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No need to boil the ocean
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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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Sometimes I'm appalled by humanity forgetting how to make cool stuff that they could do in antiquity and then had to re-discover it, like roman glass, concrete, etc. And then I come across stuff like this and it all makes perfect sense.
I've always been intrigued how scurvy has been "cured" several times but only really got figured out in the 20's after Shackleton's expedition. And then even still, scurvy is back in the news with people being too poor to afford food.
In the book How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, a team of economists finds the most effective use of money to improve humans’ lives is to buy and distribute vitamins in malnourished areas.
These are areas where people have sufficient calories, but lack certain nutrients in their local diets. It’s relatively cheap to just buy and distribute tons of vitamin supplements to fill in those gaps, allowing kids there to grow up without developmental deficiencies.
That book’s scope is the whole world, but I’m sure it would be very helpful to do the same in the US in food desert areas too.
Much of Roman technology was lost because the collapse of state capacity and according administrative capacity rendered the balance of agrarian to non-agrarian workers unsustainable.
A high equilibrium, where the products of population centers supports and enhances the productivity of the agrarian surroundings while administrative pressure (like taxes) encourage the trade between the two: If the farmers need to pay taxes in coin, they need to sell surplus to merchants who ship it to cities to sell it. Conversely, the craftsmen producing iron plows, pottery and so on need coin too, so they sell tools, which the farmers buy to improve their yield. The state also buys services (like construction) and the elite buys luxuries, further creating jobs and fostering more technological development.
(Obviously, the elite skim a lot off the value produced by others - just because they did some good for others with it doesn't mean they didn't primarily do a lot of good for themselves.)
But when internal strife, plague, worsening climate, desperate invaders and identity politics all start breaking that machine, it's hard to keep it from falling apart. And once the rural argarian production can no longer sustain the cities, the skills and crafts of the urbanites get lost.
The loss of Roman concrete happened before the collapse of the Western Roman empire. This is one exception to your insightful comment. Major public works were halted in the last century before the collapse. The last major project in Western Europe was the Temple of Minerva around 325 CE.
In Constantinople, a small church, tha Hagia Irene, has concrete walls. Larger works, like the famous city walls, don't have any concrete. It honestly may not have been an appropriate material choice, but other projects didn't use Roman concrete either. I think this might be because volcanic ash wasn't readily available.
Actually, it's not entirely disconnected.
Concrete was mostly used in large building projects. These were expensive and thus usually sponsored by those wealthy enough to invest in such projects, particularly if they were vanity projects. In Rome, that would be the Emperors. Outside, it would typically take multiple sponsors.
The decline in economic stability around the Third Century, the reduction in profitable conquest due to military power being invested in civil wars of succession and the increasingly expensive bribes for the Praetorian Guard all contributed to Emperors having less money to spend on such projects, with predictable results: Less projects were built.
This is vaguely recited from an AskHistorians post, all errors are on me.
What started out as a half assed comment with only 2 braincells, sparked a very interesting conversation about economics and antropology. It's been really insightful and it's captured my curiosity. Now I want to learn more.
Thank you nerds! Keep up the nerding, you guys are the best <3
That is just about the greatest compliment you could give me, and I'm delighted that my own fascination has lit some in you too.
One blog I can't recommend enough is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, a Roman and Military historian's look at pop culture depictions of history like the Siege of Gondor or the general stereotype of Romans, interspersed with general info about the social patterns around making bread, a discussion on the nature and severity of the collapse of western Rome, an argument on "Why We Need the Humanities" and even some thoughts on spaceship gun placement and a followup on starship design extrapolated from the factors that informed those decisions historically (like firing arcs or protection of vital components).
I'll give you a single, half-hearted warning that you may end up sinking hours and hours into binging this, but I honestly think that it's a good way to spend those hours.