In Averroës's Search, Borges tells the story of the Islamic philosopher Averroës trying, and failing, to understand Aristotle's writings on theater. Borges sums it up in the afterword:

In the preceding tale, I have tried to narrate the process of failure, the process of defeat. I thought first of that archbishop of Canterbury who set himself the task of proving that God exists; then I thought of the alchemists who sought the philosopher’s stone; then, of he vain trisectors of the angle and squares of the circle. Then I reflected that a more poetic case than these would be a man who sets himself a goal that is not forbidden to other men, but is forbidden to him. I recalled Averroës, who, bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words tragedy and comedy.

History and literature offer many cases of ironically failed quests for knowledge.

Some phenomena disappear immediately once someone describes them. Douglas Adams wrote of a theory "which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear". The modern world offers many such anti-inductive cases, above all in the movements of the stock market: successful trading strategies tend to stop working after they become known. On a civilizational scale, Malthusianism became irrelevant right at the time someone was able to articulate the idea, and it seems that the moment we are able to improve ourselves through genetic engineering, we will be wiped out by our artificial creations.

A second type of ill-fated seeker is one who finds what he is looking for, but his goal is also a punishment. William Beckford, categorically rejecting Ulysses' actions at the land of the Sirens (perhaps inspired by his own life, and perhaps commenting on all attempts to comprehend the universe) created the apostate Caliph Vathek whose obsessive quest for knowledge results in his damnation, and for whom Hell is both the object of desire and the punishment for that desire. There are those who argue that the libertine Beckford only adopted this biblical attitude against the Faustian spirit as an ironic orientalist façade, but the Caliph resists all attempts at interpretation.

Some seekers reach their goal, only to have it slip out of their hands. Scientists will occasionally chance on the right idea but lack the ability to prove it: Aristarchus of Samos was doomed by the apparent size of the stars and the lack of parallax. The Royal Navy discovered that lemons prevent scurvy, and then through terrible epistemic luck managed to lose that knowledge over the course of the 19th century: lemons were replaced by limes low in vitamin C, but nobody noticed because the ships were faster. The problem only reappeared when polar explorers started suffering from scurvy despite bringing lime juice with them—and the answer was only discovered by the miraculously good luck of experimenting on guinea pigs, one of very few animals that don't produce vitamin C on their own.

Finally the most ironic case of them all, that of the Dalmatian archbishop and heretic Marco Antonio de Dominis: a seeker who is able to find the answer, but is condemned to believe it is false. De Dominis, a contemporary of Kepler (who wrote in favor of the lunar theory of tides) and Galileo (who mocked it), was also an amateur astronomer and wrote a book on the tides titled Euripus.

The archbishop begins by presenting both empirical and theoretical arguments in favor of the thesis that the earth is a sphere. He then describes the luni-solar theory of tides: he (correctly) writes that tides are caused by the combined gravitational action of the sun and the moon, (correctly) predicts that high tide occurs simultaneously at antipodal points, and (correctly) shows that the cycle of spring and neap tides can be explained by the combined action of the sun and moon. He also (correctly) deduces that the diurnal inequality between tides will be greatest when the moon is above the tropic of Cancer or Capricorn. Finally, de Dominis explains (incorrectly) that since the two daily tides are always equal to each other, the theory must be false. The heretical archbishop died behind the bars of the Castel Sant'Angelo before his book could be published.

Links

Metascience

1. Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology: "50 experiments from 23 papers were repeated, generating data about the replicability of a total of 158 effects [...] for positive effects, the median effect size in the replications was 85% smaller than the median effect size in the original experiments"

2. A catastrophic failure of peer review in obstetrics and gynaecology: "I estimate that across these 46 articles, 346 (64%) of the 542 parametric tests (unpaired t tests, or, occasionally, ANOVA) and 151 (61%) of the 247 contingency table test (Pearson's Χ² or Fisher's exact test) that I was able to check were incorrectly reported."

3. The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications: "Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web."

4. A large replication project in marketing, with fairly catastrophic results. Amusingly the abstract doesn't mention the rate of successful replication.

5. Increasing Politicization and Homogeneity in Scientific Funding: An Analysis of NSF Grants, 1990-2020. The methodology is somewhat questionable, but insteresting nonetheless.

Covid

6. Scott Alexander on the Ivermectin literature and the trouble with trying to wade through a bunch of questionable papers. Alexandros Marinos responds.

7. Zvi's latest.

You are probably going to get Omicron, if you haven’t had it already. The level of precaution necessary to change this assessment is very high, and you probably don’t want to pay that price.

8. ADS on the Zvi-Holden bet and taking ideas seriously.

Making a blockchain game might genuinely be the best use of Zvi’s time, and he might be acting both rationality and ethically in choosing to pursue it. And so this situation is Good, but only in a very limited and local sense. The tragedy isn’t Zvi’s decision, it’s that a scenario even exists where this is the decision he has to make.

9. Omicron spreading faster than delta because of immune evasion? SARS-CoV-2 Omicron VOC Transmission in Danish Households. Plus twitter thread.

Forecasting

10. Forecasting in the Field: academics and non-experts try to predict the effects of development interventions.

the average correlation between predicted and observed effects is 0.75. Recipient types are less accurate than academics on average, but are at least as accurate for interventions and outcomes that are likely to be more familiar to them. The mean forecast of each group outperforms more than 75% of the comprising individuals, and averaging just five forecasts substantially reduces error, indicating strong “wisdom-of-crowds” effects. Three measures of academic expertise (rank, citations, and conducting research in East Africa) and two measures of confidence do not correlate with accuracy. Among recipient-types, high-accuracy “superforecasters” can be identified using observables. Small groups of these superforecasters are as accurate as academic respondents.

Economic History

11. The United Fruit Company? Good, Actually.

Using administrative census data with census-block geo-references from 1973 to 2011, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity design that exploits a land assignment that is orthogonal to our outcomes of interest. We find that the firm had a positive and persistent effect on living standards. Company documents explain that a key concern at the time was to attract and maintain a sizable workforce, which induced the firm to invest heavily in local amenities that can account for our result.

Book Reviews

12. Reviews of Moby Dick from 1851. "This is an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive." I love it when modern editions of old books include their contemporary reviews, unfortunately it's not done very often.

13. ADS on Stubborn Attachments and Straussian writing.

Crypto

14. Bloomberg report on Tether, including the story of how a French screenwriter ended up owning a Bahamian bank.

15. Vitalik Buterin on Crypto Cities.

16. A Glimpse of the Deep: Finding a Creature in Ethereum's Dark Forest.

This monster was watching Ethereum for an obscure mistake deep in the process of creating a transaction: the reuse of a number while signing a transaction. I went searching for this creature, laid bait, saw it in the wild, and found unexplained tracks. To understand how this bot works, we need to begin by reviewing ECDSA and digital signatures.

The Rest

17. Some answers to my questions about Borges, Browne, and Quevedo: On Borges and Quevedo. "The (sad) irony in Tlon’s ending is, therefore, not in a contrast Quevedo vs Browne, then, but in the contrast (Borges + Quevedo + Browne) vs Tlon. Or, maybe, grecolatin tradition versus modernity. With a tinge of sad resignation for the slow but unstoppable victory of the second over the first."

18. And here's a very interesting essay (in Spanish) on Borges's "francophobia".

19. SMTM wrap up the Chemical Hunger series on the causes of obesity after 20 posts.

20. On the NIH and the challenges of funding alcohol consumption RCTs. The big alcohol study that didn't happen: My primal scream of rage.

21. RCT of health insurance in India finds few positive effects: Effect of Health Insurance in India: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

22. "Many young females report joining Draco Malfoy as his girlfriend."

23. An interesting ACX comment on reversals in artistic "progress".

it's a pattern that has repeated throughout history and around the world, one of naturalist art executed with great skill being deliberately replaced with highly abstract art not requiring as much skill.

The cave paintings of Chauvet Cave in France ca 30,000 BP (before present) are more natural and technically much more sophisticated than any cave or rock paintings found after 20,000 BP (some of which are quite abstract and stylized).

Reminds me of this paper on bursts of technological development 60-80kya that lasted for a few thousand years and then disappeared. Related, a great new article on the Antikythera mechanism.

24. The Browser interview with QNTM.

25. Nemets on the genetic history of the ancient Greeks and the identity of the Sea Peoples.

26. Razib Khan: Out of Africa's midlife crisis

two San from different groups both living in Namibia’s Northern Kalahari desert, and speaking click languages from the same family, are more genetically distinct from one another, by a solid 20%, than a person from Stockholm is from a person from Shanghai.

27. Don't take psychedelics. "Results revealed significant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views, and towards panpsychism and fatalism, post use."

