That doesn't look like enough trash for seven days.
Come on, do we really need yet more proof of the validity of Rule 34? I mean, it's Monday morning, for chrissakes.
I forget, what's rule 34? That if you have a "but" clause you should invert the order? That when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure? Dunning-Krueger?
It's a novel by Charlie Stross.
#1 was exactly my thought. Also, I don't see food waste. I guess that would tip the scales from gross to too gross.
5: That's "I don't even see food waste."
There's a smashed up watermelon in one photo. We waste a bunch of watermelon also. Watermelon is a nice idea, but it doesn't actually taste that good.
You know what might be instructive? Rural versus urban trash practices.
Out in the sticks, it seems to me, people have very different attitudes about what kind of trash they create/are willing to create. For instance, it's no problem to have extra dry paper trash, because you can just put it in the wood stove whenever. And if you know you're going to be hauling any big piece of trash to the town dump yourself, not to mention just regular trash bags, it seems like you have some incentives to minimize it that don't obtain for city slickers.
Melons in general don't taste that good. There, I said it.
Right now we have a honeydew melon in the fridge. Somebody gave it to us and we have to keep it until it rots so we can throw it away.
7- Obviously you're not knocking on your melons properly when choosing them at the store.
And oddly I feel like I just made a watermelon knocking joke here a couple months ago.
I don't understand this attitude toward melons. I posit that you're all eating them underripe.
Melons are the filler at all workplace-based catering fruit salads.
I always just pick out the raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries.
If there are bananas it means mass layoffs are coming soon.
For me, when the temperature is 95+, melons are great. Otherwise, their proportion of flavor-to-water is not high enough for me.
Also, as heebie says, they're too often used as filler in institutional kitchens, and sliced melon that has been sitting for 6-24 hours before you eat it is just slimy and gross.
18.1: Right. The Bud Light of fruit.
I used to call Jammies "The Champagne of Boyfriends".
But to return to topic the of the photo series, I think the photographer is pointing his lance at the wrong windmill. Yes, people in the U.S. throw a lot of stuff away. Hardly surprising, given that cheap, disposable products are the foundation of our entire economy.
And egg cartons! And pizza boxes! Quelle horreur!!!
You can recycle egg cartons and the top of the pizza box (assuming the grease is only on the bottom portion of the box).
But why are they laying in the trash? What on earth does that do besides be gross or be satire? It's not like the families around the world had to roll around in their week's worth of groceries for that photo shoot. "Break all the eggs over your head, pour out your milk over your kid...come on now. We want to illustrate how clean the Somali kid is, compared to the kid from Alabama."
If the point of the photos is that people are throwing out stuff that should be routed to the recycling bin, that's fair. But unless you have a compost pile in your back yard, that watermelon rind is headed for the landfill.
What on earth does that do besides be gross or be satire?
It's porn, obviously. (See comment 2.)
You never told me what Rule 34 was.
9: you are dead to me, natilo. I will grant that cubes of tasteless honeydew are abused as fruit salad filler, but are those strawberries not styrofoam-like at their hollow cores? bad melon is bad; bad everything is bad. I guess I'm not crazy about jackfruit, but it's ok in a curry.
I thought we had discussed Rule 34 before.
heebie: I think the project fails on its own lame terms by not having half-slices of rotten bologna glistening on the peoples' thighs.
But why are they laying in the trash?
LYING
Well, sure, they're posed, but I wouldn't call that a lie. It's art.
Laying, lying, the surgeon is the boy's mom. Who can say.
LAYING.
because heebie is in the south, technically.
7, 9: Are you both actually the same person and that person is the devil?
Musk melons are definitely in the upper third of fruits, and watermelons are one of the greatest things ever. A good watermelon in summer is one of the most satisfying things ever and a serious danger if you have anything you need to do before your system can expel the quarts of unnecessary water you've just ingested.
Melon is very tasty. What's more, when I lived in Shanghai in the long-ago halcyon days of my youth, you could get special individual-serving-sized honeydew-like melons.
I think that a problem with this type of photo - though obviously less so with these trash ones - is that it aestheticizes politics and plays into Western (and orientalist!) fascination with minimalism. No one ever wants to say "hey, actually it's kind of nice for a kid to have a Lite Brite and some dolls and modeling clay and a couple of stuffed animals instead of just one little hand-crafted puppet made out of sticks" or "actually I quite like having a bed and a couple of armchairs and several rugs plus a complete set of Fire King and a nice record collection rather than two iron pots, several plastic tubs and a straw mat". We're all supposed to pretend that Having Less Stuff is better on the face of it, more moral, etc, when all it really boils down to is that less stuff makes a better photo.
While of course it's possible to have too much stuff to use or enjoy, the problem gets framed as "you greedy people want too many things" instead of "methods of production and distribution are fucked and wasteful". Unless you have the choice of not having just, like, a straw mat and a cooking pot, getting stuck with just a straw mat and a cooking pot seems like a bit of a drawback.
Nice stuff is nice, frankly. More people should have nice stuff.
Natilo's Hierarchy of Fruit:
Wild blueberries
Wild strawberries
Wild/feral raspberries
Champagne mangoes
Regular strawberries
Regular raspberries
Honeycrisp apples
Ripe pears
Fuji apples
Regular mangoes
Ripe peaches
Kiwi fruit
Oranges
Bananas
Tangerines
Maraschino cherries
Regular blueberries
Limes
Tomatoes
Lemons
Coconuts
Papaya
Guava
Passionfruit
Watermelon
Red Delicious/Granny Smith apples
Honeydew melon
Cantaloupe
What are blackberries, chopped liver?
That's some hierarchy for an anarchist, buddy.
How do you think the fruit feels about it?
Well, the cantaloupe is probably pretty relieved, actually.
