So often any of these single causal theories forget to look at timespan. Which was either decades or centuries... If system survived previously with mostly same things in place there is really no reason why such thing as lead pipes would be the cause of downfall part. By any reasonable conclusion the culprit in such case should be some disruptive innovation.
In the end gradual natural degradation of system is much more reasonable.
Complex systems fail due to single causes exactly that way. First the system runs well; once the cause is introduced the system adapts so that the visible cost is minimal, but the adaptations are costly by themselves, and demand further adaptations; then the adaptation cycle runs for a while (that can be very long), until everything finally breaks down.
It is very unlikely that the lead pipes that were there since the beginning would be such a cause, but the duration of the fall alone is not enough evidence that it wasn't caused by an immediate problem.
You can use a caustic solution to unclog your pipes and it will work flawlessly, every time for an indefinite amount of time. Then, at some point, you'll have leaks due to glue being eaten away, PVC melting, or other damage.
True for complex systems, but West Roman empire didn't "collapse" instantaneously, nor within a year/decade.
If I remember correctly what I read on it, the actual date is arbitrarily taken for didactic clarity, and it's the date the capital moved to another city. But the kingdom still called itself Roman, so contemporaries didn't quite notice the difference. BTW, this is how modern Romania got its name -- smaller kingdoms in the former empire called themselves the glorious Rome.
The curious detail is that Barbarian leaders actually wanted to become king of Rome and to be acknowledged as equally civilized, rather than merely sack and loot it. Some of them were actually legioneers, if I remember it correctly. So it's not clear if a legioneer sacked Rome and set himself as king, was the new state still Roman or already not.
Tainter deals directly with the Roman Empire, but the nutshell is the cost of complexity begins to outweigh its returns, requiring more and more resources just to maintain the status quo, until the entire thing becomes weak and susceptible to failures large and small.
- "Panarchy: Understanding Human and Natural Systems" (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Panarchy-Understanding-Transformation...) is also a fantastic book drawing from ecosystem science and proposes a general model for this. It's pretty well accepted in ecological circles but has been criticised for a lack of empirical data. The general model is the same as Tainter's though.
This is more or less how more recent scholarship looks at complicated, long-term multi-modal sort of events and changes. Fate of Rome is a fairly recent book that examines things like disease and climate change, for instance:
> So often any of these single causal theories forget to look at timespan. Which was either decades or centuries...
I don't think anyone is (was?) suggesting that someone replaced the pipes overnight and they were all dead the next morning, but rather that it was an extremely gradual process that after centuries of extending its implantation managed to reduce cognitive capabilities by a couple points, etc.
The simple counterargument "lead use didn't increase" manages to kill such a theory, though.
In software we (or at least I) often see situations where careful forethought put systems and checks in place that survive long after the responsible parties are gone, and it can be difficult to identify or accept that the project failed this year because Tom quit last year. There are too many forces arrayed against looking too closely at those situations, and once the wheels come off there's no longer a quorum to even rationally discuss such a thing, except amongst a few veterans having a beer and trying not to draw too much attention to themselves.
If you idiot-proof something well enough, it can take a long time for the Universe to invent an idiot good enough to pull the whole thing down. We tend to look at Rome as one of the oldest well-documented cases of the power of logistics, so it's not outside of the realm of reason to suggest that a good process might survive even a generation or two before Chesterton's Fence wins out. But whether that's due to a loss of cleverness or just human nature is likely going to be hard to prove.
Water piping isn't likely the primary cause of Roman lead poisoning. They were putting (acidic) wine into lead ewers to sweeten it and directly applying lead acetate powder to food.
Countries, let alone empires, are very large entities. I'd argue that they fail long before they collapse. Consider the Soviet Union. While the final reason they collapsed was economic, it would be difficult to argue that it could have continued to persist indefinitely otherwise.
In my opinion the Soviet Union had failed decades prior to its collapse (which is saying something for a system that only lasted 69 years), the root cause being the loss of faith of their own citizenry. And in such a scenario, any bump in the road is suddenly going to turn into a catastrophe. I think blaming the bump is failing to see the forest through all those trees.
The Roman Empire spanned from Great Britain, across Europe, and even along North Africa. And the speed of light was the speed of horseback or sail. Things, even when done with the utmost haste, were slow. And so in this scenario the separation between the failure and collapse was going to be even greater.
This line of publishing, much like nutritional science, is great for scientists. You can fudge data into flip flopping conclusions every couple of years. Infinite papers = tenure.
And here's a reason science can die in complex societies: because people want to score points over engaging with it. On a surface level it's easy to say "suggestions are changing, therefore it's a scam." But it's also a highly-expected outcome of a field being actively researched! Working as intended = ammunition for those who want to play games instead.
That's not to say there is no fraud, or bad actors. It's just to say that your comment falls hideously short as a potential way of spotting bad acting, so far short that it looks intentionally misleading.
> But it's also a highly-expected outcome of a field being actively researched!
But that's the point. It isn't "research". It's meaningless busy work to justify a paycheck.
> It's just to say that your comment falls hideously short as a potential way of spotting bad acting, so far short that it looks intentionally misleading.
I disagree. The guy was offering his honest opinion. Your comment comes off as someone working in the industry selfishly trying to justify your existence.