28. Blind people have a pretty good understanding of color.

Audio-Visual

29. Interface | Part II, cool animation project.

30. A project that made 999 forgeries of a Warhol drawing, then randomly mixed in the original, and sold them.

31. How to Build a Supersonic Trebuchet.

32. And here's a cool remix of Hugh Masekela's Stimela.

What I've Been Reading

Non-Fiction

• The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya approaches his subject by focusing on ideas. The first chapter takes care of JvN's early life, and the rest of the book is split up based on the subjects he worked on: mathematics, quantum mechanics, the nuclear bomb, computing, game theory, RAND, and artificial life. Large parts of the book (I'd say about a third) are dedicated not to von Neumann but rather the work other people did based on his ideas. The game theory chapter, for example, covers Nash, Schelling, Aumann, etc. in economics, and John Maynard Smith, Price, Hamilton, etc. in evolutionary game theory. Bhattacharya is good at making all these technical subjects accessible without dumbing them down too much. JvN's personality, personal life, professional relationships, etc. on the other hand are given scant attention.

  Overall it felt a bit too short. In less than 300 pages we get such a wide array of ideas, and the story of how they influenced so many people, that it often feels like we're just skimming the surface in a speedboat. I'd like to take a deeper, more ponderous ride in a submarine some day.

• Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel. Fantastically gorgeous book, filled with high-quality prints of medieval manuscripts. Pleasant conversational style. Just lovely all around. Not just about the manuscripts themselves, but also who owned them, their condition, where they're housed, the librarians taking care of them, etc.

• The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald. A book of digressions. The frame is a walking tour of England, and on it are bolted various musings on Sir Thomas Browne, Joseph Konrad, silk manufacture, the Taiping rebellion, and so on. The subjects flow into each other so you don't know where one digression begins and the other ends. However, Sebald kind of undersells how interesting his subjects are; comparing his notes on FitzGerald to the famous Borges essay, for example, makes me wonder how Sebald managed to turn such a fascinating subject into such a dull essay.

• Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy. I didn't love the book (it felt a bit sloppy, and the style isn't great), but Cortes is an incredible character. The determination, the ingenuity, the absolute ruthlesness. When he murders his wife at the end of the book, all you can think is "well of course he did". And self-aware too: "I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart that can be cured only with gold"! Perhaps it is the contrast against the Aztecs that, in a way, softens his image? Going to try Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico next.

• Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen. Solid narrative pop history. Feels a bit rushed after the point of Magellan's death. Exciting, adventurous stuff as you'd expect from the age of exploration.

• A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin. Covers the entire thing plus a ton of backstory, very thorough (within its scope). Focused on the astronauts, and much of it is the preoduct of interviews with those astronauts, which is kind of obvious at many points as you're only getting one person's perspective on certain events. It would have been better with a broader, more objective view, in my opinion. The latter parts (after the first moon landing) include a surprising amount of geology! I read three books on the early space program this year and none of them was completely satisfying, I'm still trying to find the Richard Rhodes of Apollo...

Starting in August 2019 I took part in the Replication Markets project, a part of DARPA's SCORE program whose goal is to predict which social science papers will successfully replicate. I have previously written about my views on the replication crisis after reading 2500+ papers; in this post I will explain the details of forecasting, trading, and optimizing my strategy within the rules of the game.

The Setup

3000 papers were split up into 10 rounds of ~300 papers each. Every round began with one week of surveys, followed by two weeks of market trading, and then a one week break. The studies were sourced from all social science disciplines (economics, psychology, sociology, management, etc.) and were published between 2009 and 2018 (in other words, most of the sample came from the post-replication crisis era).

Only a subset of the papers will be replicated: ~100 papers were selected for a full replication, and another ~150 for a "data replication" in which the same methodology is applied to a different (but pre-existing) dataset.¹ Out of the target 250 replications, only about 100 were completed by the time the prizes were paid out.

Surveys

The surveys included a link to the paper, a brief summary of the claim selected for replication, the methodology, and a few statistical values (sample size, effect size, test statistic values, p-value). We then had to answer three questions:

1. What is the probability of the paper replicating?
2. What proportion of other forecasters do you think will answer >50% to the first question?
3. How plausible is the claim in general?

The papers were split up into batches of 10, and the top 4 scorers in each batch won awards of $80, $40, $20, and $20 for a total of $4,800 per survey round.

The exact scoring method was not revealed in order to prevent gaming the system, but after the competition ended the organizers wrote a technical blog post explaining the "surrogate scoring rule" approach. Since the replications were not completed yet, scoring predictions had to be done without reference to the "ground truth"; instead they generated a "surrogate outcome" based on all the survey answers and used that to score the predictions.²

Markets

Every user started each round with 1 point per claim (so typically 300).³ These points were the currency used to buy "shares" for every claim. Long share positions pay out if the paper replicates successfully and short positions pay out if it does not. Like a normal stock market, if you bought shares at a low price and the price went up, you could sell those shares for a profit.

The starting price of each claim was based on its p-value:

• p<.05: 30%
• p<.01: 40%
• p<.001: 80%

The market did not operate like a typical stock market (ie a continuous double auction); instead, they used Robin Hanson's Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule which allows users to trade without a counterparty.⁴ Effectively it works as an automated market maker, making it costlier to trade the more extreme the price: taking a claim from 50% to 51% was cheap, while taking it from 98% to 99% was very expensive. Without any order book depth, prices could be rather volatile as it didn't take much for a single person to significantly shift the price on a claim; this also created profitable trading opportunities.

The payout for the markets was about $14k per round, awarded in proportion to winning shares in the papers selected for replication. Given the target of 250 replications, that means about 8% of the claims would actually resolve. The small number of actually completed replications, however, caused some issues: round 9, for example, only had 2 (out of the target 25) replications actually pay out.

Early Steps - A Simple Model

I didn't take the first round very seriously, and I had a horrible flu during the second round, so I only really started playing in round 3. I remembered Tetlock writing that "it is impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms, less still sophisticated statistical ones", so I decided to start with a statistical model to help me out.

This felt like a perfect occasion for a centaur approach (combining human judgment with a model), as there was plenty of quantitative data, but also lots of qualitative factors that are hard to model. For example, some papers with high p-values were nevertheless obviously going to replicate, due to how plausible the hypothesis was a priori.⁵

Luckily someone had already collected the relevant data and built a model.⁶ Altmejd et al. (2019) combine results from four different replication projects covering 131 replications (which they helpfully posted on OSF). Here are the features they used ranked by importance:

Their approach was fairly complex, however, and I wanted something simpler. On top of that I wanted to limit the number of variables I would have to collect for every paper, as I had to do 300 of them in a week—any factors that would be cumbersome to look up (eg the job title of each author) were discarded. I also transformed a bunch of the variables, for example replacing raw citation counts with log citations per year.

I ended up going with a logistic ridge regression (shrinkage tends to help with out-of-sample predictions). The Altmejd sample was limited in terms of the fields covered (they only had social/cognitive/econ), so I just pulled some parameter values out of my ass for the other fields—in retrospect they were not very good guesses.⁷

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cv.ridge <- cv.glmnet(as.matrix(mydata), y_class, alpha = 0, family = "binomial")

coef(cv.ridge, cv.ridge$lambda.min)

This model was then implemented in a spreadsheet, so all I had to do was enter the data, and the prediction popped up:

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=exp(Intercept+
F18*pval+
IF(N18="interaction",1,0)*interaction+
male*P18+
logauth*ln(O18)+
loglen*ln(L18)+
if(D18="Social",1,0)*social+
if(D18="Economics",1,0)*econ+
if(D18="PoliSci",1,0)*polisci+
if(D18="Education",1,0)*educ+
if(D18="Sociology",1,0)*sociology+
if(D18="Marketing",1,0)*marketing+
if(D18="OrgBeh",1,0)*OrgBeh+
if(D18="Criminology",1,0)*criminology+
if(D18="Other Psychology",1,0)*otherpsych+
ln(M18/(2019-E18))*logcitesperyear)

While my model had significant coefficients on # of authors, ratio male, and # of pages, these variables were not predictive of market prices in RM. Even the relation of citations to market prices was very weak. I think the market simply ignored any data it was not given directly, even if it was important. This gave me a bit of an edge, but also made evaluating the performance of the model more difficult as the market was systematically wrong in some ways.

Collecting the additional data needed for the model was fairly cumbersome: completing the surveys took ~140 seconds per paper when I was just doing it in my head, and ~210 seconds with the extra work of data entry. It also made the process significantly more boring.

Predictions

I will give a quick overview of the forecasting approach here; a full analysis will come in a future post, including a great new dataset I'm preparing that covers the methodology of replicated papers.

At the broadest level it comes down to: the prior, the probability of a false negative, and the probability of a false positive.⁸ One must consider these factors for both the original and the replication.⁹

What does that look like in practice? I started by reading the summary of the study on the RM website (which included the abstract, a description of the selected claim, sample size, p-value, and effect size). After that I skimmed the paper itself. If I didn't understand the methodology I checked the methods and/or conclusions, but the vast majority of papers were just straight regressions, ANOVAs, or SEMs. The most important information was almost always in the table with the main statistical results.