On the local mother's FB page, some woman was asking for feedback on possible baby names to go with the last name "Berry". They all sounded unnaturally funny to me, especially "Kort".
I went to middle school with a kid whose last name was Berry, first name Sarvis.
There are tons of options though! Barry, Cary/Carrie, Gary, Harry, Jerry, Larry, Mary, Perry, Sherry, Terry,
MARION,
I don't see what the problem is.
35.2 seems a bit removed my experience of the sheer amount of stuff in most middle class American houses. It isn't a bed and couple of arm chairs. It's having a fully furnished house, plus a basement or storage area filled with enough furnishing for another house.
Very Berry, obviously.
It's my contention that short last names require long first names. Menelaus, Maximilian, Anaximander.
35
It's also a really outdated concept of what it means to be wealthy. Stuff is cheap and ubiquitous enough that it probably in most of the world amount of stuff no longer correlates with wealth. IME with poverty and wealth in China and the US, poor people don't necessarily own less stuff. In fact, I'd say minimalism is a marker of UMC-ness in both places, whereas hoarding anything you can get your hands on is a definite marker of poverty.
Marion berries are the best berries. Not the best mayors though.
47: your use of undifferentiated "stuff" got me thinking...suppose you wanted to maximize the amount of mass you owned, in terms of material that's solid at room temperature. What's the cheapest thing you can buy?
There's just so very much shit around, especially if you have kids. Even if you try to only buy them stuff made in Scandinavia by elves using only birch and unbleached muslin, plastic shit starts to appear in your house every holiday or family visit. And that's before they go to school and learn about stuff they can ask for. Now, even going to a birthday party for another kids means you come home with at least five or six cubic feet of stuff.
49: I'm not sure, but I bet it's in Amazon in the toy section.
Not the best mayors though.
Absolutely the best mayors. If, by "best," you mean "most fun to read about."
What's the cheapest thing you can buy?
Based on this, lead is still your best bet.
Once two people in your peer group hear about Oriental Trading Company, it's all over. I'd blame Edward Said, but I'm pretty sure direct responsibility goes to some guy in Omaha.
In fact, I'd say minimalism is a marker of UMC-ness in both places, whereas hoarding anything you can get your hands on is a definite marker of poverty.
Yep! You see regular articles in the NYT from some rich person talking about how everyone should emulate their lifestyle of only owning 100 things or whatever. I have a friend who makes a lot of money and is on the "spend nothing, retire at 50" plan, or as we used to call it "being a miser". I show up at his apartment and the couch is gone. "I just got tired of it", he says. Clearly this is a good lifestyle if you figure you can just buy another one if you need it.
"I just got tired of it", he says.
It's possible he did something reasonable, like lit it on fire and cast it from the roof.
54: I'm reading that as saying concrete is the cheapest, but the caffeine hasn't affected me yet. I'm amused to see "Ice (H20)" listed as a ceramic.
I didn't fit in a waste management tour in either NYC or Boston. No-one else wanted to see Deer Island! No consumer composting in either? When the trash has to sit on the curb anyway, separating the compostables isn't more whiffy. And then you have somewhere to put the pizza boxes.
I suspect refrigerating melons ruins them, like tomatoes.
47: Yes, of course, which is why this type of photo series just plays into the usual practice of collapsing UMC habits with virtue, only using, say, an indigenous family in Bolivia as a prop . In a way it's another form of expropriation - even the image of poverty and lack gets taken and used to strengthen wealth and power, sort of like pointing to a woman in a famine-stricken region and saying that she's enviably thin or something.
Stuff is cheap and ubiquitous enough that it probably in most of the world amount of stuff no longer correlates with wealth.
I am pretty certain this is not the case. I think you could go to most countries and ask "how many cubic feet would we need to haul all your movable possessions?" - even ignoring their accommodation, which you probably oughtn't - and the answer would correlate pretty well with their wealth. I mean, and I hate to sound holier than thou, but have you ever actually seen inside the home of someone who is living in absolute poverty? Less than $1.25 a day? There is very little stuff in such a house. That's why the house is able to be so small.
But unless you have a compost pile in your back yard, that watermelon rind is headed for the landfill
At the risk of sounding insufferable, I can report that that's not true here, because we have municipal composting.
61: In rural areas at least they tend to have gear, like baskets or fish traps or some such. Space is at less of a premium, and they need more tools to get by.
61
Yes I have. I lived in one of the poorest regions of one of the poorest provinces of a developing country for two years. There may still be parts of the world that are "stuff" poor, but I doubt it's as common as it even might have been 10 or 15 years ago. A few years ago I read an article that most clothing you donate gets thrown away, because even the rag market is over-saturated. I'd also guess that most stuff owned by really poor people is scavenged or given as hand-me-downs/bartered. Never throwing anything away also leads to massive stuff accumulation. This stuff isn't necessarily valuable or useful, but it is stuff.
On another note, my grandfather's best friend (and possibly lover?) was a miser of the type they don't make any more. He used empty vegetable crates as furniture, and a broken pool table for his dining room table. He tied his pants with a rope, and only at canned foods. He left a million dollars in cash hidden under his floor boards after his death at age 98. He verbally bequeathed it to my grandfather, but left no written will, so it went to distant relatives.
I would agree that for urban poor, space is a big issue, and a limiting factor for stuff accumulation.
64: If he spent money on furniture and decent food, maybe his relatives wouldn't have been distant.
While I'm serial commenting, I'd say my biggest issue with "stuff" as a proxy for wealth is it detracts from things that are more important, like access to fresh food, clean water, education, and health care, all of which are intangible(ish) goods that matter far more for people's lives. At worst, it's used to claim people aren't "really" poor because they own TVs or air conditioners, and at best it's just kind of morally obnoxious and feeds into a sort of UMC classicism that's already been mentioned (e.g. one wooden toy is better than 50 plastic toys). Not that there's not an environmental or labor argument to be made, but in this framework it always comes out as a personal attack against the parents buying 50 cheap plastic toys, and not as a structural critique of capital or labor practices.
