sylla1

You can't be serious; dismissing any precious piece of evidence (particularly any one like the exceptionally carefully searched series of hard evidence presented all along this thread) just because it may not be 100% perfect (not even the evidence on the without providing any alternative evidence couldn't be any more fallacious.

Our Guapo has presented here in exquisite detail several independent objective lines of research that largely coflate into the same conclusion.

An outstanding level of scientific methodological rigor by any standard, absolutely exceptional for any historical research, especially on any subject two millennia plus old.

Not being History any dogmatic discipline, there's of course no need to blindly accept any research conclusions; all what would be required is any nice alternative explanation ostensibly supported by any at least equivalent nice piece of hard evidence that may incompatible with the originally challenged conclusions; easy as that.

Lord_of_Gauda

I am not disagreeing with his broad conclusions- that per capita income of the Roman Empire declined during the 4th-6th century period. I am also not disagreeing with the fact that lower productivity sapped the internal dynamics of the Roman Empire, which made it unable to resist the Germainic invasions.

However, i do disagree on absolute numbers on the per capita income- the numbers bandied around ( per capita income of Athens circa 5th century BCE being 700 bushels of wheat per head for example) are simplistic speculations that has many assumptive factors involved.

It also has a very limited scope of determining the material and sociological get-up of a society, for the simple fact that 'per capita comparisons' in and of itself leads to what our economist friend would know as 'Nader-ism' : per-capita income increases with any and all social activity which may or maynot be actual benefit to society at any level: just like how opening a factory to make soap increases per capita income of the society, so does engaging in mass gang warfare: the victims of a shoot-out need medical aid, which increases 'per capita GDP', a car wreck needs clean-up and the toxic spill from Deepwater horizon created a GDP boost, because it created 'work' for people.
As such, an increase or decrease in per capita GDP in and of itself does not prove much: for eg, if society sees less crime, it will see less GDP production, since less 'work' is being done to protect people and property from crime. On purely GDP analysis basis, it would lead to the conclusion that the 'crime free society' is economically worse off than a 'society rife with crime' and as such, living standards of the former is worse than the latter- yet, that argument in and of itself is fallacious.

Our friend also ignores the 'chicken or the egg' problem : What we know for a fact, is that Roman lead mining declined in the 4th-6th century CE. Now, did the decline in lead mining (resulting from depletion of the mines itself) lead to the economic turbulence in the Roman Empire or did the economic turbulence in the Roman Empire lead to abandonment of large scale projects requring financing and logistical capabilities ?

fascinating

That's very different from what you said earlier, which was:
If per capita numbers were really as uncertain as lottery numbers (14 million to one chance of being right, in the British National Lottery) you wouldn't have any certainty that per capita income in the RE declined in the 4th - 6th century.

In the case of the RE, we have some good evidence of the rates of prices and wages, enough to make estimates, of at least the right order, of per capita income at certain points during the centuries of the Roman Empire. For example, the wages of ordinary soldiers are well known, at least for the first few centuries, and some literature and inscriptions do show prices of staples particularly grain, which was the basis of most peoples' diet. Diocletion's edict of 284 lists the maximum prices of many goods, together with the maximum wages for the occupations covering most of the workers in the Empire, and an estimate, much more reliable than a guess on a lottery ticket, can be made of the decline in the level of income for the great majority of people.

We can discuss cause and effect later, what is being laid before us now by the learned contributors in this discussion is hard evidence of economic turbulence, or rather, disastrous decline, which was suffered in the Roman Empire.

Lord_of_Gauda

True, but not necessary.
The way i look at it, i see it as this(an example, not accurate figures):

Roman per capita circa 1st century CE: 700 bushels of wheat +/- 1000 bushels
Roman per capita circa 6th century CE: 400 bushels of wheat +/- 1000 bushels.

When the error margin of a figure is much greater than the number itself, in statistical analysis, it is useless and highly speculative. But two highly speculative figures can still be comparatively found greater/lesser than each other within the same levels of speculation.

The 'price list' is still of an extremely limited scope to extrapolate economic data: what happened in times of plenty, what happened in times of famine, what was the actual enforcement of the law,etc. makes a big difference. Not to mention, commodity value is a very small part of economic evaluation- especially for an economy with lots of 'hidden labor' -ie, slaves and serfs who lived in the estate, worked the estates, were fed and clothed by the estate but earned little or no income. There is virtually no data on two of the biggest economic facets: real estate value/trading and the inflationary pressures exerted on this sector, the debt-to-income ratio of the mercantile guilds, citizens, etc.

Overall, we can say that there was a decline in material production- but whether the loss was essentially a 'Naderism loss of GDP' or a 'real, actual loss of productivity', is speculative.

I don't disagree with that. What i disagreed with, is the actual values of economic performance (per capita GDP) attached by the author to the trend.
It is quite possible to note a trend, see that the 'value of X is at a decline, through the posited timeframe', without actually knowing the starting or final value of x.

fascinating

But your example bears no relation to reality. Nobody ever suggests an error margin of plus or minus 1000 bushels in an estimate of 700 bushels production, because that could mean there were -300 bushels of production, which doesn't make sense. The price edict of Diocletian does add a certain amount of evidence of wages and costs, and it accords with the other evidence, of which there is much, that indicates terrible decline in production and trade.

bilbil

Arrival of Slavs maybe killed ancient world??????

Lord_of_Gauda

*sigh*

When you 'assume' what the production level of a farmer was, assume the population of the empire at a given date, assume the levels of taxation (in theory and the real, imposed version), fail to take into consideration the long term impact of famines and salination of agricultural lands into the equation, you do end up with absurdities like ' 700 +/- 1000 bushels'.

Ie, this is very basic error analysis. When your assumptions outstrip the empiric facts in scale, for most cases, the error margin outstrips the actual observed value. The most realistic example of this, is a simple gravity-fed Newton's second law experiment. If you ignore friction, your error analysis would lead to an error margin greater than the calculated value.

When this happens, the data is considered 'lottery type'. Not as in ' you have 1 in a trillion chances of being right', but as in ' pick a number between 1 and a trillion and each number has the same mathematical weight of error certainty behind it'.

This is what i mean when i say that the numbers being bandied around here- whether by professional historians or not (who by no means are competent in mathematics, nor do they show any mathematical error analysis of their figures or assumptions), are complete 'pie in the sky number'. if you say Roman Per capita income circa 200 CE was '100 bushels of wheat to 10,000 bushels of wheat', mathematically, any number between the two are perfectly valid.

Which makes the whole emphasis on accuracy that the poster (and most historians who want to sell their books/gain recognition for their papers) is trying to potray, completely nonsensical and academic dishonesty: by quoting numbers, these historians are trying to convey a sense of scholarly opinion backed up by 'hard science', when in reality, their numbers are not backed up by anything other than personal feelings/tendencies and the mathematics of those number derivation are woefully amatuerish.

fascinating

No, I say you are incorrect. Let's see if anybody agrees with you.

Lord_of_Gauda

I am incorrect in what ?
Claiming that the numbers thrown out there are 'wild guesses' ?

Well, lets see some numbers then and the methodology of their derivation, since not a single historian I've read has the basic competency in mathematics to analyze their data and give any sort of median deviation or error margin to the numbers they are assigning.

Someone says 'i feel the productivity would equate to 1000 bushels of wheat a year' or 'that seems appropriate' and thats what we have- opinions of historians, not data that stands up to mathematical scrutiny.

HackneyedScribe

We have evidence of the amount they earn, and the price of wheat from the same period. There's really not that much math to it when you have these two things.