The factors I took into account, in rough order of importance:

• p-value. Try to find the actual p-value, they are often not reported. Many papers will just give stars for <.05 and <.01, but sometimes <.01 means 0.0000001! There's a shocking number of papers that only report coefficients and asterisks—no SEs, no CIs, no t-stats.
• Power. Ideally you'll do a proper power analysis, but I just eyeballed it.
• Plausibility. This is the most subjective part of the judgment and it can make an enormous difference. Some broad guidelines:
  • People respond to incentives.
  • Good things tend to be correlated with good things and negatively correlated with bad things.
  • Subtle interventions do not have huge effects.
• Pre-registration. Huge plus. Ideally you want to check if the plan was actually followed.
• Interaction effect. They tend to be especially underpowered.
• Other research on the same/similar questions, tests, scales, methodologies—this can be difficult for non-specialists, but the track record of a theory or methodology is important. Beware publication bias.
• Methodology - RCT/RDD/DID good. IV depends, many are crap. Various natural-/quasi-experiments: some good, some bad (often hard to replicate). Lab experiments, neutral. Approaches that don't deal with causal identification depend heavily on prior plausibility.
• Robustness checks: how does the claim hold up across specifications, samples, experiments, etc.
• Signs of a fishing expedition/researcher degrees of freedom. If you see a gazillion potential outcome variables and that they picked the one that happened to have p<0.05, that's what we in the business call a "red flag". Look out for stuff like ad hoc quadratic terms.
• Suspiciously transformed variables. Continuous variables put into arbitrary bins are a classic p-hacking technique.
• General propensity for error/inconsistency in measurements. Fluffy variables or experiments involving wrangling 9 month old babies, for example.

Things that don't matter for replication but matter very much in the real world:

• Causal identification! The plausibility of a paper's causal identification strategy is generally orthogonal to its chances of replicating.
• Generalizability. Lab experiments are replicated in other labs.

Some papers were completely outside my understanding, and I didn't spend any time trying to understand them. Jargon-heavy cognitive science papers often fell into this category. I just gave a forecast close to the default and marked them as "low confidence" in my notes, then avoided trading them during the market round. On the other hand, sometimes I got the feeling that the jargon was just there to cover up bullshit (leadership studies, I'm looking at you) in which case I docked points for stuff I didn't understand. The epistemological problem of how to determine which jargon is legit and which is not, is left as an exercise to the reader.

Pour exemple

The data from Replication Markets are still embargoed, so I can't give you any real examples. Instead, I have selected a couple of papers that were not part of the project but are similar enough.

Ex. 1: Criminology

My first example is a criminology paper which purports to investigate the effect of parenting styles on criminal offending. Despite using causal language throughout, the paper has no causal identification strategy whatsoever. If criminologists had better GRE scores this nonsense would never have been published. The most relevant bits of the abstract:

The present study used path analyses and prospective, longitudinal data from a sample of 318 African American men to examine the effects of eight parenting styles on adult crime. Furthermore, we investigated the extent to which significant parenting effects are mediated by criminogenic schemas, negative emotions, peer affiliations, adult transitions, and involvement with the criminal justice system. Consonant with the study hypotheses, the results indicated that [...] parenting styles low on demandingness but high on responsiveness or corporal punishment were associated with a robust increase in risk for adult crime.

The selected claim is the effect of abusive parenting (the "abusive" parenting style involves "high corporal punishment" but low "demandingness" and "responsiveness") on offending; I have highlighted the outcome in the main regression table below. While the asterisks only say p<.01, the text below indicates that the p-value is actually <.001.

Make your own guess about the probability of replication and then scroll down to mine below.

I'd give this claim 78%. The results are obviously confounded, but they're confounded in a way that is fairly intuitive, and we would expect the replication to be confounded in the exact same way. Abusive parents are clearly more likely to have kids who become criminals. Although they don't give us the exact t-stat, the p-value is very low. On the negative side the sample size (318 people spread over 8 different parenting styles) isn't that big, I'm a bit worried about variance in the classification of parenting styles, and there's a chance that the (non-causal) relation between abusive parenting and offending could be lost in the controls.

This is a classic example of "just because it replicates doesn't mean it's good", and also a prime example of why the entire field of criminology should be scrapped.

Ex. 2: Environmental Psychology

My second example is an "environmental psychology" paper about collective guilt and how people act in response to global warming.

The present research examines whether collective guilt for an ingroup’s collective greenhouse gas emissions mediates the effects of beliefs about the causes and effects of global warming on willingness to engage in mitigation behavior.

N=72 people responded to a survey after a manipulation, on a) the causes and b) the importance of the effects of climate change. The selected claim is that "participants in the human cause-minor effect condition reported more collective guilt than did participants in the other three conditions (b* = .50, p <.05)". Again, make your own guess before scrolling down.

I'd go with 23% on this one. Large p-value, interaction effect, relatively small sample, and a result that does not seem all that plausible a priori. The lack of significance on the Cause/Effect parameters alone is also suspicious, as is the lack of signifiance on mitigation intentions. Lots of opportunities to find some significant effect here!

Spreadsheets

The worst part of Replication Markets was the user interface: it did not offer any way to keep track of one's survey answers, so in order to effectively navigate the market rounds I had to manually keep track of all the predictions. There was also no way to track changes in the value of one's shares, so again that had to be done manually in order to exit successful trades and find new opportunities. The initial solution was giant spreadsheets:

Since the initial prices were set depending on the claim's p-value, I knew ahead of time which claims would be most mispriced at the start of trading (and that's where the greatest opportunities were). So a second spreadsheet was used to track the best initial trades.¹¹ The final column tracks how those trades worked out by the end of the market round; as you can see not all of them were successful (including some significant "overshoots"), but in general I had a good hit rate. As you can see, there were far more "longs" than "shorts" at the start: these were mostly results that were highly plausible a priori but had failed to get a p-value below 0.001.

["Final" is my estimate, "default" is the starting price, "mkt" is the final market price]

Finally, a third spreadsheet was used to track live trading during the market rounds. There was no clean way of getting the prices from the RM website to my sheet, so I copy/pasted everything, parsed it, and then inserted the values into the sheet. I usually did that a few times per day (more often at the start, since that was where most trading activity was concentrated). The claims were then ranked by the difference between my own estimate and the market. My current share positions were listed next to them so I knew what I needed to trade. The "Change" column listed the change in price since the last update, so I could easily spot big changes (which usually meant new trading opportunities).

["Live" is the current market price, "My" is my estimate, "Shares" is the current position]

Forget the Model!

After the third round I took a look at the data to evaluate the model and there were two main problems:

• My own errors (prediction minus market price) were very similar with the errors of the model:

• The model failed badly at high-probability claims, and failed to improve overall performance. Here's the root mean square error vs market prices, grouped by p-value:

Of course what the model was actually trying to predict was replication, not the market price. But market prices were the only guide I had to go by (we didn't even get feedback on survey performance), and I believed the market was right and the model was wrong when it came to low-p-value claims.

What would happen if everyone tried to optimize for predicting market prices? I imagine we could have gotten into weird feedback loops, causing serious disconnects between market prices and actual replication probability. In practice I don't think that was an issue though.

If I had kept going with the model, I had some improvements in mind:

• Add some sort of non-linear p-value term (or go with z-scores instead).
• Quantify my subjective judgment of "plausibility" and add it as another variable in the model.
• Use the round 3 market data of 300 papers (possibly with extremized prices) to estimate a new model, which would more than triple my N from the original 131 papers. But I wasn't sure how to combine categorical data from the previous replications and probabilities from the prices in a single model.¹²

At this point it didn't seem worth the effort, especially given all the extra data collection work involved. So, from round 4 onward I abandoned the model completely and relied only on my own guesses.

Playing the Game

Two basic facts dictated the trading strategy:

1. Only a small % of claims will actually be replicated and pay out.
2. Most claims are approximately correctly priced.

It follows that smart traders make many trades, move the price by a small amount (the larger your trade the larger the price impact), and have a diversified portfolio. The inverse of this rule can be used to identify bad traders: anyone moving the price by a huge amount and concentrating their portfolio in a small number of bets is almost certainly a bad trader, and one can profitably fade their trades.

Another source of profitable trades was the start of the round. Many claims were highly mispriced, but making a profit depended on getting to them first, which was not always easy since everyone more or less wanted to make the same trades. Beyond that, I focused on simply allocating most of my points toward the most-mispriced claims.

I split the trading rounds into two phases:

1. Trading based on the expected price movement.

2. At the very end of the round, trading based on my actual estimate of replication probability.

Usually these two aspects would coincide, but there were certain types of claims that I believed were systematically mispriced by other market participants.¹³ Trading those in the hope of making profits during the market round didn't work out, so I only allocated points toward them at the end.