64: and you reckon that, overall, you couldn't see a correlation between "volume of stuff" and "wealth"? As in, you could be told "all this man's possessions will fit in the back of a car" and he could as easily be rich or poor? Conversely, you reckon someone with three ISO containers worth of stuff could easily be living on 6 RMB a day?
I'm prepared to believe "some people on low incomes have a lot more stuff than you might think", but I have real problems believing that there's no correlation at all.
68
I would say where I lived there was an inverse correlation between volume of stuff and wealth, which held to at least a certain level. The poorest people I knew kept rooms of junk (broken toys, busted woven baskets, 6 rusty bicycles, plastic bags of old clothes. stacks of feed bags), whereas richer people tended to live in well manicured apartments, with some of the wealthiest people having apartments that looked like IKEA catalogs.* Definitely by value, richer people had much better, nicer stuff, and they also consumed a lot more new stuff. They mostly got rid of stuff that was broken, or never acquired it in the first place. The poorest people I knew sorted through garbage and took home stuff they thought might be potentially useful, and AFAIK almost never threw anything out that.
*Older peasants who'd been forced into apartments by the government packed them floor to ceiling with stuff. I would say the absolute richest people probably had the same or maybe slightly higher volume of stuff spread out of a much larger area, and which consisted of things like expensive antiques or artwork. But, like, a large Ming vase takes up the same volume as two rotting crates.
But if the rotting crates are nested, they might be smaller.
Yes of course, billionaires with 15 homes have more stuff than everyone else, but the argument is not that the global .01% own more than everyone else, it's always "look you spoiled Westerner with gobs of stuff, you're better off than you think you are." It's not even that the argument isn't necessarily true, it's just that volume of stuff is the wrong metric to measure it. Focusing on water quality or exposure to carcinogens would be better, but it's much less photogenic.
It's my contention that short last names require long first names. Menelaus, Maximilian, Anaximander.
A friend of mine recently had a son named Anaximander.
Something you never think about in historical fiction: People would have been surrounded by hand-me-down stuff, some possibly lasting for generations. Not that they wouldn't have new stuff too, but some little horse doll that some guy in Poland made in 300 AD could still be going strong 100 years later.
They had collectables in a way we'd understand.
That's about a third of what I think about in historical fiction, though: material survival with really scarce resources. The other thirds are "horsie!" and clever interpretation of incomplete historical record, so.
material survival with really scarce resources
Scarcity is why the bodices keep ripping.
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Reusing material resources: anyone who wants a great-grandpa tie: get me your mailing address and tell me if you prefer autumnal or bluish colors and if you'd like one of the really heavy woolly ones. There is a first-come-first-served based on when I get exasperated or sell them to local hipsters.
Oddity: three plain cream wool ties, different widths as though they were bought at different times. Is this a sartorial sturdy commonplace with... with what? Flippanter?
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78: Ooh! I would like one. Are we friends at the other place? I can't remember.
I would be so goddamn annoyed if someone ripped my bodice. Cut the laces, you nitwit, they're meant to be replaced. Also, by the steel period the bodice is in many ways stronger than the wearer's ribcage.
80: I think working this out is a reasonable price for a tie.
I thought they just ripped naturally, because of frayed fibers and deep, heaving breaths.
Hmm, okay, I'll have to start a spreadsheet, like for one of those logic puzzles.
Generalizing enormously, they're* made of a couple layers of heavy denim** and often bound with wash-leather. Heaving breaths are likely to pop the breasts out the top, which can be a good time for all.
*taking bodice as including the corset. The meant-to-be-seen cloth fitted over the corset is also called the bodice, but ripping that just gets you the corset.
** best everyday equivalent of coutil IMO.
How does one get you one's email address?
Having just learned what it really was on Supersizers, I wonder if there's some ancient-Roman historical fiction that really gets into garum and what people liked about it, but maybe that would alienate the culture more than authors like to do. It appears Colleen McCullough's books are set before it became popular.
At the very least, I'll now get a chuckle whenever I hear "Forever in blue jeans."
88: Lindsey Davis.
http://www.garycorby.com/2010/10/garos-garum-ketchup-of-ancient-world.html?m=1
You can still buy garum, or something that's maybe like it and is Italian. It's not weird at all if you are anchovy-tolerant, which you should be, delicious on vegetables. We got some about a year ago and I use it pretty often as a condiment.
$9 for San Marzano canned tomatoes?
I have a cookbook compiling recipes from classical antiquity, and a lot of the dishes call for liquamen or garum. I've substituted patis or Vietnamese fish sauce; pretty tasty.
93
I was there recently, and paid almost $18 for a reuben. I would have been tempted by some of the delicacies but they were all well out of my price range. One of the jams looked good but it was $20.
Isn't it thought that the Romans liked salty food because they all had lead poisoning from their cookware? I dunno how salty garum is, but it sounds like it might be.
I thought the lead poisoning thesis had been pretty well debunked (that is, yes for sure the Romans used lead, but not at levels to cause general lead poisoning, and were aware of the issue despite having an artificial sweetener (!) made out of lead). Also does lead poisoning make you crave salty anchovy-based food?
Sometimes I wonder things like how Nosflow happened on the piece in 97, and then I just realize that the world is a big, wonderful place.
One thing that I learned from my kid's ancient Rome picture book, and I think that someone mentioned here recently, was that urban Romans didn't cook at home, except for the very rich, because of the way living quarters were set up and the risk of fire -- basically all meals were at the ancient equivalent of pizzerias.* Having a nice salty condiment to splash on your crap food probably worked for them for the same reasons it works for fast food restaurants today.
*sufficient explanation for decline right there.
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I've put some before-and-after pictures from my program on Flickr.