It's expected for hypothesis that make up a field to converge over time towards something resembling "truth".
When hypothesis change wildly decade by decade (e.g. in nutrition research) without convergence, you can reason that the system isn't working as intended.
In the nutrition example, I think the lack of progress is due to inadequete data and tooling to tackle such a complex field, as well as the limitations imposed by ethical considerations.
Another issue is research bias due to funding from industry. I don't this should be as much of an issue since the efficacy of scientific methods should be mostly independent of funding source.
If you could earnestly profile even a few scientists who have personally flip-flopped their way to tenure like that, you'd surely have a red carpet welcome across a thousand podcasts and alt-media outlets
Heck, maybe you could even get tenure somewhere if you happened to have academic creds of your own.
Surely someone's done it? Are you familiar with any such profiles that you could share?
How not to get published: "The general consensus is right."
So although individuals may not flip-flop constantly, fields as a whole do. Pick almost any topic in almost any field (especially humanities) and read papers 10-20 years apart. There's a constant cycle.
The cycle becomes self reinforcing too, because now you can interact with previous criticisms (Dr. A said this, but Dr. B said he was wrong. In fact, A was correct because B neglected to consider...).
As someone who made their living publishing scientific papers for over a decade and amassed a track record that showed that I was pretty good at it, I can tell you from first hand experience that you are absolutely wrong about this.
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.
You don't attack established authors and frameworks. The low hanging fruit I was referencing is choosing something easy to disprove such as "eggs kill" or "roman empire fell because lead poisoning". After these results are published, the process is reversed. You disprove "eggs don't kill" or "lead poisoning had no bearing on the fall of roman empire". Ad infinitum.
Yes, earnestly contributing your effort towards a controversial or unsettled issue is a good way to publish and make progress in your career.
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.
Null hypothesis confirmation is not a good source of papers. Framing of problem is part of the craft. It's not a secret that there is a big reproducibility problem in science today. Why? Because problems and results are hand crafted to go from "let's disprove this... oh look I did it".
One thing I really got out of the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan is if anyone tells you there was ONE cause of the fall of Rome, they're full of crap.
And if you really want to boil it down to a single reason, the best candidate would be "becoming militarily dependent on hired mercenaries and then not paying them" rather than something more interesting
Another, related view is to look at how many was on the dole. During the late empire, around 20% of the population in Rome was effectively on welfare, getting food from the state.
Instead of drafting these poeple into the empire, Rome recruited foreigners for the army, while the productivity of the domestic population kept going down. Eventually the state, needing to pay both the welfare receipients and the army, ran out of economic capacity to provide for both groups. Stopping the dole was if possible more dangerous short term than not paying the provicial armies, since the proletariat in Rome/Constantinople could riot instantly, and overthrow any emperor.
Wasn't the dole only implemented because land ownership had concentrated to a few extremely wealthy individuals? Only a few generations earlier, during the Second Punic War many landowners had either died or had their farms ruined to deny food to Hannibal, allowing the land to be bought at low prices.
Combined with massive influx of slaves from Gaul and other places making latin farm laborers too expensive.
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.
The problem with many of those argument is that the source base to draw such wide conclusion is really bad. And while we have some comments on some things in some regions, to make wider conclusions about economics for the empire as a whole is really tricky business.
Is that actually a useful correlation? Subsidized grain was a very prominent feature of the early empire. I'd be surprised if the late empire had a significantly larger proportion on it.
Early on, the dole was just grain. During the late empire, it was replaced by bread, wine, olive oil and pork. So clearly the costs were rising as the empire was approaching its end.
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?
It's also how the Byzantine Empire went into its downwards trajectory starting with the late 1000s. In fact, it was a little more complicated, as the Empire had to resort to using mercenaries because its theme system had been basically broken into pieces by the Empire oligarchy and by the Church, so Byzantium having to resort to mercenaries in order to defend itself was mostly, by that time, a consequence of said oligarchy and Byzantine Church doing their thing against the small Byzantine tax-payers.
And before someone starts saying that the Roman Empire lived "through" the Byzantine Empire all the way to 1453 I have to say that from my point of view that is only valid until the late 6th-early 7th century, by the end of Heraclius's [1] reign the Byzantine Empire was a thing totally different compared to the Roman Empire.
I can agree that it ceased being the Roman Empire per se, but I don't see it as being that much different from the end of the Roman Kingdom or the Roman Republic. It's still a continuation.
This exactly. The argument about non continuation are nonsense. Yes of course after 500 years it was different. Look at any state with 500 year and it will not be exactly the same.
I don't think this is a good argument. The Byzantine Empire was at a peak around 1000 and the main reasons for it decline after that is not mercenaries but rather that Basil didn't have an heir and his daughters were left in power and had no interest in ruling so that only a few decades later the state was disaster.
Combine that with the rise of a new powerful enemy and you have a disaster on your hands.
New evidence suggest that the Theme system was only barley function for a long time before the decline. In fact, going away from that system is partly why they were so powerful by the year 1000.
> by the end of Heraclius's [1] reign
I don't agree with that at all. If there is any reasonable point to talk about non-continuation it would be 1204.
Regarding Basil II, an empire shouldn't stay in/depend on just one dynasty, or just one exceptional person (even though it helps having such person at the helm), I'd say the rot was there even when Basil II was on the throne but the latter years proved that in the absence of such an exceptional leader there was almost nothing holding it up all together.