Another factor to take into consideration was that not all claims were equally likely to be selected for replication. In some cases it was pretty obvious that a paper would be difficult or impossible to replicate directly. I was happy to trade them, but by the end of the round I excluded them from the portfolio.¹⁴

Buying the most mispriced items also means you're stuck with a somewhat contrarian portfolio, which can be dangerous if you're wrong. Given the flat payout structure of the market, following the herd was not necessarily a bad idea. Sometimes if a claim traded strongly against my own forecast, I would lower the weight assigned to it or even avoid it completely. Suppose you think a study has a 30% chance of replicating, and a liquid market insists it has a 70% chance—how do you revise your forecast?

Reacting to Feedback

After every round I generated a bunch of graphs that were designed to help me understand the market and improve my own forecasts. This was complicated by the fact that there were no replication results—all I had to go by were the market prices, and they could be misleading.

Among other things, I compared means, standard deviations, and quartiles of my own predictions vs the market; looked at my means and RMSE grouped by p-value and discipline; plotted the distribution of forecasts, and error vs market price; etc.

One standard pattern of prediction markets is that extremizing the market prediction makes it better. Simplistically, you can think of the market price being determined by informed traders and uninformed/noise traders. The latter pull the price toward the middle, so the best prediction is going to be (on average) more extreme than the market's. This is made worse in the case of Replication Markets because of the LMSR algorithm which makes shares much more expensive the closer you get to 0 or 100%. So you can often improve on things by just extremizing the market forecast, and I always checked to see if my predictions were on the extremizing side vs the market.

Here you can see the density plots of my own vs the market forecasts, split up by p-value category. (The vertical line is the default starting price for each group.)

And here's the same data in scatterplot form:

Over time my own predictions converged with the market. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret this trend. Perhaps I was influenced by the market and subtly changed my predictions based on what I saw. Did that make me more accurate or less? It's unclear, and based on the limited number of actual replication results it's impossible to tell. Another possibility is that the changing composition of forecasters over time made the market more similar to me?

Automated Trading

I think a lot of my success was due to putting in more effort than others were willing to. And by "putting in effort" I mean automating it so I don't have to put in any effort. In round 6 the trading API was introduced; at that point I dropped the spreadsheets and quickly threw together a desktop application (using C# & WPF) that utilized the API and included both automated and manual trading.¹⁵ Automating things also made more frequent data updates possible: instead of copy-pasting a giant webpage a few times a day, now everything updated automatically once every 15 minutes.

The main area on the left is the current state of the market and my portfolio, with papers sorted by how mispriced they are. Mkt is the current market price, My is my forecast, Position is the number of shares owned, Liq. Value is the number of points I could get by exiting this position, WF is a weight factor for the portfolio optimization, and Hist shows the price history of that claim.

On the right we have pending orders, a list of the latest orders executed on the market, plus logging on the bottom.

I used a simple weighting algorithm with a few heuristics sprinkled on top. Below you can see the settings for the weighting, plus a graph of the portfolio weights allocated by claim (the most-mispriced claims are on the left).

To start with I simply generated weights proportional to the square of the difference between the current market price and my target price (Exponent). Then,

• multiplied that by a per-study weight factor (WF in the main screen),
• multiplied that by ExtremeValueMultiplier for claims with extreme prices (<8% or >96%),
• removed any claims with a difference smaller than the CutOff,
• removed any claims with weight below MinThreshold,
• limited the maximum weight to MaxPosition,
• and disallowed any trading for claims that were already close to their target weight (NoWeightChangeBandwidth).

There was also another factor to take into consideration: the RM organizers ran some bots of their own. One simply traded randomly, while the other systematically moved prices back toward their default values. This created a predictable price pressure which had to be taken into account and potentially exploited: the DefDiffPenalizationFactor lowered the weight of claims that were expected to have adverse movements due to the bots.

Fading large price movements was automated, and I kept a certain amount of free points available so that I could take advantage of them quickly. Finally, turning the weighting algorithm into trades was fairly simple. If the free points fell below a threshold, the bot would automatically sell some shares. Most trades did not warrant a reaction however, and I had a semi-automated system for bringing the portfolio in line with the generated weights, which involved hitting a button to generate the orders and then firing them off.

High Frequency Trading

When there are a) obviously profitable trades to be made and b) multiple people competing for them, it's very easy to get into a competitive spiral that pushes speeds down to the minimum allowed by the available technology. That's how a replication prediction market ended up being all about shaving milliseconds off of trading algos.

By round 9 another player (named CPM) had also automated his trades and he was faster than me so he took all my profits by reacting to profitable opportunities before I could get my orders in—we were now locked in an HFT latency race. There was only one round left so I didn't want to spend too much time on it, but I did a small rewrite of my trading app so it could run on linux (thanks, .NET Core), which involved splitting it into a client (with the UI) and a server (with the trading logic), and patching in some networking so I could control it remotely.¹⁶ Then, I threw it up on my VPS which had lower ping to the RM servers.

When I first ran my autotrader, I polled the API for new trades once every 15 minutes¹⁷. Now it was a fight for milliseconds. Unfortunately placing the autotrader on the VPS wasn't enough, the latency was still fairly high and CPM crushed me again, though by a smaller margin this time. Sometimes I got lucky and snagged an opportunity before he could get to it though.

The Results

In money terms, I made $6640 from the surveys and $4020 from the markets for a total of $10,660 (out of a total prizepool of about $190k).

In terms of the actual replication results, the detailed outcomes are still embargoed, so we'll have to wait until next summer (at least) to get a look at them. Some broad stats can be shared however: the market predicted a 54% chance of replication on average—and 54% of the replications succeeded (the market isn't that good, it got lucky).

Of 107 claims that resolved, I have data on 31 which I made money on. For the rest I either had no shares, or had shares in the incorrect direction. Since I only have data on the successes, there's no way to judge my performance right now.

Survey vs Market Payouts

The survey round payout scheme was top-heavy, and small variations in performance resulted in large differences in winnings. The market payout on the other hand was more or less communistic. Everyone gets the same number of points; and it was difficult to either gain or lose too many of them in the two weeks of trading. As a result, the final distribution of prizes is rather flat. At best a good forecaster might increase earnings by ~10% by exploiting mispricings, plus a bit more through intelligent trading. The Gini coefficient of the survey payouts was 0.76, while the Gini of the market payouts was 0.63 (this is confounded by different participation levels, but you get the point).

This was backwards. I think one of the most important aspects of "ideal" prediction markets is that informed traders can compound their winnings, while uninformed traders go broke. The market mechanism works well because the feedback loop weeds out those who are consistently wrong. This element was completely missing in the RM project. I think the market payout scheme should have been top-heavy, and should have allowed for compounding across rounds, while the survey round should have been flatter in order to incentivize broader participation.

Conclusion

If the market had kept going, my next step would have been to use other people's trades to update my estimates. The idea was to look at their past trades to determine how good they were (based on the price movement following their trade), then use the magnitude of their trades to weigh their confidence in each trade, and finally incorporate that info in my own forecast. Overall it's fascinating how even a relatively simple market like this has tons of little nuances, exploitable regularities, and huge potential for modeling and trading strategies of all sorts.

In the end, are subsidized markets necessary for predicting replication? Probably not. The predictions will(?) be used to train our AI replacements, and I believe SCORE's other replication prediction project, repliCATS, successfully used (cheaper) discussion groups. It will be interesting to see how the two approaches compare. Tetlock's research shows that working as part of a team increases the accuracy of forecasters, so it wouldn't surprise me if repliCATS comes out ahead. A combination of teams (aided by ML) and markets would be the best, but at some point the marginal accuracy gains aren't really worth the extra effort and money.

I strongly believe that identifying reliable research is not the main problem in social science today. The real issue is making sure unreliable research is not produced in the first place, and if it is produced, to make sure it does not receive money and citations. And for that you have to change The Incentives.

PS. Shoot me an email if you're doing anything interesting and/or lucrative in forecasting.

PPS. CPM, rm_user, BradleyJBaker, or any other RM participant who wants to chat, hit me up!

Links

Economic History

1. Was the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution? A fascinating look at the industrial revolution in the UK, including some explanations of slow/zero growth in various periods before WWII.

From 1760 to 1800, the contribution of the steam engine was .004 percent per year to capital deepening and .005 percent to TFP growth. Not until after 1850 had the high-pressure engine become widespread and efficient enough to be deployed in factories and on rail engines that these numbers each rose to .2 percent. A century passed between James Watt’s patent—the first revolutionary “general purpose technology”—and its maximum realization in TFP growth.

Soaring population growth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries threatened the island with a Malthusian demographic catastrophe. [...] Without an Industrial Revolution, Mokyr reasons that GDP per capita in Britain could have been twenty percent lower in 1830 than in 1760.

Britain became modern, and then it got rich.

