- Jan 12, 2012
- 27,286
- 113
It's over simplistic to say the least. It's like taking a page covered in dots, connecting only the ones you choose, and saying "look, it was a picture of a horse this whole time!" Well, sure, but there's a lot of other possibilities if you add in the dots you left out.
Industrial nations =/= agrarian nations. Agrarian nations can only support a limited amount of specialization, a limited amount of expansion, and a bad crop year starts things turning in on themselves. There is no industry to manage shortages. There is no real economy engine outside of agriculture and trading. Resources are vastly more limited and unable to weather rough patches in terms of war, natural disaster, etc.
Rome, at the end of the day, got too big to support itself given the logistics, communication speeds, political structures, and economic engines of the day. It divided itself into chunks to try and be more manageable, but those sub-units lacked a federal system to work out disagreements and disputes over resources turned into competition, which started the whole thing spiraling. Arguing about what caused the empire to fall is like arguing which organ failed first in a cancer ridden patient. Academically it may be interesting, but if it wasn't one it was going to be the other.
Compare to the modern US economy which can grow based entirely on a consumer uptick in spending. There's no need to conquer new land suitable for farming, forests to build ships, etc. You can grow your economy with the resources on hand. What resources does a Windows operating system consume from the land? How much does it enhance the economy? That's a HUGE deal that's so often overlooked in these 'decline of xxx empire" debates tryin to compare agrarian societies to us. We can grow in standard of living without growing in footprint. Modern logistics and communication make larger and larger areas easier to manage and administer, ease shortages, etc. It's the winter in Indiana and I can put my hands on fresh fruit for a buck a pound. It's so commonplace to us we forget what a huge advantage that is. The ability to feed and provide drinking water to the entire "empire" even when half of it has a drought/flood/tornado/what-have-you? That's HUGE.
While this is true and will allow us to avoid some critical failures which would have killed off an ancient empire, it is also true that there are certain matters of principle which will always result in the collapse of a civilization, most of which are matters of principle. Inflation, devaluation of currency, moral failures, overreaching government which necessarily is more resource intensive than a free society, and bad actors being allowed to abuse positions of power for personal gain are timeless issues which are just as deadly to a society today as they were thousands of years ago. At the end of the day, these elements leading up to the rejection of the rule of law in favor of the rule of man/a man operating on the currency of self-interest of one or a few rather than the principles upon which the society was founded will reliably result in a collapse of that society.