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.
I can see that happening. Thinking about Canada. The other day I calculated it would take 25 hours of work for the minimum wage worker to afford a weekend camping. And I think that's a pretty good indication we're pretty close collapse.
Workers not being paid enough, and out of control inflation is how the soviet system collapsed.
That’s actually a really interesting metric. Cost of living has really shot up in Canada while wages have stagnated. Everyone knows that housing has increased dramatically. This leads to less disposable income obviously. I’m 40 and grew up in Edmonton. Once or twice a year, as a kid and into my late 20s, my family and and/or I did a hotel type vacation in Banff or Jasper once a year, which seemed expensive at the time, and multiple times camping in the Rockies per year, which basically seemed free. My slightly more wealthy friends’ parents had a cabin and boat.
Now if I were to live in Edmonton again, I could probably still camp as if it were free but I appreciate your assessment that a minimum wage worked could not. Because I certainly could as a minimum wage worker back in the day. And I probably would never justify a domestic hotel type weekend or week long trip within Canada.
I'm in NZ, a few years ago a colleague and I would bitch to each other that we are in the top 10% of salary earners in the country, but we felt not that well off. We were worried about affording a house that wasn't a damp, drafty shit hole. But people in our position a generation or two ago were buying boats and beach houses.
I’ll take the devil’s position: Your are not owed by nature a footprint on the ground, or a weekend camping.
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.
I don't know why I'm replying to someone who thinks governments don't owe us democracy but people are allowed to complain when things get worse and I would prefer if previous policy didn't disallow increasing density in Canada. Incidentally I live in Tokyo now and it's now cheaper than Vancouver and the density (which is actually not as high as people think[1]) is a positive, not a negative.
[1] Just for fun, I checked densities. Tokyo 23 wards (the actual city of Tokyo): 14,500/km^2. Downtown Vancouver: 17,000/km^2. Downtown Edmonton: 5,000/km^2
> Workers not being paid enough, and out of control inflation is how the soviet system collapsed.
No its not actually. If anything the Soviet system collapsed because the elites didn't really like it that much. The elites had lost interest in preserving the system. Elites didn't like the party discipline.
There is a reason why Soviet collapsed and China didn't. Just having demonstrations and unhappy population does magically lead to successful overthrows of governments.
Workers going on a mass strike across the Easter Block countries in the "Solidarity" movement in the late 80s is how its generally viewed as being the beginning of the end of the soviet system.
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.
Yes and as many historical topics, it a romantic tail that people like to tell rather then a great analysis of the truth.
> The communist governments were put in a position where there were going to have to massacre their own people openly revolting in massive strikes.
That's what many governments in history did. And that's exactly the point, the reason a state fails is when the elites have not enough reason to defend the current system. When they do, then the army shows up. And in Hungary in 1956 they were willing for example.
I like Francis Spufford's comment: Stalin was a gangster who thought he was a social scientist. Krushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. Brezhnev and those who came after him were gangsters who only pretended to be social scientists.
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.
Based on what/ divided how?
Purchasing a tent, utensils, backpack etc ie starting from scratch, or assuming everything already paid for and just 'real costs' ie food, tent-place (ground rent?)?
Decathlon.fr or .co.uk prices can be pretty cheap, but I'm not sure where the costs start.
Based on Canadian Prices, a working guy would spend. And not even going very far from home.
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.
This has to be some kind of joke post. Or, you've never been camping. Or, more likely, you're just constructing scenarios to fit your perspective instead of being honest with yourself.
- Cigarettes and beer are a necessary part of camping?
- Not going far from home, but using ~23 liters of gas($50 @ 210/L) just to get there?
- Staying at the most expensive camp site(AA fee schedule) in Ontario?
- Paying for firewood instead of just collecting it?
I agree this is a troll, but I'd like to point out a few things:
> - Not going far from home, but using ~23 liters of gas($50 @ 210/L) just to get there?
Absolutely could see this. I live in the US, but the nearest spot I'd like to go camping is probably a $50 round trip. And I'd like to camp in different places, so we're starting to look at $50 being entirely reasonable if I made a list of places I'd like to camp. Not every trip, but certainly within the realm of possibility.
> - Paying for firewood instead of just collecting it?
For what it's worth, this is not allowed in many parks.
> - Spending $25/person/day on food?
This doesn't sound insane in the context of a trip, even a camping trip. You'll probably buy some special meat to grill, marshmallows to roast, some trail mix and maybe stop for food on the way out or back. $25 isn't really that crazy when you're traveling.
Even spending $50 in one direction on gas isn't insane for a weekend camping trip, a couple hours of highway driving at current prices, but I don't think anyone would consider that "not far from home" as OP stated.
> For what it's worth, this is not allowed in many parks.
Sure, but you don't need to camp in parks. That helps save on the $60/night fee as well.
> You'll probably buy some special meat to grill, marshmallows to roast, some trail mix and maybe stop for food on the way out or back.
According to OP it is just a "basic sausage", not even a special meat. I end up spending about $15/day on food and I just pack what I want with no thought to cost.
I guess my point is...none of what OP described is completely unreasonable for a random person's camping trip. But it is completely unreasonable when using this camping trip as an example as to how a person making minimum wage can't even go camping without saving up for weeks.