2. Leo Aschenbrenner on his favorite Chad Jones papers. "Most of all, Chad’s papers showed me what beautiful economic theory looks like. Simple models that capture a few essential forces, guided by broad empirical trends. These can often reveal insights that totally non-obvious ex ante—but are strikingly intuitive and powerful once found."

3. The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture A fascinating (and speculative) paper from 2019 which argues that agriculture was invented because changes in the earth's orbit caused an increase in seasonality!

Metascience

4. Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty. Fairly brazen data fabrication, though it's still not clear whether it was Ariely or the company that was in charge of collecting the data.

5. Some evidence suggesting that the Sputnik vaccine paper used fake data. I'd note that real-world data shows the vaccine working pretty well regardless of whether there was fraud in the trial.

6. Predicting and reasoning about replicability using structured groups: predicting replicability using the IDEA protocol (‘Investigate’, ‘Discuss’, ‘Estimate’ and ‘Aggregate’) for generating and combining predictions seems to work very well, achieving 84% classification accuracy in this sample. Still waiting on the SCORE results.

7. The Effect of Replications on Citation Patterns: Evidence From a Large-Scale Reproducibility Project

successful replications led to an increase in yearly citations of around 5% and that unsuccessful replications led to a decrease in yearly citations of around 4%. For the average article in my sample, which has roughly eight citations per year, this would imply a change of ±1 citation every 2 to 3 years.

As I was saying, replications don't really matter, so it's better to go for forward-looking reforms instead of trying to fix the past.

8. A survey on questionable research practices s from the Netherlands. ~4% fabrication, ~50% frequently engage in QRPs.

9. A clever paper uses the shutdown of a journal (due to an "exogenous shock" in economese) to measure the prevalence of strategic citations. Citations drop by about 20% after discontinuation.

10. Is the Value Premium Smaller Than We Thought? A look at the various decisions that go into constructing a risk factor, and how they affect the end result. "The results suggest that the original value premium estimate is upward biased because of a chance result in the original research decisions."

11. Text-generating models are sometimes used to plagiarize papers by back-and-forth translation, or to generate new (nonsensical) papers. This study looks for "tortured phrases" like "profound neural organization" (ie deep neural network) and "haze figuring" (ie cloud computing), and finds many published papers that appear to have been computer-generated.

12. Arcadia Science is a for-profit research institute, with a biology lab opening in Berkeley next month. "No work produced or funded by Arcadia will be published in journals."

Covid

13. Simpson's paradox and Israeli vaccine data. On stratification by age and calculating vaccine effectiveness.

14. Tamiflu for covid? Looks pretty good, ~50% decrease in risk of hospitalization. Costs $700 though.

Forecasting

15. Alignment Problems With Current Forecasting Platforms. A look at some issues with GJO/CSET/Metaculus. It's not easy to incentivize people to provide their true forecasts at all times, share information, etc.

16. Facebook's new forecasting platform lasted about a month.

17. Hedgehog, blockchain prediction market from "Futarchy Research Limited".

Book Reviews

18. Razib Khan has a relatively positive review of Harden's The Genetic Lottery, but the Steve Sailer review is a lot more entertaining. It's amusing that the BBEG for these people is still Charles Murray rather than, say, David Reich who has said much worse things.

The Rest

19. George Church is bringing back the woolly mammoth.

20. ADS: Become a Billionaire.

Surveying the top Y Combinator companies, I find that around the top 50 are valued at over $1,000,000,000. They won’t all exit successfully, and the founders won’t all own enough equity to emerge with tres commas to their net worth, but this already gets us to a much more practical and optimistic heuristic to life:

1. Try very hard to get into YC
2. Conditional on acceptance, try very hard to become a billionaire

The odds really aren't that bad. Also from ADS, Does Moral Philosophy Drive Moral Progress?

21. You've probably already seen SMTM's fantastic series on the causes behind the rise in obesity. Some interesting pushback from RCA and a literal banana.

22. Felix Stocker on Will MacAskill's longtermist plans: Reflecting on the Long Reflection. "I'm struggling to see the Long Reflection as anything other than impossible and pointless: impossible in that we cannot solve all x-risks before any s-risks, or avoid race dynamics; pointless in that I don't believe that there is a great Answer for it to discover."

23. Alexey Guzey on Bloom et al's Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? The paper has a bunch of problems, but the more general section on TFP is the most interesting:

France’s TFP in 2001 was higher than in 2019. Italy’s TFP in 1970 was higher than in 2019. Japan’s TFP in 1990 was higher than in 2009. Spain’s TFP in 1984 was higher than in 2019. Sweden’s TFP in 1973 was higher than in 1993. Switzerland’s TFP in 1974 was higher than in 1996. United Kingdom’s TFP in 2003 was higher than in 2019.

24. ACX on the FDA: Adumbrations Of Aducanumab The Moldbuggian aspects of this are still underappreaciated. Bureaucracy and bureaucrats are isolated from the consequences of their actions; the idea of equality before the law is a complete joke in the modern regulatory state, and the incentive vectors point in exactly the wrong direction. Scott ultimately blames it on the incentives of the politicians—the people seem to accept infinite costs to prevent certain bad things from happening; but if we take the people as a given, isn't ultimately the system of governance at fault? Plus ACX on missing school: Kids Can Recover From Missing Even Quite A Lot Of School.

25. Herding, Warfare, and a Culture of Honor: Global Evidence. "The culture of pre-industrial societies that relied on animal herding emphasizes violence, punishment, and revenge-taking". Highly speculative (the approach of extracting culture of honor from folklore seems doubtful for various reasons) and those scatter plots are not entirely convincing, but also intuitively appealing.

26. Exploiting an exogenous shock in birth control prices, The Children of the Missed Pill looks at the causal impact of the pill: "As children reached school age, we find lower school enrollment rates and higher participation in special education programs." The eugenic effect of abortion/contraception is both underrated and understudied.

27. A primer on olivine weathering as a cheap method of carbon capture; looks like it could sequester a tonne of CO2 for less than $20. Geoengineering is very cheap compared to most proposed "green" solutions. The OECD has 120 euros per tonne as its "central estimate" of carbon costs in 2030, implying an extremely high ROI for geongineering.

28. DeepMind: Generally capable agents emerge from open-ended play. "We find the agent exhibits general, heuristic behaviours such as experimentation, behaviours that are widely applicable to many tasks rather than specialised to an individual task. This new approach marks an important step toward creating more general agents with the flexibility to adapt rapidly within constantly changing environments."

29. Unintentionally hilarious paper about AI spotting race in chest x-rays: "Our findings that AI can trivially predict self-reported race - even from corrupted, cropped, and noised medical images - in a setting where clinical experts cannot, creates an enormous risk for all model deployments in medical imaging: if an AI model secretly used its knowledge of self-reported race to misclassify all Black patients, radiologists would not be able to tell using the same data the model has access to."

30. "Pain Reprocessing Therapy" "centered on changing patients’ beliefs about the causes and threat value of pain" more effective than usual care for back pain, at least if you think you can trust people's responses in surveys.

31. Yet another piece of evidence against the efficacy of advertising: TV Advertising Effectiveness and Profitability: Generalizable Results From 288 Brands. "...negative ROIs at the margin for more than 80% of brands, implying over-investment in advertising by most firms. Further, the overall ROI of the observed advertising schedule is only positive for one third of all brands."

32. Brain surgery causes man to need 3 hours less sleep per day.

33. Matt Lakeman travels to Peru and Panama.

34. Poemage is a visualization system for exploring the sonic topology of a poem.

Audio-Visual

35. An animated explainer of Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model: Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens.

36. Did you know that Milla Jovovich released an album in 1994 and it's...not bad at all? Sounds like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. Check out Clocks. [NSFW cover art]

37. Plus some great krautrock: Et Cetera - Kabul.

What I've Been Reading

Non-Fiction

• The History of the Pelopponesian War, by Thucydides. Re-read. What was that Coleridge quip? "All men are born Herodotians or Thucydideans"? Something like that. Anyway, I was definitely born a Herodotian. Thucydides is a historian with the soul of an accountant. Still, there are things to appreciate in that attitude: while most ancient historians never saw an army smaller than 400,000, he's happy to tell you about engagements with 60 hoplites and 20 archers. And keeping track of a myriad engagements, covering Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, over the span of multiple decades is extremely impressive.

  How prescriptive is Thuc's realpolitik? I'm not entirely sure, it certainly didn't do the Athenians any good. He's obviously a skeptic when it comes to the supernatural, and there's very little room for morality in his history; is this an artifact of the lack of morality in the way the Athenian went about their affairs, or is this something Thuc projects onto them? One interesting point is that his story draws on the structure of tragedy: the hubris of the Sicilian expedition is ultimately punished; the players seem to lack any ability to change course. Perhaps morality plays no role in this history because Thuc views the path taken by each polis as deterministic. (This applies both to the "Thucydides trap" specifically, and also more generally).

