People who are worried about the future of the U.S. often find
parallels with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And oh the
parallels there are! Here are a few I dredged up in a brief Internet
search: easy monetary policy, excessive bureaucracy, entitlement spending, income inequality, extreme pleasure-seeking, high military spending, oppressive taxation, shady campaign financing and privatized public services.
There’s surely something to all these concerns, and it is handy that there's at least one to match pretty much any political persuasion. Still,
I have trouble taking America-is-the-new-Rome arguments all that
seriously, mainly because of the implication that we're headed for a
Rome-style collapse. That's why, when I look for parallels with the
modern U.S., I tend to go for post-1300 European powers instead.
That's
because, when Rome declined and fell, there was no rival able to take
up the slack. The barbarians knew how to sack the place, but not how to
run it. Since the late Middle Ages, things have been different.
Knowledge has spread via print and other means; trade has continued to grow,
with occasional interruptions. The European economy, and then the world
economy, have been characterized by shifting fortunes, not outright
collapses.
Here, for example, from an article
by Roger Fouquet and Stephen Broadberry in the Fall 2015 issue of the
Journal of Economic Perspectives, is how European countries for which
there is adequate data fared from 1300 to 1800:
Northern Italy’s city-states pioneered capitalism, then ceded
leadership to the Dutch in the 1500s. Sweden rose to wealth during the
expansion of the Swedish empire in the 1600s, then began declining with the onset of the Great Northern War. England started a long rise after its civil war in the mid-1600s.
After 1800, according to global databases maintained by the Maddison Project, economic growth accelerated, with the U.K. leading the way.
In the early 1900s, the U.S. began challenging the U.K. for the lead,
and has stayed on top since the onset of World War II. But interesting
things have been going on just below the top, with France and Japan
passing the U.K. for a time before relinquishing their lead in the 1990s, and China beginning its great rise after 1980.
My choice of nations here is a bit haphazard, and past performance is
no guarantee of future results. Also, per-capita gross domestic product
isn’t the only valid measure of national success. Still, you get the
picture: Since the Commercial Revolution
began in the late 1200s, nations that have joined the race have lost
ground to others, and sometimes fallen back sharply due to war (as did
France and Japan in World War II). Some, most notably Argentina, have gone from leaders to perennial laggards. But none have fallen into centuries-long dark ages.
This isn't to say that modern human civilization couldn’t collapse in the face of a pandemic, environmental crisis, super solar storm, alien invasion, zombie invasion, robot uprising or really convincing virtual reality technology. But such a fall wouldn’t be confined to one nation. It would presumably take down the lot of us.
So
what is an appropriate historical parallel for the U.S.? Well, I've
just finished reading W. H. Lewis’s classic “The Splendid Century: Life
in the France of Louis XIV,” so I’m going to give 17th-century France a
try.
In those days, France was Europe’s superpower -- not as rich
per-capita as the trading cities of Holland, but wealthier than any
other major nation, with military ambitions to match. After a series of civil wars
at mid-century during which the aristocracy challenged the king, France
experienced a long period of political stability and prosperity. Louis
XIV became king as a four-year-old in 1643, and really ran the country
from 1661 until his death in 1715.
What was France like during the
Sun King’s reign? Lewis -- the older brother of C.S. Lewis -- is far
from exhaustive in his account. In the introduction he apologizes, for
example, for failing to include much of anything “on Colbert, Louis’
greatest civil servant, who worked with such unavailing energy to give
France the planned economy of a modern totalitarian state.” Hmmm, would
have liked to read that.
Still, the book offers a lot to chew on.
France in the 17th century saw its share of innovation and reform. The
military became stronger and more efficient, although Louis, as he may have admitted to his heir
on his deathbed, made far too much use of it. The arts flourished;
medicine improved, if fitfully. The towns, which had some measure of
independence, grew and mostly thrived.
But then there was “the
enormous chateau of Versailles, with its ten thousand inhabitants, in
which was spent six out of every ten francs collected in taxes.” And the
system for collecting those taxes, which “was in itself radically and
incurably vicious; as a contemporary remarks, if the Devil himself had
been given a free hand to plan the ruin of France, he could not have
invented any scheme more likely to achieve that object.” Proximity to
the king brought privileges and tax exemptions; distance brought a
heavier burden. As best I can tell from Lewis's account, a poor farmer
was likely to pay more in taxes than a government bureaucrat. Partly as a
result, farmers left the land to seek better lives in the towns.
Agriculture, the core of the French economy, began to fall behind.
If you believe that government in the U.S. has become excessively imperial, this is intriguing. Yes, most tax dollars are spent outside
Washington. And while our tax system may be too complicated, poor rural
residents seldom pay higher taxes than D.C. officials. But connections
to power mattered a lot in 17th-century France, and they seem to be
mattering more in the U.S. than they used to.
What happened next
(which isn’t in Lewis’s book) may be even more instructive. After Louis
XIV died, France struggled under unpopular kings as freer,
less-centralized England gained economic ground. As finance minister in
the 1770s, the great economist
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot tried to fix the tax system and revitalize
rural France, but Louis XVI threw him out after two years and reversed
his reforms. Then came revolution and decades of turmoil and economic
stagnation. It was only around the middle of the next century that
France joined the great growth boom of the Industrial Revolution. The
France that Louis XIV left behind was particularly ill-suited to adapt
to changing circumstances. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the
21st-century U.S. is too.
It’s
also fun to have excuses to learn about ancient Rome, since people keep
writing such great books about it. I’m itching to read “Dictator,” the
final installment in novelist Robert Harris’s great Cicero trilogy; Mary
Beard’s “SPQR” and Tom Holland’s “Dynasty” look really appealing too.
I’ve
been making this we-aren’t-Rome argument for a while, and I once got
Fortune magazine to pay for me to spend a few days drinking beer and
eating waterzooi in Antwerp, Belgium, to make the point that life in a former global financial capital isn’t bad. But Antwerp, while it accounted for an estimated 40 percent of world trade in the early 1500s, was a city, not a superpower, so maybe it’s not the best comparison.
Per-capita
GDP has been about the same in Japan as in France since the late 1990s,
which is why you can't really see the line for Japan from then on in
the chart.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story: Justin Fox at justinfox@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Zara Kessler at zkessler@bloomberg.net
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-26/stop-comparing-the-u-s-to-the-fall-of-rome
Still, you get the picture:
Since the Commercial Revolution began in the late 1200s, nations that
have joined the race have lost ground to others, and sometimes fallen
back sharply due to war (as did France and Japan in World War II).
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