23 November 2024. Empires | Climate

The decline of the West’s empire // The colours of disaster [#618]

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1: The decline of the Western empire

The book How Empires Fall was published last year, but it was new to me when its authors, Peter Heather and John Rapley, turned up recently on a Novara Media podcast to discuss it. It’s a long podcast (90 minutes long) and there’s more complexity in the discussion than I can completely reflect here.

Heather is an historian of Ancient Rome, Rapley a political economist with a particular interest in development. In their collaboration they explore the similarities and differences between the end of the Roman Empire and the relative economic decline of the West today. I know there’s a whole and possibly overblown literature on these comparisons, and I embarked on the podcast with some trepidation for this reason, but bear with me.

So: there’s four immediate things to say.

The first is that the relative economic decline of the West (or the global North, if you prefer that terminology) is real. Rapley puts some numbers on it: since the turn of the century (i.e. in less than 25 years) the economic share of global output of the global North has fallen from four-fifths of the world economy to three-fifths, and is continuing to fall. This is a large and rapid comparative shift by any historic standards. The collapse in the fall in the share of India and China over the course of the 19th century—helped along by colonialism in various forms—was larger but took longer. What goes around comes around.

The consequences are seen in individual countries. Although this is a relative decline globally, it has become an absolute decline in some places, even if so far these declines are small. Rapley says:

I measure absolute decline in the first instances as a declining GDP per capita. We already seen Germany, Britain, Canada… cross that threshold. Others are very close to being on the threshold. The only Western economy that is doing particularly well is the United States, but even that one is a bit misleading because if you take away the added debt in the last few years the debt wipes out the total growth.

The second is that many of the things we understand about the end of the Roman Empire are wrong. The conventional account has the high water mark in the first century CE, with a steady decline thereafter. Heather says that archaeological techniques pioneered during the 1970s and ‘80s have created a new story, based on being able to both find pottery fragments better and to date them to within a decade.

What we learn from this is that the economic peak of the Roman Empire was in the fourth century CE. There were more pottery fragments and they were—using pottery fragments as a proxy—more economically active. This suggests that we might need a different model of decline than the ones that we are used to (such as the increasing cost of complexity, as per Tainter.)

(Late Roman pots from the edge of Empire. Wessex Archeology/flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The third is that economic change can happen more quickly in an industrial world than an agricultural one, because industrial technologies have a leverage affect, on the one hand, and because—short of inventing tractors—agricultural assets are fixed in place. Travel speeds are also far slower.

The fourth thing is that the West is clearly an empire, in that its cultures and values and organising principles dominated the world, notably in the period after World War II. These principles included “free markets, democracy and human rights”, amplified by cultural capital—notably educational capital—and these were expressed through a set of international institutions. And four-fifths of global output consumed by 15% of the global population is an extraordinary dominance. Hardt and Negri’s book Empire, published in 2000, seems prescient.

Heather and Rapley first met as students at Oxford, and they found when they met up a few years back that they had the same hypotheses about the Roman Empire and the 21st century economic order:

that collapse follows a change in the relationship between the core and the periphery.

In the case of the Roman Empire, Heather proposes this account. By the fourth century, a ‘Roman’ was someone of free status, with Roman citizenship, which included most of the better-off population in the empire—some two-thirds of the overall population. It was a cultural term, not an ethnic term.

So how did this fall apart? The “formulaic account” is that the Roman Empire was always too big—“from Scotland to Iraq”—and it eventually lost its capacity to manage this. This leads to civil war and internal revolts.

By Heather’s account, because we know that the economy was expanding until the fourth century, it wasn’t an economic issue. What happens in the fourth and fifth century is that new political confederations emerge around the edges of the territory of the Roman Empire. (‘Goths, Visigoths, Vandals’: “barbarians”, as the Romans called them.) This was partly a result of mergers between previously much smaller groups, and their agricultural productivity had improved, so they are also a lot richer. At the same time, they are no longer paying taxes to the centre, so the centre can no longer afford to protect its peripheries.

Aaron Bastani, the interviewer, summarises this in a question:

Your argument is that through long-term contact with the Roman Empire, we see the organisational and technological development of the periphery. It becomes more affluent, more capable, and that is the ultimate challeneg to the empire.

This is the parallel to the current era.

Rapley and Heather agree that the peak of the West was in 1999 (“a gift of a year”, which even has its own song) although it didn’t really become visible until the Financial Crisis of 2008.