  On the question of direct democracy as a system of government things are a bit clearer as Thuc doesn't hide his views. He's short on alternatives though; the traditional polis obviously can't cope with the environment of the 4th century, but Thuc can't really see beyond it.

  There are apparently some people who think Thucydides influenced the Neoconservatives, and I find that utterly absurd. Thuc is extraordinarily cynical when it comes to "spreading freedom"-style justifications for war, and if there's any realpolitik involved in spending trillions so that Afghan women can get gender studies degrees for 20 years before the Taliban come back, I'm not seeing it.

  One of the things that stand out is how bad the Greeks are at war. Reading Thuc, you're constantly thinking "well of course these guys got rolled by the Romans". How did they beat the Persians so hard? Sieges seem to be a sticking point (something Phillip II turned out to be quite good at), so perhaps the open battles against the Persians played into their hands, or perhaps it was simply a matter of mismatched unit compositions. On the other hand the Athenians were extraordinarily persistent; even after the plague and the Sicilian disaster they still kept going for years, possibly only losing due to the Persian money flowing into the Spartan coffers.

  If you haven't read any histories of the Pelopponesian war, this is highly recommended, just keep in mind it's very unfinished. Get the Landmark edition.

• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt. This book has an incredibly ambitious thesis: it argues that the world became modern due to the rediscovery of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. Unfortunately the evidence presented in favor of that thesis is pretty weak, and the book suddenly ends right as it starts to get into a groove. Still, it's fairly entertaining and has a ton of interesting anecdotes from the life of Poggio Bracciolini (the man who rediscovered Lucretius).

• The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. A fairly dry read, its value today mainly lies in its documentation of the discovery of evolution, and in showing how Darwin could reason his way forward despite rather limited means (not even an inkling of DNA!). It was cool to see the role geology played in the development of evolutionary theory, and there's a very interesting passage (at the end of the chapter ON THE IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD) in which Darwin almost invents plate tectonics based on the geographical distribution of species. It's difficult to recommend: if you want to learn about evolution, pick up a modern textbook; if you're interested in the history of science you should probably read a historian; and if you just want to read something cool by Charles Darwin, pick up his Beagle adventure.

Fiction

• A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge. Some pretty cool worldbuilding, with a universe divided into zones where different levels of technology are possible (the highest one is filled with Gods who quickly commit suicide). One of the main alien races is a sentient houseplant riding a roomba (seriously). But half the novel is wasted on a dull isekai story about some annoying kids stuck on a backwards planet with telepathic wolves, making the thing way overlong. And the resolution is not entirely satisfying.

• Inhibitor Phase, by Alastair Reynolds. A new novel in the Revelation Space universe, unfortunately it's also the worst novel in the Revelation Space universe. It's a bit like a horror theme park, going from one ride to the next with little to no connective tissue between them. Even worse, many of the rides are completely nonsensical given the setting (humanity has almost been completely wiped out by the inhibitors). The two main characters are completely uninteresting, their dialogue is annoying, and the revelations of their backstory are completely predictable.

• Crash, by J. G. Ballard. Holy mother of Christ, this is an experience. A blunt tool that beats you into submission through drone-like repetitiveness. Truly a novel that lives up to its reputation (one publisher's reader wrote: "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!"). What images! A peerless examination of the intersection between sex and technology. The Cronenberg film gets the imagery right, but the languid, whispered tempo is completely wrong. Kermode, in a very positive review, described it as "glacial"! I feel the novel required a more in-your-face treatment.

  He dreamed of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers, of taxis filled with celebrating children colliding head-on below the bright display windows of deserted supermarkets. He dreamed of alienated brothers and sisters, by chance meeting each other on collision courses on the access roads of petrochemical plants, their unconscious incest made explicit in this colliding metal, in the heamorrhages of their brain tissue flowering beneath the aluminized compression chambers and reactions vessels.

• Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Somehow managed to evade this as a kid. It's compelling and effective but I can't get on board with its overwhelming cynicism.

• Don't Make Me Think, by Zero HP Lovecraft. The emoji gimmick doesn't work, but I loved the world-building.

• Flashman and the Dragon, by George MacDonald Fraser. Flashman's in China this time, right in the middle of the Taiping Rebellion. This is the 8th book in the series, and things are starting to get repetitive, but the humor, deep historical research, and memorable characters manage to overcome the familiar plotline.

• The Shadow of the Wind. by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Bad audiobook of a bad airport novel filled with interminable exposition dumps in an awful style. Dropped it halfway through.

I found Giorgio Vasari through Burckhardt¹ and Barzun. The latter writes: "Vasari, impelled by the unexampled artistic outburst of his time, divided his energies between his profession of painter and builder in Florence and biographer of the modern masters in the three great arts of design. His huge collection of Lives, which is a delight to read as well as a unique source of cultural history, was an amazing performance in an age that lacked organized means of research. [...] Throughout, Vasari makes sure that his reader will appreciate the enhanced human powers shown in the works that he calls "good painting" in parallel with "good letters.""

Vasari was mainly a painter, but also worked as an architect. He was not the greatest artist in the world, but he had a knack for ingratiating himself with the rich and powerful, so his career was quite successful. Besides painting, he also cared a lot about conservation: both the physical preservation of works and the conceptual preservation of the fame and biographies of artists. He gave a kind of immortality to many lost paintings and sculptures by describing them to us in his book.

His Lives are a collection of more than 180 biographies of Italian artists, starting with Cimabue (1240-1302) and reaching a climax with Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). They're an invaluable resource, as there is very little information available about these people other than his book; his biography of Botticelli is 8 pages long, yet on Botticelli's wikipedia page, Vasari is mentioned 36 times.

He was a straight-laced man surrounded on all sides by wild and eccentric artists. While Vasari was a sober businessman, always delivering his work on time, the people he was writing about were usually tempestuous madmen who would take commissions and leave the work unfinished, or go off on the slightest affront and start hacking apart their own works. Even of the great Leonardo he writes that "through his comprehension of art, [he] began many things and never finished one of them".

The greater part of the craftsmen who had lived up to that time had received from nature a certain element of savagery and madness, which, besides making them strange and eccentric, had brought it about that very often there was revealed in them rather the obscure darkness of vice than the brightness and splendour of those virtues that make men immortal.

Many of them were undone by their love of food, drink, and/or women:

...when his dear friend Agostino Chigi commissioned him to paint the first loggia in his palace, Raffaello was not able to give much attention to his work, on account of the love that he had for his mistress.

Gwern's review of the autobiography of Cellini (which includes the words "aside from the demonology and weather-controlling") should give you a taste of what these guys were like.

Vasari's approach to the truth can be described as loose, if not gossipy. Many of the lives include fabricated elements, sometimes obviously so: I doubt anyone ever believed the story of Cimabue taking on Giotto as a pupil after seeing him scratch a painting on a stone. One of the most striking tales is the murder of Domenico Veneziano by Andrea del Castagno, but in reality Castagno actually died first. Vasari also damaged the reputation of some of his competitors, such as Jacopo da Pontormo, whom he portrayed as a paranoid recluse.

Vasari is also hilariously biased in favor of Florence: "in the practice of these rare exercises and arts—namely, in painting, in sculpture, and in architecture—the Tuscan intellects have always been exalted and raised high above all others". The story of his visit to Titian (a Venetian) is typical:

One day as Michelangelo and Vasari were going to see Titian in the Belvedere, they saw in a painting he had just completed a naked woman representing Danae with Jupiter transformed into a golden shower on her lap, and, as is done in the artisan's presence, they gave it high praise. After leaving Titian, and discussing his method, Buonarroti strongly commended him, declaring that he liked his colouring and style very much but that it was a pity artisans in Venice did not learn to draw well from the beginning and that Venetian painters did not have a better method of study.

I read (as usual) the Everyman edition, but would not recommend braving the entire work unless you're a Renaissance art fanatic. The collection spans over 2000 pages, and can get tiresome and repetitive when you go through the 100th similar biography of some minor painter you've never heard of. I would, however, recommend the best chapters which I have picked out below (and which are freely available online):

• Giotto (1267-1337), an early stepping stone between the medieval "Greek style" and the modern one.

• Uccello (1397-1475), the pioneer of perspective.

• Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522), an eccentric who was influenced by the Dutch and eventually fell under the sway of Savonarola.

• Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), you've probably heard of him.

• Raffaello (1483-1520), a brilliant talent who died young.

• Il Rosso (1495-1540), who travelled to France and painted for Francis I.

• Baccio Bandinelli (1493-1560), who everyone hated.

• Il Sodoma (1477-1549), the name says it all. Had a pet monkey.

• Michelangelo (1475-1564), Il Divino.

The Golden Present

Giorgio Vasari was one of the earliest philosophers of progress. Petrarch (1304-1374) invented the idea of the dark ages in order to explain the deficiencies of his own time relative to the ancients, and dreamt of a better future:

My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.