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Another militaristic, sport-obsessed, lazy, corrupt society, fed on bready fast food, populated with slaves who were too brainwashed to question their vastly unequal status, ruled by plutocrats and a Senate full of bloated buffoons.
Sometimes I wonder things like how Nosflow happened on the piece in 97,
I'm a big Thomas Browne fan.
Does anyone write historical fiction that actually keeps up with historians? There's lots of novel in the view, now well-attested based on archaeology, that Rome didn't "fall" or rather it only fell for the elite. (Skeletons from after the fall are taller and better fed than before. Estimates of life expectancy based on Roman evidence fit actuarial tables from 20th century starving shitholes like the DRC.)
(Skeletons from after the fall are taller and better fed than before. Estimates of life expectancy based on Roman evidence fit actuarial tables from 20th century starving shitholes like the DRC.)
This is one of my favorite factoids but it's true. In terms of freedom, health, and even technology* the dark ages were a better time for the 95% of people who weren't wealthy urbanites or urban commercial people, and even the cities didn't really collapse as much as people once thought. Fuck Rome!
*Mouldboard plow motherfuckers!
Ahimsub Terry Jones's Barbarians, which, while aimed at a popular audience, is still loaded with neat facts debunking the Romans and showing how much nicer the Celts and Goths and what not were.
Huh. Someone called Thomas Carleton in Arlington, Mass has barbarism.org - he's probably on here.
Barbarism.com, though, belongs to someone in Karachi and I wonder if he means it a different way.
I enjoyed The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins, short and seemed firmly in the total-crank-with-nonetheless-a-point tradition. Lots of physical evidence surveyed to argue along the lines ajay sketches out. Discussion of mass production and trade of standardized goods super interesting.
before-and-after pictures
Nice! How much of a weight difference is it between those two photos? (It is so hard to guess with weight.)
See the descriptions. Total loss is more at the moment.
Wow, Minivet! How is the emotional/social side of it?
101: That's some serious change. Congrats!
On Rome: This intrigues me. I guess I'll give the book in 109 a look if it isn't too cranky.
Don't read it, it's very tendentious, esp on the archaeology. Chris Wickham, Inheritance of Rome is the bestest and what you should read.
In addition to seeing some impressive thinning, I also saw J Robot's great pictures and, while reading old comment threads, figured out what 'idp' stands for. I had somehow missed that.
Huh, the thread has come around to being relevant to the post title again.
It made me have a beer, cheese, and some green onions instead of a beer, cheese, and a pulled pork sandwich with mayo. Because healthy.
How far up on the green part can you go before you get to the poison?
Wow, Minivet. Well done. What was your "program"?
Eating the whole green part of a green onion.
116: enjoying the intro. I'll go with that, since I haven't acquired a very strong taste for archeological discourse yet (although I ver much enjoyed Cunliffe's Ancient Celts).
J Robot's pictures were very nice, but I think I'll stop checking the Flickr feed for a while. At least on my work machine. I will never know the secret of idp's initials.
114: Emotionally, not a lot going on - I spent a week or two feeling chronically ecstatic, now more leveled off, still happy. Socially, I am now less walled off by meal substitutes.
Huh, I think these pictures are great---and I think the self-aware sardonic smiles of the subjects is part of what makes them great. To me it says, "yeah, we have a shit ton of trash, and it's kind of gross, but we're willing to pose with it to fuel the conversation about how to deal with it, b/c this is a systemic issue, not just a household one."
Where's the food waste? Well, if you eat enough pre-packaged food, you have very little food waste left over. Usually we have so little trash-trash we frequently go for weeks without actually bothering to roll out the grey trash only bin, some recycling (mostly office paper)---and the big problem is dealing with city compost (inevitably something gets stuck to to the kitchen compost bin and has to be scraped into the city bin, and that's unpleasant) and the worm compost (I generally refuse to have anything to do with that b/c I'm paranoid about accidentally killing the worms). My boyfriend's been out of town for about a month, and I was kind of ill for about a week a week ago, so I lazily stuck to all frozen food and packaged snacks and instant soup, rather than exhaust myself cooking for one. When I took out the "trash" I was discombobulated--there was almost no compost, way more recycling and enough trash to justify rolling out the trash-trash bin.
But Berkeley has an nonprofit recycling and gardening center (The Ecology Center) and a big mountain of city compost that gardeners fight over every spring. El Cerrito has a municipal recycling center that is, in a weird way, something of a center of civic pride and gathering---it's located at the base of a beautiful canyon, and its book exchange pile was once known as a sort of dork's pick up spot. Neither magically started out that way. They've been building up for years, and years of people volunteering at the Ecology Center, working with the Sierra Club, working with the the League of Women Voters, going to city council meetings, etc. Food waste and much paper (like the greasy bottom of the pizza box) and compostable "plastics" (like many of the take out containers) can all be composted along with the yard clippings. In fact most people's compost piles otherwise suffer from too high a nitrogen to carbon ratio. Cans and bottles can be recycled. Even some plastic can be recycled---other plastic goods, fleeces, etc. Activism and volunteerism on the local level to get these local systems in place, and maintain the, is worthwhile and productive. Photos like this, viewed in contrasted with photos where this stuff has been sorted and recycled/composted, could be a perfectly excellent tool for communicating *why* your local municipality+community needs to cooperate to make a more structure waste management system. Households can't recycle on their own without systemic change, but the systems are, mostly, local.
The problem is the plastic that *can't* be recycled, and the energy cost of recycling (vs. composting). There are companies that are switching to make packaging that's more sustainable. A more organized movement of supporting those companies and boycotting companies that use those horrible plastic clamshell packages and the like would make a big difference---and again, pictures like this seem like potential good measure towards fueling that movement.