To me, this post reminds me exactly of things you see on reddit's antiwork sub, where people say something like "You can't live on minimum wage", and to prove it provide a breakdown of how much it would cost to rent a 2BR apartment downtown, $500/month clothing allowance, $400/mo car lease, things like that. Stuff that I don't even do for myself despite making closer to 7 figures than 5. I've never camped at a AA fee schedule spot, never spent $25/day on food(while camping), never drank $25 of beer per day(while camping), never bought cigarettes, etc...
I see your point. But the flip side is how better off people do these silly calculations how they can penny pinch a 10% cheaper price on something the poor person should buy instead of what they want. What they neglect to consider is the experience of trying to penny pinch. And the decreased value of what they end up getting. I can penny pinch and buy a really crappy loaf of bread for $3.5 or pay $6 for sourdough bread with walnuts. Sure one loaf is much cheaper than the other, but you really do get less for less. Same with campsites. Sure I can penny pinch and get a budget campsite, but it won't be in a provincial park with nature. And I wasn't quoting some exuberant travel experience. Just a simple outing, a place a father my want to take his kid camping and fishing one day. The food prices are very realistic for actual real food. Sure you can do it for 10% cheaper, and 30% less of experience, and eating crappy food. But this is someone's vacation. Shouldn't they at least be able to splurge once in a while.
Which campsite costs $59/night? Looking at Algonquin Provincial Park, a full RV hookup comes out to $53.68/night, the most expensive non-hookup is $47.46/night, and the cheapest one is $42.38/night.
Also, I remember being charged a convenience fee for booking online on top of everything.
Even at these prices I still think a provincial park is the best value for what you get. The park will be your entertainment for a full day, as it most likely has access to water for swimming, or places to hike. Unlike a cheaper private campsite.
Also, I personally had a really crappy experience staying at a private campsite before in Northern Ontario. Got yelled at for starting a fire after 11 pm, and subsequently followed around, including when I went to the bathroom. The campsite was run by mennonites, but it felt like I was on some cult's compound. Cameras everywhere and people walking behind you with walkie talkies.
And it wasn't even that much cheaper and had to pay for showers.
> never drank $25 of beer per day(while camping), never bought cigarettes
A bigger problem with the itemization of cigarettes is that listing them as a camping expense implies that you smoke more while camping than you would otherwise, which makes no sense.
I listed beer and cigarettes, because its a common vice of lower class working people. Less so than it used to be. But $15 dollars is just for one pack in Ontario. So the guy is rationing his cigarette pack over 2 days.
People counting and trying to ration how many individual beers this poor guy gets to have on his one camping trip are proving my point. As if that really changes the equation. Also, I'm not sure if you are aware, but they shrank the size of beers.
I listed beer and cigarettes, because its a common vice of lower class working people. Less so than it used to be. But $15 dollars is just for one pack. So the guy is rationing his cigarettes if that makes you feel better.
Also just tanked up, and it was $130. So a $50 would be less than half a tank of gas in my car. It's about a 2 or 3 hour drive one way, if you live in Toronto and go camping up north and/or get stuck in traffic.
Most of Ontario, at least the populated parts, do not have free camping anywhere near, and other places have no trespassing laws.
Cheaper campsites do exist, but really not by that much. $35 is pretty common, at least it was a few years ago. But do you really want to be stuck by the highway listening to cars going by in your budget campsite. I thought Provisional parks were built for the citizens to enjoy nature. And if you're going to save up for camping trip for so long, I hope you at least go to a good place.
You can't collect firewood anywhere you paid for camping. That has been my experience. I definitely would not try collecting firewood in a provincial park. I've read about someone that collected mushrooms in a local park, and they were fined over 5k.
You're also not allowed to bring wood with you.
Also, I just came back from the grocery store. A bag of cherries, which are in season, btw, were $15/kg. Low quality pork sausages (full of fat) are over $10. Salmon or any fresh fish fillet $25+. Real food, or even "processed corn" food prices are sky rocketing in Canada. If it was me going camping, $50 that would even be that much for Friday Evening, Saturday, and Sunday morning.
For someone from the other side of the planet (former USSR), this list feels very weird. I can't imagine paying for a campsite (nobody here does, you just go wherever you want and take whatever place is available), or firewood (you can always find a dry tree trunk somewhere along the road, or there's a friend of a friend who will bring some from his own house).
So although our minimum wages are absolutely atrocious by your standards (officially it's around $100 per month IIRC, but I haven't heard of anybody making below $200), half of this list doesn't apply, and the other half is cheaper by 5-20 times (a pack of cigs is ~$1 if I'm not mistaken, a liter of gasoline around 50 cents, etc). Considering all of this, we've been chugging along just fine… or not, actually. Braces yourselves, I guess.
I'm in North America and the list still feels very weird.
Going camping at a premium campsite alone (e.g. not splitting the bill with friends) only to consume $50 of beer and $15 of cigarettes is kind of a hilarious definition of camping.
FWIW, there are places where open camping is allowed in the Canada and the United States. The OP was using a specific car-camping site with reserved spots and amenities nearby.
