Sublime

The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.

For as long as Rome could conquer new lands with significant wealth, its soldiers and emperors could enjoy spending their loot, and emperors even decided to buy themselves popularity by mandating artificially low prices of grains and other staples, sometimes even granting them for free. Instead of working for a living in the countryside, many peasa

A reasonable estimate is that across the empire at any one time there were fewer than 200 elite Roman administrators, plus maybe a few thousand slaves of the emperor, who had been sent out from the imperial centre to govern an empire of more than 50 million people.

Eines der wichtigsten Werke seiner Epoche ist An Essay on the Principle of Population von Thomas Malthus. Dieser behauptet, dass die menschliche Bevölkerung unweigerlich anwachse, dass daher der Konkurrenzkampf immer unerbittlicher werde und nur der Stärkste siegen könne.

Indeed, one could judge how egalitarian a society really was by exactly this: whether those ostensibly in positions of authority are merely conduits for redistribution, or able to use their positions to accumulate riches. The latter seems most likely in aristocratic societies that add another element: war and plunder. After all, just about anyone w

Even the Black Death reduced the population of Europe by only a third.

the question of why a stable international system suddenly collapsed after flourishing for centuries.

The destruction of sound money was pivotal in turning the former citizens of the Roman Empire into serfs under the mercy of their local feudal lords.