If you got a place like, say, suburban West Bengal, where there is no recycling at all, and very little municipal waste services in general, and there are now western levels of packaging, and so all that trash ends up everywhere or gets incinerated right there, it's very depressing and makes one suddenly appreciate all the civil society and volunteerism and local activism and local good government that has gone into changing the waste stream in at least some parts of the US. And also the fact that local municipal government and local civil society is at least somewhat tractable to, and accessible to, local do-gooders.
on garum, Vietnamese fish sauce is a good substitute as it's made by exactly the same method, as far as anyone knows. This article by somebody who made her own, with a link to a description of the process. She says it came out saltier and fishier that shop bought nuoc mam, but that may just be the way she made it. I suppose there would be minor brand differences in commercial garum in antiquity.
I endorse TRO's recommendation of Wickham, which is probably the locus classicus for the period for this decade and the next. Read Ward Perkins, but after you've absorbed a discussion of what's known as the "Walter Goffart thesis", which is the most extreme respectable version of the 'Rome didn't really fall' approach. Ward Perkins isn't mad. The archaeological evidence has changed how people look at the period; also, WP walks back the most extreme implications of his thesis in the last section.
Heston Blumenthal made garum on some TV show, following an ancient recipe. He said it was really nice, iirc.
127: In my experience there's a very noticeable difference between brands of fish sauce too. I'm guessing it's the sort of process where minor differences at the beginning have big effects at the end.
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me goodraising awareness, I should run for my life
The best part of Ward-Perkins' book is definitely the part at the beginning where he gets into a magnificent lather about the explanatory plaques at the St. Albans museum (intended audience 8-12 year olds). The next best part is the really interesting bits about trade and manufacturing. After that you're down to the pathos of the last dude walking over the alps to collect the outpost's pay packet, or something like it. Basically W-P walked straight out of a Pym novel and his book is very entertaining. Plus short!
If Rome didn't fakk, was it not really a malarial plain of vine-covered ruins when the Enlightenment got back to it? Piranesi: faking it or really faking it?
132. It had been a malarial plain when Romulus laid the foundation stone, when Julius Caesar hung out there and when it was sacked by the Goths; so no change there.
The city contracted substantially after it ceased to be the imperial capital in the 4th century, and during the middle ages the monumental buildings were used as quarries for building material by the people who still lived in it. There were probably plenty of vine covered ruins for Piranesi.
Obviously nobody disputes that the western empire ceased to exist as a political entity in the late 5th century. The debate is over how violently it ceased to exist, and how much its ceasing to exist actually affected the day to day life of the average Joe.
Fewer, larger people? (Unless ag tech and Georgic egalitarianism made up for international food imports right away, which seems just possible.)
Late Roman elite dining was sort of famously wasteful. Plus, slave importation would have stopped with (or before) food importation so fewer people to feed.
Still, I bet the transition meant several very bad years and various dead people.
137 -- definitely larger people, with disputes about just about how many "fewer" in the countryside (there were definitely fewer people in some cities, though more in others). And also definite general improvements in agricultural technology (over about a 400 year period of diffusion, so not like overnight) and definitely greater egalitarianism and empowerment for individual rural villages, though as you say less international trade in food (though the scale of the decline there, while real, is also debated). Of course this is all subject to substantial regional variation throughout the Western Empire as a whole.
I have a personal crank theory that in pre-modern societies there's ordinarily an inverse relationship between the richness of a civilization's elite culture and how well its peasants are doing. If growth is slow to non-exsitent and elites are funded by extracting value from agricultural workers, basically the better off and richer the elites are, the more brutally they have to take surplus from a large but but more brutally oppressed population. Hence more temples and aqueducts (or maybe even gothic cathedrals or castles or whatever) and more poetry and plays and what have you are directly related to most of the population being worse off. If patronage pays for culture, and the money to fund patronage is basically extractive from a large agricultural population, there will be an inverse relationship between the material richness of a pre-modern civilization's culture and how well its average citizen is doing.
W-P's book is interesting on precisely that point, when he discusses the archaeological evidence for changes in e.g. farmhouse building materials and the skill sets available to manipulate them.
According to historical economists, there's a correlation in pre-modern societies between the level of urbanization and average living standards. So it's possible for the average level to be higher, which gives the elite scope to skim more. Renaissance Italy would probably be an example.
I don't think that's nuts, actually -- maybe not a perfectly reliable relationship, but it sounds at least plausible.
I think there's also, in the relevant period, something that looks very unfamiliar in the modern world, where more peace can mean less prosperity. That is, where you've got a strong central state, you can get a population of malnourished peasants getting wealth extracted from them in a fairly orderly way, but at pretty low risk of violent death. Where there's less centralized power, your population might end up being better fed, but also likelier to have their heads split open with axes. It's kind of hard to take a pick between the two options, which means being worse off.
The strength of the central state would depend on upon potential competitor and the importance of fixed resources (e.g. hydrolic despotism).
143 -- yeah, I already knew that my crank theory is mostly wrong, as a general rule, for that reason. But there's still something to the crankitude that I will discover through tireless research more speculation and popular-level reading. Mostly its that growth is so low that your pre-modern ruler can choose to ratchet up the oppression as a way of taking more surplus and do nearly as well (and much more intentionally) than by just hoping that average standard of living improves.
To add to 144, very big cities in antiquity: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch were largely vanity projects for the rulers or the elite class. The size of their populations was quite disproportionate to the level of economic activity. So not merely were there vast bureaucracies to support, there were hundreds of thousands of unemployed or underemployed people who had to be fed to prevent them rioting.
The population of Rome in, say 300 ad consumed most of the surplus grain grown in north Africa that wasn't consumed by the local elite. When the western emperors move their capital to Trier/Milan/Ravenna the population of Rome fell, but the key moment was when the Vandals occupied Africa, so that the state grain ships stopped coming and the Roman poor either starved or had to go back to the land. This was obviously good for the African peasantry who had a lot of extra food available.