I couldn't disagree more. A lot of working class people smoke, and when they go camping they typically drink beer. Let's say its a divorced dad, taking his son camping and fishing on the one weekend he has custody. A fairly common scenario.
He might not drink the full case, but he would probably bring one. Especially if his friends are campsite near by and they might drop by.
There might be places where you can openly camp in Canada and United States. I lived in BC and those where possible to find. In Ontario not anywhere near cities were people live.
this is for how many people? because camping trip fees are split usually. i assume 50 dollars in beer is not for one person in a weekend... when I was there right before the pandemic the beer didn't cost anywhere near that.
One guy definitely can drink a case over a weekend. I dont think you hanged out with many working people. I think most would not bring a 12 pack, but a full case.
But even if they did. Last I rember there was $10 covinince charge for getting the campsite tickets online, which you would want to do. Because you will not drive out there without knowing you have a spot if you saved up for a camping trip.
IDK. Camping can be very cheap. I went on camping trips all the time as a teenager and I had almost no money. Unless by "camping" you are talking about towing a small mobile home into a paved "campground" with electricity, water, showers and bathrooms.
I vaguely remember a magazine biography of an Italian scientist who lived near the mountains. In the summer, he liked to strike out on Friday afternoon with a hunk of bread and a hunk of cheese, think about scientific problems while he hiked around in the mountains, sleep under his jacket, and come home on Saturday or Sunday. In his location he didn't need any more material wealth to "go camping" than he needed to stay at home.
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.
I think they were called "hunting / gathering" for most of human history.
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's more just what they had to do anytime they traveled longer than a day's distance. I'm sure that happened for pleasure, but a trip specifically to camp seems like something that is more relegated to the modern age where you can get to a destination easily without having to just camp along the way.
If the minimum wage worker had free housing, food, electricity, etc. your calculation would make sense. Generally if you are a minimum wage worker who is working full time, a large component of your disposable income goes into those things (living paycheck to paycheck).
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.
I always thought favoring biological heirs was up there too. The Five Good Emperors were all adopted and some of the absolute worst leaders only got there through luck of birth.
Probably true, but it was so baked into the system that it was hard to escape. Even the five good emperors chose their successors via adoption, so on paper it was still direct inheritance. For Marcus Aurelius to pass over his son would have been a huge break from tradition.
The best attempt to escape this was Diocletian's tetrarchy, but that just led to yet another civil war.
What I find recently is that the folks suggesting Rome fell because of ONE cause, that one cause tends to be some political fringe talking point. So there's some other clues in there.
That's very reasonable. But there was a slow collapse of the economy that is an intermediate cause in the chain of events that is central to the fall.
You can speculate what caused that collapse, that in turn caused the fall and there are also many causes to consider, but again, there is one intermediate cause that is Christianism. The religion altered several aspects of the economy: slavery, commerce and lending.
Now you can again speculate about what make them think it was a good idea to adopt Christianism as official religion. If a previous crisis existed that shook the foundations of the empire. Anyway, it seems the solution solved nothing.
The eastern half of the empire was just as Christian and didn’t collapse for another thousand years, so you can’t really point to Christianity as the cause.
I don’t know why people obsess over finding a cause for the fall of Rome when it was one of the world’s longest lasting empires. We should be more interested in how it endured for over a millennia (nearly two thousand years if you count the Republic) whereas most continent-spanning empires fell apart in a handful of centuries or even decades.
That's actually quite a good remark. The most compelling theory I have read on the fall of the western part of the empire was that a mode of production based a land based elite that relied on slavery came to have a lot of limitations. The war machine kept it going as new land could be given to fighting soldiers (that would become less of a threat when settled) and fueled the economy with ever more slave.
When Rome invaded the hellenistic region, there was already an established economy that relied a lot less on big domains worked by slaves and that region managed to keep it that way. Thus when the slave mode of production came to a dead end, it was the part of the empire that relied massively on it that collapsed.
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.
> mode of production based a land based elite that relied on slavery came to have a lot of limitations
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.
Ooops I must have found it too compelling only because it aligned with my worldview (and was well written). Thanks for taking the time to assess those arguments.
If you blame Christianity, what about all of Constantine's other major changes? Was it the Tetrarchy? The formation of Constantinople? The restructuring of the government or military? The introduction of a new currency? All monumental changes that had about as much of an effect as the change of religious policy.
I'm no fan of Christianity, but the claim that it was central to the fall always comes off as somewhat lazy. Religion needed reform, and maybe they could have done it in a different manner which would have led to a more stable West but it just as likely could have destroyed the East.
If you blame Christianity, what about all of Constantine's other major changes?
It's the Economy, Steve. In particular, if you discourage commerce, you're playing with fire in an empire with such an extension.
I'm no fan of Christianity, but the claim that it was central to the fall always comes off as somewhat lazy.
I thought I'd added enough nuance. The three aspects I mentioned are not trivial and can be connected directly. In fact, it's not something that just occured to me, there's abundant literature on them and are considered most probable causes by a lot of scolars.
It is, to say the least, not obvious that Constantine's conversion to Christianity was the thing he did that had most impact on commerce in the Roman Empire.
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.)
> The religion altered several aspects of the economy: slavery, commerce and lending.
It does seem that the western half of the empire was more dependent on slavery. But Christianity wasn’t the only factor in that. With fewer conquests there were fewer slaves to take.