What we see in the 21st century is that the tax base is being eaten away. It’s being reduced in different ways: the movement of peoples is far more tightly controlled in the global North, although there is vast migration within India and China, while capital is mobile. This capital is moving from core to periphery.

The reason for this is that

“investors are seeking the higher growth rates that are available in the periphery.”

A lot of this money is coming from pension funds. As Rapley argues:

So the very large scale outsourcing of production is driven by the 1%… If you are a [mortgage free] home owner with a defined benefit pension in a Western country you are part of the global 1%, statistically.

This group is by definition older. And the combination of ageing populations and increasing demand for health care has the effect of eroding the tax base or increasing the levels of government debt, which in their different ways amount to much the same thing. This also leads to the erosion of the social contract, and it is felt more acutely by the young.

So this global shift is also a significant intergenerational problem. To spell this out: the financial interests of the prosperous old involve investing in the economies of emerging markets such as China or India, which in turn means that their domestic economies slow down because of insufficient investment.

Towards the end of the podcast, the interviewer, Aaron Bastani, puts something of a black cap on the political economy of all this. He says that we’re used to the idea that youth movements matter, because of the legacy of the 1960s. But he wondered if, in this ageing world, where our political and economic systems are tilted sharply by the interests of the old, whether this will ever be true again.

Obviously the acid test of an idea such as this (because all models are wrong, but some are useful) is how much explanatory power it has. And I’d say that this version of the world, of empires being pulled apart by their peripheries, has quite a lot of explanatory power.

I’ve ordered the book and may return to this; there’s also lot of discussion of the political economy of housing on the podcast which is interesting.

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2: The colour of disaster

I could have been writing about COP29 as it grinds to a close in Azerbaijan, and that may yet happen, but this seemed more interesting.

(Source: Freddie Yauner)

'What colour is disaster?’ is a print by the artist Freddie Yauner that mimics typical housepaint colour charts to convey some of the ways that climate disaster could strike. Each colour is a warning.

It’s probably worth reproducing the commentary here for each of the six colours:

ECONOMIC SUNSET Extremely warm, Economic Sunset is coloured with billions of working hours lost to climate change. These already number over half the working hours lost to COVID-19.

WAR ROOM RED Like blood in water, climate impacts don't stay where they start, but cascade across borders, driving political instability, threatening security and fueling conflicts.

MAROONED PEOPLE Paired with Burnt Bread Basket and War Room Red, climate change will drive migration. When safe countries provide no safe routes in, those displaced stand to be marooned.

HEALTH MELTDOWN Stressed under extreme heat and battling zoonotic diseases, pandemics, fires and floods, healthcare crises will paint the 2030s even more starkly than the 2020s.

BURNT BREAD BASKET This colour can deepen if crops fail in more than one key region at once, the chances of which are 50:50 in the 2040s. Food security colours bring out shades of Economic Sunset and War Room Red.

COST-OF NOT LIVING Each year in the 2030s, more than 400 million people will experience temperatures so searing they cannot work outside. Combine with Economic Sunset and Health Meltdown to build tones of disaster.

The colours are inspired by Professor Ed Hawkins’ famous warming stripes, which show the way in which global temperatures have risen since 1850:

Last year, due to a dramatic rise in temperature, Professor Hawkins declared that he would likely need a new colour beyond the red zone - into purples, browns and black - to reflect the anticipated temperature rises. ‘What colour is disaster?’ is a reference card for these new colours with names and descriptions taken from some of the devastating impacts we will experience from extreme heat and flooding.

Yauner sent a copy of the print to every member of the British Parliament that was elected in June with a covering letter, of which this is an extract.

(Source: Freddie Yauner)

The print is the first in what Yauner calls Parliament Editions, which is intended to harness

the power of art to directly influence power holders and create meaningful impact in relation to the climate crisis. The intention is that the value of these works will command attention and eventually find a place to reside in the offices and consciences of the people with the power to make change at scale.

The reference to the Chatham House report in the letter refers to a 2021 report by its Environment and Society team, ‘The Climate Change Risk Assessment’. By way of disclosure, I’m doing some work with that team at the moment, so I asked about how Freddie Yauner came to use it as his inspiration.

It turned out that he’d been a kind of ‘artist in residence’ with the team when they were developing that report. Yauner had talked to lobbyists, civil servants and parliamentary staff:

[T]hey all agree that MPs already have an understanding of the issues, but often need to be given the courage to act on it.

Who knows: telling the climate change story in this direct way might help people cut through all of the noise of the climate delayers and the excessive caution of politicians in the face of the climate emergency.

(H/t Ian Christie)

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j2t#618

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