There is a theory that governments were first created when a subset of marauding raiders got tired of marauding and instead of going around stealing everything from different people, they became "stationary bandits" who always stole from the same people but were careful to leave enough for them the people to survive and reproduce.
I'm not aware of how well this is supported by empirical evidence.
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Come enjoy the majestic beauty of scenic AlaskAAUUUGH!
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I guess I don't know what evidence they would find except circumstantial.
|| So, I've got this case at the highest court in a neighboring state, and a few weeks ago they sent both parties a 'save the date' notice asking us to block 5 dates at the end of August/beginning September, and let them know if we were unavailable any of those dates. We were both available each of the 5 days. I just got the scheduling order: not only is the hearing going to be 10 days earlier than the earliest saved date, it's going to be held at the law school on the second day of new student orientation. For the next 3 years, professors will be saying remember that guy who got slow roasted by the Supreme Court back during Orientation? Don't do it like that. |>
150: No need for pause/play. That is one shocking photo. I can't wait to see it in my nightmares.
Obviously nobody disputes that the western empire ceased to exist as a political entity in the late 5th century.
And what is Anatoly Fomenko, chopped liver?
Dear Mr. Khan,
I have a new idea. Instead of killing everybody like we did in Samarkand, how about we just kill enough to scare the rest. And not steal all the food/burn everything. Then, when they grow more food next year, we can come back and take that. This would mean we could take the same amount of goods without having to ride farther and farther away each year.
Sincerely,
The Members of Hemorrhoidal Horse Archers Local 156
Oh, it's just the week before. Still, why did they even ask?
156: Love this.
It was probably written by Mr. Peabody.
148 is interesting. I liked Inheritance of Rome a lot as well. I've read in a couple of places that many latifundia were also basically motivated by vanity rather than profit.
Chris, can you recommend any reading on Diocletian's economic reforms or that supports the idea that Constantinople was inefficient in the same way as Rome? Trade crossroads there should have been considerable, everything I've read about Byzantium is pretty old, doesn't adress any specifics.
156 in great.
150 reminds me of the pineal gland sucking appendage in From Beyond
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NMM to "Headless Body in Topless Bar" headline writer Vince Musetto
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I thought 159.2 was addressed in Inheritance of Rome itself, if not it's something I'd picked up from elsewhere. But late-antique Constantinople before the 8th century was definitely a vanity imperial project largely controlled by (I think) Egyptian grain; once that dried up after the Muslim conquest, Constantinople had a huge and precipitous population decline.
Or, really, after the Persians conquered and then the Arabs conquered. The 7th century sucked for the Byzantines, but they deserved it because they were dicks.
141 et seq.: There's some interesting work relating average income in pre-industrial societies to inequality, and specifically how close the societies came to the maximal inequality compatible with keeping the peasantry alive (PDF). Most of the data is naturally from the early modern period, but that paper does include guestimates for both the Roman Empire under Augustus and Byzantium c. 1000; the later was poorer and closer to the maximum inequality frontier than the former (though not by much).
the maximal inequality compatible with keeping the peasantry alive
This sounds suspiciously like something the Koch brothers would be interested in learning more about.
162. ?? I had thought that the main problem for Byzantium was the Seljuks, then later the more capable Osmanli. Leo III defeated the Umayyads, and there were Byzantine rulers in Syria after that. The Seljuks didn't get that much of Anatolia.
I'm not that sure about broader context, which is why I'm asking-- basically, seeking good reading for Byzantine-Abbasid conflict and Byzantine - Persian- Turkish conflict and trade. But even if Constantinople shrank, Byzantium was a significant empire until the Seljuks started seizing territory.
167 -- Wickham says that Constantinople went from about 500,000 in the time of Justinian (550) to maybe 40,000 by 700 or so. The 7th century really was a period of near-total collapse for the empire, though population estimates are all over the place. Constantinople had recovered a lot by the 9th and 10th centuries, as had the empire as a whole, but its economy and society were totally transformed by the intervening period, and it probably never got back to the level of the era of Justinian. The empire as a whole was a third of the size in 950 as in 550.
500,000 in the time of Justinian (550) to maybe 40,000 by 700 or so.
Did the plague that hit in 540 and then kept recurring for a while do most of that?
170 -- maybe, but as I say Constantinople also lost its main source of food in the period and food was state-supplied then. But I am not an expert!
The paper linked in 165 is really really great. I love the concept of the "inequality possibility frontier."
I'll reread some stuff- Leo III toook power after a period of anarchy right around 700. He defeated a considerable Umayyad army, Wikipedia claims at least 80k strong.
I don't see how that can be consistent with a total population of 40k. Leo III is a polarizing figure-- basically I understand him as leader of one faction in a brutal civil war. That means contemporary sources will have a bias about him and about the preceding anarchy. Wickham is a good historian, obvs, I'll reread what he says.
I think the 40,000 must be the population of the city, not the empire.
Righ, but even taking ancient sources with a grain of salt, the Umayyads mobilized a large fleet and army to attack Constantinople, Arab as well as Greek sources for that. Leo held the city against this attack. If the total population of the city in 700, just before Leo got there, was really only 40k, then Leo III instantiated Halfordismo.
The source materials on that siege (i.e. Wikipedia) are interesting. Leo had lots of help from Bulgarians and the Christian crews of Arab ships. Plus, really high walls.
|| 153 -- So, one of the clerks must be a lurker, because they just rescheduled the case. Probably figuring I'd dissuade the students before the first day of class. |>
We are aware of all internet traditions.
Note to self: if I want to learn some history, I should probably just do a quick pause/play here first to learn what all the latest scholarship is.
Everybody arguing about history here is just looking at Wikipedia before commenting.
Wait, we're supposed to do that before commenting now?
Don't spoil the mystique. I mean, that's what I'm doing, but I assume everyone else is an offhanded polymath.