OK, let's say breeding humans is less efficient than making wars, to keep the slave supply. But if in a scarcity market you impose an outright ban, would it improve the situation?
For the Economy, I ask, not sure if slaves were better off.
Also, the ban wasn't the only effect I mentioned. Actually it seems that attacking commerce and credit could be even more debilitating.
If you look at _any_ complex event (war , disease , great success , great failure) you can use the same rule of thumb. As an example, did Europe in the middle ages succeed only because of science and technology? Did they take more risks because they could get credit? It's all layers and makes for a richer understanding of the world :)
If the hypothesis is correct, that lead significantly decreased roman mental capabilities, then this might be the root cause, for everything else. Stupid people make stupid decisions.
But wether the effect is significant enough, I am not qualified to judge.
I had a great history teacher in school who would use every opportunity (and there were many, obviously) to drive home this point. Not just Rome: most, if not all, major historical events and developments are driven by multiple causes.
Hmmm... the offending compound was lead acetate which was also used as a general sweetener, sugar substitute, and to preserve fruit/veg. So I think the scope for the influence of lead poisoning is a bit higher than suggested in the article. It's still a huge stretch to blame it for the entire downfall though ofc!
Well, if I hadn't known, you would have a hard time convincing me that crime waves in the 20th century were caused by leaded gasoline too, but the evidence really is quite damning.
I think we can agree that the Roman Empire fell as a result of some bad decisions. (Exactly which bad decisions, we may argue about). If lead really messes with your brain in subtle, dangerous ways - and it does - then it is at least plausible that some of those bad decisions would not have been taken.
But where we do have a large variety of comparable countries which phased out lead in gasoline at different times, we don't have a large variety of 1st century Mediterranean empires which phased out lead at different times. So we really can't know with any certainty.
So maybe it's more useful to focus on the more immediate causes of the fall of the Roman empire. It does depend on what we hope to get out of that sort of discussion - if it's a do and don't for modern politics, I still think "don't underestimate environmental poisons" is pretty well-justified.
This 'lead causes the downfall of Rome' claim was always totally absurd. How anybody could take it seriously is just crazy. And of course for the majority of the population living in the Roman Empire, it didn't actually fail it continued to exist.
Is there even a clear indication that lead use was significantly higher in the Western empire? If anything I would expect far more lead to exist in the east.
In general, any analysis of 'Fall of Rome' that does not take into account the East and how id didn't Fall can be pretty much dropped instantly. It ends up that you are not really talking as a Fall, but more like a reduction in size of an empire.
Looking at it that way, its actually more reasonable to look at Roman history as one of continues success and then decline. One could argue that the first ~1000 years of Roman state were it consistently getting bigger and then 1000 years where it consistently gets smaller. It started out as city state with king and ended as city-state with an emperor (ie King with a different name).
How does lead factor into this story? As 1 of 10000s of different factors that played a role. It was likely used for a reason that made sense to people back then and the overall effect could still be positive overall effect.
This article argues against the fall of the roman empire being caused by severe lead poisoning.
I would argue that it was more likely caused by widespread minor lead poisoning. If everyone is more forgetful and learns slower, then that isn't something that will be written in history books - the people themselves will just consider that 'normal'.
Yet an empire of forgetful and slow-learning people won't be efficient. Every task will take more man-hours to achieve. Productivity will be lower. Accidents will happen more frequently. Crime will be higher. Strategic mistakes will be made by rulers, but will also be made by local rulers and individual families. "Should we plant corn or wheat this year?" - someone with intellect may read a book to discover the best crop or do a small scale trial, while someone with lead poisoning may just do the same as he did last year because it takes less mental effort.
This is not true, you can check https://acoup.blog. He has a series on it. In very real terms Rome fell and the caloric intake and bone length of the Romans and their livestock took a massive nosedive.
I think the distinction that the parent is making is that Rome fell in the West, but the Eastern Roman Empire lived on for quite a long time afterwards.
Bret agrees, and notes this repeatedly in that series.
Where I think he would disagree with the parent is that they seem to be implying that the fall in the West was therefore not a particularly significant event that might deserve explanation, whereas Bret would point out that cities shrank, cows shrank, mail links got bigger (more vulnerable, less material, less effort) while fewer people were armored, and on and on... Things changed for the worse for a huge number of people. That things didn't change the same for another group of people (who, in some contexts, are quite reasonably treated as part of the same larger group of people) is interesting! But it doesn't make the changes in the West unimportant or uninteresting.
> Strategic mistakes will be made by rulers, but will also be made by local rulers and individual families. "Should we plant corn or wheat this year?" - someone with intellect may read a book to discover the best crop or do a small scale trial, while someone with lead poisoning may just do the same as he did last year because it takes less mental effort.
That seems to be transplanting modern education and growth norms onto a historic situation. Roman literacy was exceptionally high by the standards of ancient civilisation, which meant that one in ten people (probably not farmers) could read a book and doing the same as last year or as their ancestors was the rule rather than some sort of anomaly. People smart enough to make substantial changes would tend to be stopped far more by social structures than any minor slowdown to their cognitive abilities. In that sense, if lead poisoning had effects on modern information and intellect driven civilisations so small it took some pretty thorough statistical analysis against a backdrop of rapid growth to convince us there was anything to the theory at all, it seems unlikely it could have made so much more difference to daily life in Ancient Rome. A cognitively impaired Emperor could do a lot of damage, but the inherent flaw in the system was that sort of power also flowed to natural born idiots and every civilisation has those.
