain whey they are better than the people in the medieval period. It is basically propaganda that has survived till this day.

The truth is things got much worse before they got better. The whole inquisition, witch hunts, religious fundamentalism, yeah that happened AFTER the medieval period. That is modernity. It was this transition period that saw lots of war and plagues and much uncertainty. So it is natural that people longed for a romanticized golden age that they project their ideas on.

The dark ages were originally called dark in the sense that there are less written sources from this time period. They are "dark" in the sense that historians know less about them time, like blind spots. They are not dark because times where horrible. That is a modern interpretation.

And please don't draw parallels, you shouldn't, the society now is very different.

[edit] for clarification, the last sentence is a general 'you', I'm not talking about my parent who made an overall good point.

2. Cities can not sustain themselves but need the existence of villages that would sell them the food.

In the late medieval period farmers absolute would sell the surplus for money on the market. We also see also traveling merchants that would go from village to village to offer wares.

> Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things?

Some people in a village did not have land but were craftsmen like the iconic blacksmith.

An yes it was a development and early medieval period ages the serf was probably just happy to have slightly more to eat. It didn't all happen over night. Villages started very self-sufficient. Basically producing everything they needed themselves while we see much more diversification of labor later on.

3. I made a comment about the US South as well. An yes, history is not linear. There are just general tendencies.

There was a fair bit of specialization and cash-cropping in Rome, though - it's unfair to assume that Rome and the medieval period are the same here, when the key difference is Rome, which 1) acted as basically a giant trade union, economically, and 2) Rome was built around the mediterranean, which obviously made shipping easier than in the middle of Europe.

You are picking a very specific area and comparing it to the entire Roman empire? The proportion of the population that was enslaved was significantly higher in Italy than in the rest of the empire (and it was about on the same level as in the Southern States by 1860, around 30-35%).

I can't find reliable figures but it was significantly higher in Sicily and Southern Italy and probably as high if not higher than in South Carolina.

> Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer and grows all the same things?

No but there was still extensive trade on the regional level. Not by modern standards of course since surpluses were very low (but not by Roman standards since productivity had likely increased significantly throughout large swaths of the former Roman empire due to technological progress). e.g. the production of wool which was exported to the low countries made up a non insignificant fraction of the English economy.

> significant cash crop economy in medieval Europe.

I think people often tend to compare Northern and Western Europe during the middle ages with the Mediterranean centered Roman empire for some reasons. I'm not sure there was an extensive crash crop economy was particularly more extensive in Northern Gaul, Germany or Britain during the Roman period (probably the opposite since the population sizes seem to have been much higher in those regions during the middle ages).

The plantation/latifundia based economy in Southern Italy had collapsed of course but I'm not sure that the production of main cash crops wine/olives was necessarily much lower overall by the high middle ages even in Southern Europe (though of course it varied by exact period and region).

Yes, apart from the aqueducts, the sanitation, the roads, the wine, public health, public baths, public order, cheese, medication, law, education and entertainment the Romans accomplished very little.