To this scheme of ancient glory and medieval darkness, Vasari added a third—modern—age and gave it a name: rinascita.² And within his rinascita, Vasari described an upward trajectory starting with Cimabue, and ending in a golden age beginning with eccentric Leonardo and crazed sex maniac Raphael, only to give way to the perfect Michelangelo in the end. It is a trajectory driven by the modern conception of the artist as an individual auteur, rather than a faceless craftsman.

The most benign Ruler of Heaven in His clemency turned His eyes to the earth, and, having perceived the infinite vanity of all those labours, the ardent studies without any fruit, and the presumptuous self-sufficiency of men, which is even further removed from truth than is darkness from light, and desiring to deliver us from such great errors, became minded to send down to earth a spirit with universal ability in every art and every profession.

This golden age was certainly no utopia, as 16th century Italy was ravaged by political turbulence, frequent plague, and incessant war. Many of the artists mentioned were at some point taken hostage by invading armies; Vasari himself had to rescue a part of Michelangelo's David when it was broken off in the battle to expel the Medici from Florence.

And yet Vasari saw greatness in his time, and the entire book is structured around a narrative of artistic progress. He documented the spread of new technologies and techniques (such as the spread of oil painting, imported from the Low Countries), which—as an artist—he had an intimate understanding of.

This story of progress is paralleled with the rediscovery (and, ultimately, surpassing) of the ancients. It would take until the 17th century for the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes to really take off in France, but in Florence Vasari had already seen enough to decide the question in favor of his contemporaries—the essence of the Enlightenment is already present in 1550. He writes about Donatello (1386-1466), who produced the first nude male sculpture of the modern era:

The talent of Donato was such, and he was so admirable in all his actions, that he may be said to have been one of the first to give light, by his practice, judgment, and knowledge, to the art of sculpture and of good design among the moderns; and he deserves all the more commendation, because in his day, apart from the columns, sarcophagi, and triumphal arches, there were no antiquities revealed above the earth. And it was through him, chiefly, that there arose in Cosimo de' Medici the desire to introduce into Florence the antiquities that were and are in the house of the Medici; all of which he restored with his own hand.

Similarly, he explains that Mino da Fiesole's (1429-1484) work was "somewhat stiff", yet it was nonetheless admired because "few antiquities had been discovered up to that time". The ancients created a new higher standard, which first created a thirst for imitation, then an impetus to outclass it.

...their successors were enabled to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others, which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure but only a movement of certain parts, and are revealed with a most perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness, hardness, and sharpness of manner...

It is curious that this competitive attitude seems to have disappeared in later eras. In the 18th century, for example, the English painter Joshua Reynolds said of the Belvedere Torso that it retained "the traces of superlative genius…on which succeeding ages can only gaze with inadequate admiration." The Italians of the Renaissance had such a civilizational confidence and such an individual lust for Glory that these fatalistic thoughts would never enter their minds. Take Raphael's School of Athens for example: imagine the self-confidence (if not presumption) necessary to paint Plato (portrayed by da Vinci) and Heraclitus (portrayed by Michelangelo) in the form of your friends and contemporaries! Imagine someone trying that today—Dennet as Plato, Gaspar Noé as...Diogenes?

What came first, the excellence or the confidence? Who can disentangle cause and effect? Braudel suggests an initial "restlessness" created the necessary conditions:

Perhaps if the door is to be opened to innovation, the source of all progress, there must be first some restlessness which may express itself in such trifles as dress, the shape of shoes and hairstyles?

Vasari certainly thought this ambition was a necessary ingredient for greatness. Commenting on Andrea del Sarto, he writes that he was excellent in all skills but "a certain timidity of spirit and a sort of humility and simplicity in his nature made it impossible that there should be seen in him that glowing ardour and that boldness which, added to his other qualities, would have made him truly divine in painting".

And one may ask: why is there no ancient Vasari? Pliny, describing the Laocoön, writes that it is "a work to be preferred to all that the arts of painting and sculpture have produced". Yet he is content to simply mention the names of the artists in passing: Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes. There is not the slightest hint of curiosity about the lives of those most excellent men. Even worse, they were (highly-skilled) copyists, selling reproductions of Hellenistic works to wealthy Romans. The name of the original sculptor is lost to time.³

Aesthetic Value Over Time

You're probably familiar with the story of the Mona Lisa: it was unpopular until it was stolen in 1911, Apollinaire and Picasso were suspects in the case, and when it was finally returned two years later it had become the most famous painting in the world. I was surprised, then, to see that the Mona Lisa was singled out for effusive praise by Vasari. He even focuses on that famous smile:

For Francesco del Giocondo, Leonardo undertook the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife, and after working on it for four years, he left the work unfinished, and it may be found at Fontainebleau today in the possession of King Francis. Anyone wishing to see the degree to which art can imitate Nature can easily understand this from the head, for here Leonardo reproduced all the details that can be painted with subtlety. The eyes have the lustre and moisture always seen in living people, while around them are the lashes and all the reddish tones which cannot be produced without the greatest care. The eyebrows could not be more natural, for they represent the way the hair grows in the skin—thicker in some places and thinner in others, following the pores of the skin. The nose seems lifelike with its beautiful pink and tender nostrils. The mouth, with its opening joining the red of the lips to the flesh of the face, seemed to be real flesh rather than paint. Anyone who looked very attentively at the hollow of her throat would see her pulse beating: to tell the truth, it can be said that portrait was painted in a way that would cause every brave artist to tremble and fear, whoever he might be. Since Mona Lisa was very beautiful, Leonardo employed this technique: while he was painting her portrait, he had musicians who played or sang and clowns who would always make her merry in order to drive away her melancholy, which painting often brings to portraits. And in this portrait by Leonardo, there is a smile so pleasing that it seems more divine than human, and it was considered a wondrous thing that it was as lively as the smile of the living original.

There are, however, one or two minor problems with his account. One of them is that Vasari never actually saw the Mona Lisa: he was about 6 years old when the painting was moved to France, and he never left Italy. Vasari also says that Leonardo left the painting unfinished, while the Mona Lisa is very much finished. So what's going on? Until the 20th century people simply thought he made it up based on sketches or second-hand accounts.

And then, in 1913, an art collector discovered a second Mona Lisa hanging in a house in Somerset. By all accounts it appears to be authentic, and it matches a sketch by Raphael. It's also a better match for Vasari's description, though he may not have seen this one either. If he thought this one was great, just imagine how he would have raved about the first Mona Lisa!

This raises the question: do we venerate the same paintings as Vasari due to path dependency, or due to constancy in aesthetic judgment? Broadly, Vasari's taste is our own. He likes Raphael, da Vinci, and Michelangelo above all others. There are certainly those who argue that the influence and worship of Florentine artists is merely a historical accident, and if Vasari had been a Venetian the history of painting would have turned out rather different.

There are a few interesting points of difference. For example, Botticelli only gets a very short biography, and his Birth of Venus merits not more more than a passing comment: Vasari says "he expressed himself with grace". Another artist who was mostly ignored by Vasari and was later "reevaluated" is the highly erotic Antonio da Correggio.

Architecture?

YOU - Hold on, is architecture also art?

CONCEPTUALIZATION - Of course not, it's autism. Box-drawing. Masturbation with a ruler and a sextant or whatever they use.

Painters, naturally. Sculptors, of course. But...architects? Certainly no twenty-first century chronicler would collect the lives of painters, sculptors, and architects. In our own age architecture is little more than an exercise in applied misanthropy. It has gotten so bad even the commies can tell it sucks, and they're not exactly famous for their aesthetic discernment. And these Renaissance artists were not limited to constructing fancy villas or churches, they often got involved in military engineering as well!

Architects might try to defend themselves by appealing to specialization and saying that, as the science has progressed, an architect today requires far more specialized knowledge than they did in the 16th century. One cannot be both a painter and an architect at the same time. Yet I cannot help but notice that the Duomo and the Uffizi are still beautiful and still standing, while our contemporary concrete claptrap starts crumbling after a couple of years. Our segregation of these fields is both arbitrary and misguided. Perhaps education (and the way it commoditizes knowledge) is to blame.⁴

Human Capital, Power Laws, and Cluster Effects

Perhaps the reason these people were able to paint, sculpt, architect, and sometimes even do a bit of military engineering on the side, is that art was one of very few avenues available at the time for people to monetize their high human capital. A smart guy in 16th century Florence had limited options: he might go into law, try to be a scribe, or (if he had money) commerce. Science was not a profession, and there were no hedge funds or startups. Art offered a new avenue, open to all with talent.⁵

Art was also something of a winner-take-all market, with virtually unlimited upside for the select few who could make it to the top. Like modern athletes, the superstars were drowning in money while the average painter didn't make all that much. Time seems to have confirmed this power law in artistic excellence: nobody goes to a museum for the paintings of Bartolomeo Vivarini, while da Vinci draws millions every year.

