Video by ‘The Archivist’s Journal’ (7 minutes)

From the transcript:

Joseph Tanter is a historian who’s pretty much spent his whole career trying to identify how all this went down. And he landed on what he calls diminishing returns on complexity.

Every problem Rome faced, they solved by adding something. More soldiers, more administrators, more subsidies, more regulations. Each solution worked, but each one also added a permanent cost. And once you build those systems, you can’t really walk them back. You can’t cancel grain subsidies without riots. You can’t cut the army without losing territory. So, the machine just keeps getting bigger and more expensive every year. And eventually, the cost of maintaining it outpaces what it can produce.