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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">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. <br>
<br>
Everybody raves about the loss of cement, but forgets that the
Romans had de facto lost the academy/university of the Greeks. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
On 15/12/2012 18:34, Stefano Vaj wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAPoR7a5M_VzzB9PXcMweBMnLT8B7nrQrbVp5iF42=vuEPFpeYQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div class="gmail_quote">On 15 December 2012 19:24, Tomasz Rola <span
dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:rtomek@ceti.pl" target="_blank">rtomek@ceti.pl</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Forgot to mention, but we are not 2000 years after Romans (and
other<br>
ancients) in terms of technological advances. Not even 1500. I
understand<br>
than we surpassed them just some 300 years ago, with
introduction of<br>
calculus and steam engine... and rediscovery of concrete, of
which for<br>
example Colosseum and Roman Pantheon had been built.<br
clear="all">
</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
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.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
[ 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.
]<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University </pre>
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