[ExI] what if

[Anders Sandberg]

Many people overestimate the amount of military activity in the Roman 
empire. Sure, they were fighting left and right at the borders, but the 
vast interior was (when not having a civil war) mostly peaceful and 
doing trade, agriculture and the usual commerce of a civilization. They 
had great civil engineering prowess, but there were no new geometrical 
or mathematical results under the Republic or Empire, no mathematicians 
of note, and nothing we would call science.

Everybody raves about the loss of cement, but forgets that the Romans 
had de facto lost the academy/university of the Greeks.

A medieval person would actually have noted that they were low-tech: no 
stirrups, no knitting, no three-field crop rotation, no heavy plough, no 
blast furnaces, no complex mechanical systems (Romans had some, but they 
were special siege engines, while Medieval towns were replete with 
cranes, mills and crude clockworks). The medieval guy would have been 
impressed by the scale and overall wealth of the Romans, but he would 
know plenty of things they did not know.

On 15/12/2012 18:34, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> On 15 December 2012 19:24, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl 
> <mailto:rtomek at ceti.pl>> wrote:
>
>     Forgot to mention, but we are not 2000 years after Romans (and other
>     ancients) in terms of technological advances. Not even 1500. I
>     understand
>     than we surpassed them just some 300 years ago, with introduction of
>     calculus and steam engine... and rediscovery of concrete, of which for
>     example Colosseum and Roman Pantheon had been built.
>
>
> Indeed. I believe to remember that the agricultural returns (proceeds? 
> how does say that in English?) got back to Roman standards only in the 
> XVII-XVIII century.

Well... I have looked at this in some detail. World GDP per capita 
(which is typically measured via agricultural output) was relatively 
stable between the years 0-1600, with little evidence that the loss of 
the Roman empire made things go backwards. At most, when squinting at 
the data, it looks like Roman empire ended a period of somewhat faster 
total economic growth that started a few thousand years ago. And the 
middle ages were (in terms of total GDP) several times richer than 
antiquity. Overall, long-term economical growth is fitted quite well 
with a big exponentical curve.

[ For data I used data from Angus Maddison's "Historical statistics of 
the world economy 1-2008", John Bradley de Long, and Jan Luiten van 
Zanden. Plenty of uncertainty and quibbles, of course, but the curves do 
seem to match up well enough for our discussion purposes. ]

One can argue that in a Malthusian world any increase or decrease gets 
absorbed by a changing population size. So it did not matter that the 
Romans largely had their act together, their growth turned into a bigger 
but not per capita richer Empire. Everything went exponential after 1700 
or so because the wealth production outpaced the population.


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University

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