The sad thing is that this point of view is just not accepted to be discussed e.g. in case of (covid) vaccines or other large scale innovations. I'm not a fan of intelligence measuring the potential of a society but just to give an idea of the non-linearities that can be in play here: A reduction of just 3 IQ points on average leads to a 10 fold decrease in people of IQs around 140.
Many vaccines have some of the side effects of infection.
One such side effect (of both vaccine and disease) is minor neurological impairment. ie. you might not be able to remember where you parked your car last tuesday afterwards.
The side effects are typically so minor and/or rare that the risk-benefit analysis strongly favours taking the vaccine over risking getting the infection.
It's a controversial topic because humans are bad at judging small risks, and therefore there are groups of people 'scared' of the side effects of the vaccine and unconvinced by experts saying the risk-benefit is worth it. Some experts believe it is better to say "it is safe" rather than try to explain that there are in fact risks, but they're risks worth taking.
Note: The above isn't covid specific - the same could be said of nearly any disease and vaccine.
Here is a counter-point[1] which finds high levels of lead toxicity in regular citizens. While this article seems to mostly be reasoning based on a literature review, the counterpoint uses analysis of roman skeletons.
That article ends with a note about the source of lead being indeterminate, with a chance the lead leached into human remains after burial.
The issue also isn't just "did they have high lead levels?". The Roman empire around, with its lead pipes, for a long time. Why after hundreds of years would the lead of resulted in the downfall of Rome when Rome had flourished under the same lead-filled conditions previously?
While harder to define, it seems like as time goes on the Roman state apparatus becomes overtaken with people who are more likely to look out for their immediate benefit as opposed to act altruistically for Rome or their immediate community members.
My interpretation of this was the selfless people all died in battle, alternatively it could be the slow buildup of not only the individual but the societal effects of lead poisoning.
Your article seems reasonably persuasive. The thing about the OP is that it's about what the Roman knew - but just any sort of pre-scientific knowledge of poisons tends to neglect questions around long term exposure.
This was the pet theory of my chemistry professor in college. Having learned more about the Roman Empire, which didn't fall so much as shrank and withdrew to the east before being conquered by the Ottomans, I can look back and say "Yeah, I bet as a chemist he'd like to believe that."
Close. This was the downfall in popular belief.
The real cause was of course the victory of Christianism over Rationalism, which caused hundreds of years of dark ages.
Do you think the Roman empire was notably rational, and that if Constantine hadn't converted to Christianity it would have been more rational than it was under Christianity? That seems highly not obvious to me, and I would be interested in any evidence you have.
That's what we learned in our history lessons.
The roman empire was not build upon military, technological or social achievements, but on a strong organizational and legal structural framework, the res publica. A rational framework.
Which was based on philosophical and political advantages (still a monarchic slave economy), but mostly it was a stable and written groundwork. Different to the US legal system btw, which bends fore-, backwards and even more backwards all the time, depending on your social and economical status.
The allowance and then even the adoption of Christianity allowed the Christians to refuse to pay the Fiscus Judaicus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Milan
Before, their refusal with their continuous insurgencies led to drastic persecutions, and now this principal to honor the res publica was just abolished, the roman state gave up on the martyrs. Monotheism led to sanctioning of completely irrational stories as told in the bible and various other lunatics, in contrast to the more rational polytheist societies.
I wonder whether we are using the terms "rational" and "rationalism" in different ways.
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?
Kind of the reason Christianity got a foothold is that belief in the traditional Greco-Roman gods was dropping in late antiquity. Lots of new religions were beginning to pop up -- Christianity, the cult of Isis (which was based on a Egyptian goddess but the way they worshiped her was new), the cult of Mithras. At one way, the death of traditional paganism can be seen as a win for rationality, although subsequent events suggests that getting rid of religion entirely is difficult because new religions tend to fill the vacuum left by the old making no net increase in overall rationality.
Tomatoes took a while to get popular in Europe because rich people where eating them off of pewter plates and the acid in the tomatoes leached the lead out and made them sick.
It was the poor people without pewter plates that made tomatoes in Europe popular.
Yeah, and most leach into the wine. It's less of an issue with wine glasses since the wine is not in them very long, but decanters are a cause for concern. Tbh, I refuse to use crystal glass at all. Cheaper stuff is simply safer.
The infloor and in-wall heating systems are just recently being re-introduced! 2000+ years later.
Even small buildings in the wilds of england are found with hypocaust tiles. I just saw a video introducing a brand-new underfloor heating system using hot air! The not leaking liquid was a big selling point.
While not a proper historian I find Dan Carlin's observations very interesting, especially him comparing how, historically speaking, the middle class of their period had a lifestyle quite envious to our own, more akin to how we imagine the "idle rich" today (servants for all menial tasks, expansive homes, lackadaisical lifestyles and high quality education for personal pursuits). Underlaid of course by the same conceits we apply to the modern rich: they live on the backs of millions who, comparatively, are effectively slaves.