I don't even remember how I did graduate school without it.
I think at some point in my life I must have just sat down and read books.
But that just doesn't sound plausible.
Sometimes I look at other sites, such as my favorite, Yahoo! Answers.
Today I had lunch early and then got stuck on a long phone call until after I meant to leave work, so by the time I got home I was starving. The fastest thing I could throw together out of what was in my kitchen was a pile of kale, some scrambled eggs, and bacon. I just thought I should let TRO know I took a tiny step toward Halfordismo.
Why not just stop at a bar on the way home? I did that and I saw a woman who looked like the young, hot version of one of my enemy neighbours. I couldn't think of a polite way to ask if they were related, so I just drank and left.
neighbours
Wait, are you one of those people who adopt an English accent when they're drunk?
It was supposed to read "elderly neighbors". I'm not sure why my phone went British.
189: Middle class sexual fantasies are weird! Stupid sexy Flanders.
190: I'm one of those! One of my top twenty most annoying tics.
its book exchange pile was once known as a sort of dork's pick up spot
There's a local recycling center here that has a book exchange. I wondered about it, but then figured it was for people who were about to recycle books, to give them an option that didn't destroy the books. But my new theory is that someone was trying to start a dork's pick up spot.
150: Huh, I'm surprised I hadn't heard about that. I was even in Fairbanks last week.
Maybe you're not very attentive. Have you tried ADD drugs? I'm not sure which one is best. So start with dexidrine.
This is kinda neat:
http://flyer.psychedelicencounteringthedivine.org/
194: The story did involve birds. Maybe you just blocked it out of your memory to escape the horror (of the birds and possibly of the bitey eye-worms).
I was probably just preoccupied by worrying about the state budget.
I really like potatoes. It's not just a "ground apple" -- apples are potatoes of the air!
And wasn't my Ambrose Bierce/potato pastiche funny?
191. Enemy neighbours sound much more fun. I recommend large numbers of Bulgarians and Christian sailors. Plus, really high walls.
you guise, I need to push back on the "poor people have lots of possessions" thing. drive along a road in indonesia or lane in india sometime at night--you can see all the way into everyone's house. even comparatively rich people with a concrete block house and a fluorescent ceiling light and a TV often don't have a sofa. people that live in a corrugated-iron roofed shack don't have jack shit. people with dirt floors don't have lots of items weighing them down IME. they can see violins on tv at the local hang-out though.
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Completely unexpected and shocking use of the n-word by a colleague just now. Not someone in my department but he was giving me and another colleague a lift home and we were talking about cars and we got on the subject of shitty American cars from the late 70s and 80s and he said how the n****rs like to drive really big cars and not believing he'd said that I came back "excuse me?" and he repeated it and then said, "you know, black people." He's not a native English speaker, not an Arabic speaker either, he's from southern Europe. I told him that you just never ever say that word in English - literary usage a la Mark Twain or Ishmael Reed to the side - it's the ugliest word there is. He said he didn't know and I believe him, he's very young and a very nice guy but wow. I'm thinking he's probably heard it from other (white) Americans before and thought nothing of it. I hope not. Or maybe he saw Django Unchained recently and got the wrong idea. Weird and disconcerting.
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FWIW, in my experience, poor Scottish people, do quite often have a lot of possessions. Of course, they are pretty rich by global standards. But it's certainly true that a lot of skint Knifecrimean people have a lot of crap stashed about.
I think it depends a lot on how available stuff is in the country. [Relatively] poor people in rich countries with a lot of consumer goods will maybe hoard. So you might see an inverse correlation. [Absolutely] poor people in poor countries with few goods will have almost literally nothing - in rural Madagascar, you would not believe how important items of clothing were to people. Particularly shoes. There, amount of stuff is very obviously proportional to wealth.
China, which I think might be Buttercup's example, is a sort-of special case. For one thing, the megacities are first world, with the same pattern of consumption. And for another, a huge amount of goods are produced in China. So I would imagine that people in even the poorest regions have much more access to "stuff" than their equivalents in countries which don't have such developed cities and/or manufacturing bases, even if they are as poor in absolute terms.
Now I know two tings about rural Madagascar. (The other one is about lemurs.)
"in absolute terms" would probably have been better expressed as "in other regards" - earnings, capabilities, etc
That they exist in rural Madagascar is pretty much it.
Also most of the world's supply of chameleon and baobab tree species! And lots of other weird and wonderful flora and fauna.
Visit before it all disappears! And donate $$$ to NGOs like the one I worked for!
I probably don't have the budget to do both. Or either. I should have gone to look at the Lemur Center when I was in Durham. At the time, nobody would go with me because I keep making jokes about it being a restaurant.
the megacities are first world if you have the right hukou.
204: That's consistent with poverty here, and I expect elsewhere in the first world. It encourages hoarding.
Did you joke that they would eat the lemurs, or be turned into delicious bananas and fed to them?
212:
First world cities also have incredible levels of poverty - I'm not suggesting that everyone in Beijing spends all day in air-conditioned shopping malls and can access healthcare. But then, I wouldn't suggest that for Washington DC, either.
213: Whenever somebody would say they went there, I would ask what lemur tasted like.
I think there's a significant difference between being poor in DC and being a migrant laborer in Beijing.
The wikipedia page (I'm not good at clicking links, but pretty good about looking up words I don't know) helpfully mentions that it is difficult to correctly prepare tenrec.
Ahimsub my great aunt and uncle, farmers all their lives on a small Maine farm. Not "poor" of course, they owned their own land, but especially when they had kids at home, I'm sure they would have qualified as low-income. So when they died, their kids found every single electrical device they'd ever purchased, which, having ceased to function, they'd put back in the original box and stored in the barn. Very different relationship to stuff than what we would think of as normative. They were also big weekend drunks, not sure if that had any correlation.