Historically the middle class in the past is the modern rich of today. It consisted of the bourgeoisie and the well educated elite who still had to work for their living (i.e. business owners, lawyers etc.) it wasn’t much more than a few percent pf the total population. Prior to the 20th century describing any person earning an ‘average’ income as middle class wouldn’t make much sense.
> Take Caligula as an example. We all know him as the mad emperor who supposedly once declared war on Neptune, then ordered his soldiers to attack the sea and take seashells as booty. The problem is that this story and the others like it all come from extremely late, hostile sources such as the biography Life of Caligula by Gaius Suetonius Tranquilus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 AD) and Roman History by Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 AD).
Actually, I think Caligula was more trolling than insane. Reading about him, reminds me not so much of insanity, as if a 4chan poster was suddenly given absolute power.
It my view, he had the Roman Army march around collecting sea shells for the lulz.
Absolute power can be its own madness apart from lead.
Basically when an emperor died he was either transformed into a god or demonized depending on which was more politically convenient to his successor. The truth seemed more like the emperors were quite similar in their cruelty and competence compared to the exaggerations of the surviving propaganda about them.
> demonized depending on which was more politically convenient to his successor
Didn't they straight up remove some people from historical records? [0]
That's something that stuck with me when visiting the Pula Arena in Croatia; In there was plaque, as old as the colosseum, where a name was scratched out.
Sadly the plaque didn't have any explanation with it, so I just assume that's a case of damnatio memoriae.
I thought the downfall of the roman empire was the result of near constant idealogical and physical warfare, a series of plagues, and then division and getting conquered
I thought we already knew that it was because of ergotamine poisoning because they only ate rye shipped from Rome, which went foosty on the way with ergot mould?
The Mausoleum of Augustus was designed to hold the ashes of not only Augustus, but also his family/descendants. Maybe we could analyze those ashes for lead before jumping to any conclusions.
Bret Devereaux recently went into a lot of detail on this in his blog [0]. Short answer: some things stayed the same (lots of sub-communities didn't see much difference), other things distinctly got worse (lots of people died). The process was also different in different areas. In general, in Western Europe, a lot of regions went from an urban-oriented centralized economy to a more decentralized one, causing big problems for the cities that no longer had the administrative prowess to support themselves.
A lot of people died - starved or got killed by disease, pillagers or such like. The population of Italy and Greece post the Empire was probably only half of what it was during the Roman times.
But even beyond that, the “fall” of Rome (the city) meant that its one million former inhabitants now largely became rural subsistence farmers rather than artisans/craftsmen/smiths/teachers in a city with theatres, race tracks, running fresh water, spas and food trucks. If the US underwent the same sort of change, you might call it “fallen” too…
Most of this occurred close 100 hundreds years later after the fall of Rome when the Eastern Roman Empire tried to reconquer Italy the inhabitants of which had really noticed that the empire had fallen in 476. And anyway the population of Rome hadn’t been close to a million for hundreds of years, it had been declining for centuries.
Lots of people died and disappeared, whole cities were abandoned, those that weren’t often had a tenth of their previous populations, people receded to subsistence agriculture, and literacy went to almost zero. If you took an interest in a subject and read a few books, you could be the worlds foremost expert on it. This was most prevalent in the west.
Rome was just a few sparks away from triggering an industrial revolution a thousand years early.
I remember reading a very entertaining story as a kid by John Christopher (typically an author of juvenile sf) in which basically the opposite happened (the protagonists are transported to an alternative 1981 in which the Roman Empire survived in stable form basically unchanged, and they're able to transform its fortunes with longbows and pendulums... although helping the underground Pope legitimise Christianity as a religion doesn't go quite as well as expected. Special props to the author for having the imagination to conceive that the pendulum could be used as a torture instrument!
I’m guessing it means that things went from one single government with lots of power ruling over a large population to many governments ruling smaller groups of people.
That actually happened 100s of years after the political fall of the empire and it also happened to a large extent in the East where the empire persisted.
So the political fall of the West as the primary factor in de-urbanization is not really a good argument.
> the fall of Rome was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided into several successor polities.
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."
The Roman empire had long assimilated other cultures into a pan Roman identity. This is not a compelling reason, either. Contemporary explanations typically point to two main causes:
* The split between the Eastern and western Roman empire caused the comparatively less wealthy Western empire to weaken considerably. Remember, the Eastern Roman Empire didn't collapse and lasted well into the medieval era.
* Lower crop yields due to changing climate patterns. Immigration is a symptom of this, lower yields prompting societies to migrate towards more productive areas.
Lead arsenate was sprayed directly onto fruit (like apples) as an insecticide until the government revoked its authorization for use on food products in 1988.
No OP and I don't know about 1988, but lead pipes are still common in the US, either many states have them or all states do. Flint, MI has a plan to eliminate them this year, maybe.
Lead in pipes is only a problem if you have the wrong water chemistry. If the water is naturally or or treated to have the right pH then lead phosphates form and no lead leeches into the water.
Hm, didn't know about that. I wonder if that is why my mom never bought canned vegetables when I was a kid. She always bought frozen if she couldn't get fresh.
I'd be interested too, the only thing I could find was the Lead Contamination Act of 1988 that was supposed to fight contaminated water coolers - pretty bizarre that this was actually a thing.
In the end gradual natural degradation of system is much more reasonable.