216: Fair point.
Relatedly, my ex-roommate has just finished working for an NGO that works specifically with migrant laborers in Beijing (I'm not making this up, I promise). Whereas I'm living in Beijing, but haven't spent much time outside the fifth ring-road. We met in Madagascar, so I'm going to ask his opinion on the "stuff" question and I'll post if he gets back to me.
218: Unfortunately it's not difficult to catch them. Children would often be tasked with waiting outside their burrows until the tenrecs woke up, at which point the tenrecs would run straight out into their hands.
Dunno, I mostly ate oysters, steak and "Apollo" instant noodles out there.
That's an entire order you'll probably never get another chance to eat again.
True, although I discovered that I would trade almost any other foodstuff for cheese.
216: Yes, it's possible that the social mobility in Beijing is greater.
225: Yes, again, if you have the right hukou. If you're from rural Shaanxi good luck. If you're a poor African-American in DC--which is actually one of the better cities in terms of social mobility out of the bottom quintile--and DC isn't working for you, you could at least in theory move somewhere else--say, Atlanta, which surprisingly isn't as good as DC on social mobility--and not be permanently saddled with poor-person-from-DC-ness.
I agree that once you pass that barrier you're probably right. Although China is in massive flux and that might not be true in the longer run.
|| Lawyers: this is bullshit, right? |>
China also has a significant enough difference in cost of living that being dirt poor in Beijing can still be enough to live comfortably in one of the poorer inland provinces. Where I lived, most people would work in Shanghai or Hangzhou as migrant laborers for two long stints (one before marriage and children, one after), and then retire to their enormous house they had built with their savings over the years.* Some people would stay in the area, where life was more pleasant (no pollution, slower pace of life), but the pay was much worse. And the city also drew in people from even poorer parts of the province, although pay was low and cost of living was high enough that people who could would try to get to a big eastern seaboard city. For really poor people, I would agree that access to stuff is mostly access to other people's waste, and even a poorer area has enough stuff that there's plenty to go around, if we're talking about sheer quantity. Where I was, people in absolute poverty also couldn't afford to buy stuff, outside of the most basic necessities, and took very good care of what they did have (e.g. darning nylon ankle socks.)
I'm sure there are still parts of the world where absolute poverty means absolute lack of stuff, but I would guess that this will decrease with large-scale manufacturing moving into South & Southeast Asia, and China investing like crazy in Africa. I know from friends who do work with charity that there's a problem of people in the US assuming poor people in undeveloped countries will be grateful for anything, so they donate worn out toys and clothes, and then charity workers have to throw them out. Again, maybe it's not true in Madagascar, but there is enough cheap clothing in the world that the global second hand and charity markets are oversaturated and most of what we donate gets thrown away in the end.
*Interestingly, lots of people would still cram all their stuff into their first floor. So the first floor had floor to ceiling piles of junk, and the second two floors were completely empty. Lots of times people would also keep their old house as a farming implement storage shed, and then store all their newer crap in their new house.
It's also weird in China that house size is a U-shaped curve, where the poorest and richest have the biggest homes, and people in the middle live in smaller apartments. Rural homes in China are massive, and where I live (a "rural" city), the large houses within the city were by and large in rural townhouse style and mostly built by displaced peasants, some of whom supported themselves by renting out rooms on the cheap. Where I live is famous for preserving most of its old architecture, so now you have wealthy Shanghainese and Beijingers buying up 100+ year farmhouses and turning them into country houses. Housing prices for old homes have increased about 15-fold in the past 15 years in certain areas.
227 -- it is, but figuring out precisely why (or if! but I think it is) it is illegal or unconstitutional is a very interesting and not particularly clear-cut issue.
224: like that dude in treasure island!
228: that's kind of like in the rural philippines. we built a house for our previous maid on property she owned outright as an inheritance from her dad. it's a pretty sweet little house (though the western-style kitchen cabinetry she installed got fucked hard by flooding from a cyclone, much to her dismay--and only in for six months). real toilet (fancy!), cinder block and stucco walls, tiled roof. she owned other property too, which she sold. there's so little work there that even someone like her, who owns land and had two years of post-secondary schooling, could still only support her family by working thousands of km away as a maid. in the case of her hometown (also my current maid's same barangay/neighborhood), people really do still want cast-off stuff. we buy m---- extra baggage allowance going home and also send man-high boxes of stuff (one is going out today.) people use husband x's old work shirts for rice-farming sun/mosquito protection. I have them made to measure periodically, they are just as cheap that way here. makes for mildly incongruous scenes. it's true that some of this may be down to our maids' unwillingness to throw anything away ever. it may not be an economically rational choice, were it not that I were paying shipping. when we moved from our house to our current place we sent SO MANY things to the philippines. the treasure in a way was the american girl dolls, endless clothes, and motherfucking furniture (did I not realize children grow up quickly?). there are about ten girls in m----'s town who got The Last Doll from the little princess. we combed their hair after spritzing water on it to make it perfect (this really works!), and packed each with a wardrobe. well, selfishly as a giver I liked that as the treasure, I know other things were more useful.
but in their barangay there are nice houses like my former maid's, and houses with dirt floors, like her sister's immediately adjacent--a cause of sibling strife, unfortunately. they decidedly don't have a lot of stuff in there. sheets and towels, a mattress/futon they share, a hammock for the youngest girl, a wok, two knives, spatula and wire basket thingie you fish fried foods out of boiling oil with, buckets and big chipped enamel-ware bowls for laundry, um...a fan? I think they're hooked into the electricity grid with some sketch extension. I think it's true that people hoard what they have, but up the social scale people are often tastelessly lavish rather than simply scandanavian. rich indonesian peoples houses look like someone got the "midas trump" power to turn everything they touch into hideous gilt over-stuffed jacquard-upholstered monstrosities.