Societies are broadly defined by how they allocate status and (by extension) how they allocate the scarce biological resources they have access to. Rome rewarded military leadership, so it got a lot of great generals (and civil wars). The kleptocrats of Renaissance Italy allocated talent to art; gold and fame attracted competence. At the time Vasari was writing, there were about thirty thousand men in Florence—roughly the same as the number of male citizens in Classical Athens, and also roughly the same as today's population of Dubuque, Iowa. Yet their achievements (to borrow a phrase from Gibbon) would excuse the computation of imaginary millions.

One might ask: where are all the Shakespeares? There are about 25x more literate men in England today than in 1564, how come we aren't producing 25x more Shakespeares? The answer is that our society does not allocate much of its human capital to playwriting. There are (potentially) great authors who spend 8 hours a day writing ads for cereal, or improving trading algorithms by 0.01%. Capitalism, for all its virtues, tends to instill a preference for mere optimization in its subjects; the shadow of utility blots out the impetus for Glory.

One of the starkest lessons from Vasari is the importance of clusters in artistic production. He highlights both the spur of competition and the virtues of learning through imitation. He documents how new techniques (oil, perspective, new approaches to color) spread like wildfire, and how the newly unearthed Roman statues provided both a lesson and a stimulus for improvement. The mentor-mentee relationship was extremely important; a young artist could destroy his entire career by choosing the wrong master.

There is an extensive literature in "economics"⁶ covering the influence of agglomeration in creative industries. Hollywood is an obvious example, but there also seem to be agglomeration gains in 18-19th century classical music, while a writer who moved to London in the 18th or 19th century ended up with 12% higher productivity. Renaissance Florence certainly seems to be another one of these (which suggests an element of path dependency).

A century ago a man like Ernest Hemingway could just travel to Paris, join a flourishing artistic community, and have lunch with the world's greatest author (James Joyce). Imagine some random guy flying to New York and trying to have a meal with Thomas Pynchon today. Global connectivity has made us more insular by removing the barriers that used to act as filters. The apprenticeship opportunities of the Renaissance do not exist any more, though the wealthy patrons are still around.

Yet new possibilities for cluster formation open up on the internet: group chats, forums, perhaps even twitter. But it is not easy to cultivate the right mix of competition and imitation, or the preconditions necessary for cultural confidence and a lust for Glory. Perhaps the closest analogy in our time would be Silicon Valley; a relatively small area which attracts talent in search of money and fame. It certainly has that culture of ambition.

I leave you with a final quotation from Vasari, on the motivations behind art and how they affect the ultimate product:

And, to tell the truth of the matter, those craftsmen who have as their ultimate and principal end gain and profit, and not honour and glory, rarely become very excellent, even although they may have good and beautiful genius; besides which, labouring for a livelihood, as very many do who are weighed down by poverty and their families, and working not by inclination, when the mind and the will are drawn to it, but by necessity from morning till night, is a life not for men who have honour and glory as their aim, but for hacks, as they are called, and manual labourers, for the reason that good works do not get done without first having been well considered for a long time. And it was on that account that Rustici used to say in his more mature years that you must first think, then make your sketches, and after that your designs; which done, you must put them aside for weeks and even months without looking at them, and then, choosing the best, put them into execution; but that method cannot be followed by everyone, nor do those use it who labour only for gain.

The idea of a personal "carbon footprint" is an oil company psyop. About 20 years ago, British Petroleum launched an ad campaign popularizing the notion and put out a website letting you calculate your "carbon footprint". They're still at it.

It's an idea with remarkable memetic power, both for individuals and brands. Displaying your concern about your personal carbon footprint lets you show off your prosociality and marks you out as someone virtuous, someone who takes personal responsibility. The idea also feeds into people's narcissistic tendencies, reassuring them that they're actually important and that their actions matter in the world.

Marketers love the concept, and any company trying to appeal to the nature-loving demographic can use and abuse it: Outdoor Brands Get Serious About the Carbon Footprint of Adventure: The North Face and Protect Our Winters unveil an activism-oriented CO2 calculator.

The problem with all of this, and the reason BP pushed the idea in the first place, is that your personal carbon footprint doesn't matter. You're 1 of about 7.6 billion people on earth, so your effect is about 1/7,600,000,000 ≈ 0.000000013%. Your personal carbon footprint is completely irrelevant to climate change. Global warming is a collective issue that requires collective solutions; framing it as a problem that individuals can tackle (and that individuals are responsible for) distracts from the public policy changes that are necessary. Environmentalist signaling is complete nonsense but also deadly serious.

The Parallel

Caring about individual bad studies is a bit like caring about your individual carbon footprint.

People occasionally send me shitty papers, and year or two ago I would care a lot, enjoying the shameful thrill of getting Mad Online about some fraud, or having fun picking apart yet another terrible study. It's an attractive activity, and performing it in public shows how much you care about Good Science. Picking out a single paper to replicate operates at the same level. What's the impact of all this?

In the idealized version of science, a replication failure would raise serious doubts about the veracity of the original study and have all sorts of downstream effects. In the real version of social science, none of that matters. You have to go on active memetic warfare if you want to have any effect, and even then there's no guarantee you'll succeed. As Tal Yarkoni puts it, "the dominant response is some tut-tutting and mild expression of indignation, and then everything reverts to status quo until the next case". People keep citing retracted articles. Brian fucking Wansink has been getting over 7 citations per day in 2021. So what exactly do you think a replication is going to achieve?

Walker

A couple years ago Alexey Guzey wrote "Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors", finding not only errors but even egregious data manipulation in Walker's book. Guzey later collaborated with Andrew Gelman on Statistics as Squid Ink: How Prominent Researchers Can Get Away with Misrepresenting Data.

What was the effect of all this? Nothing.

Guzey explains on twitter:

my piece on the book has gotten >250k views by now and still not a single neuroscientist or sleep scientist commented meaningfully on the merits of my accusations. [...] According to UC Berkeley, "there were some minor errors in the book, which Walker intends to correct". The case is closed.

The feedback loops that are supposed to reward people who seek truth and to punish charlatans are just completely broken.

...but a prominent neuroscientist did write to him in private to express his agreement.

Implicit Bias

It is so much harder to get rid of bullshit than it is to prevent its publication in the first place. Let's take a look at some of the literature on implicit bias.

Oswald et al (2013) meta-analyze the relation between the IAT and discrimination: "IATs were poor predictors of every criterion category other than brain activity, and the IATs performed no better than simple explicit measures." Carlsson & Agerström (2016) refine the Oswald et al paper, and find that "the overall effect was close to zero and highly inconsistent across studies [...] little evidence that the IAT can meaningfully predict discrimination".

Meissner et al (2019) review the IAT literature and find that the "predictive value for behavioral criteria is weak and their incremental validity over and above self-report measures is negligible".

Forscher et al (2019) meta-analyze the effect of procedures to change implicit measures, and find that the "generally produced trivial changes in behavior [...] changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior". Figure 8 from their paper shows the effect of changing implicit measures on actual behavior:

What was the effect of all this? Nothing.

Just within the last few days, the New Jersey Supreme Court announced implicit bias training for all employees of state courts, "Dean Health Plan in Wisconsin implemented new strategies to address health equity in maternal health, including implicit bias training for employees", the Auburn Human Rights Commission has "offered implicit bias training to supervisory personnel in Auburn city government, the Cayuga County Sheriff's Office, public schools and other local organizations", and California's Attorney General is making sure that healthcare facilities are complying with a law requiring anti-implicit bias training.

You can debunk, and (fail to) replicate all you want, but it don't mean a thing. Mitchell & Tetlock (2017) write:

once employers, health care providers, police forces, and policy-makers seek to develop real solutions to real problems and then monitor the costs and benefits of these proposed solutions, the shortcomings of implicit prejudice research will likely become apparent

But it didn't turn out that way, did it? Just as with the personal carbon footprint, the ultimate outcome is a secondary consideration at best.

Fin

Yarkoni (the British Petroleum of social science) says "it's not the incentives, it's you" but, really, it's the incentives. Before you can run, you must walk. Before you replicate, you must have a scientific ecosystem with reliable self-correction mechanisms.¹ And before you build that, it's a good idea to limit the publication of false positives and low-quality research in general.

One of the key insights of longtermism is that if humanity survives in the long term, the vast majority of humans will live in the future, so even a small improvement to their welfare can have a huge effect. We might make a similar argument about longtermism in social science: the vast majority of papers lie in the future. If we can do something today to improve them even by a little bit, the cumulative impact would be enormous. On the other hand, defeating one of the 10,000 bad papers that will be published this year is not going to do much at all. Effective scientific altruism is systematically improving the future by 0.01% rather than putting your energy into deboonking a single study. Every dollar wasted on replication is a dollar that could've been invested in fixing the underlying collective problems instead. The past is not going to change, but the future is still malleable.

Ideally we'd proclaim the beginning of a new era, ban citations to any pre-2022 works, and start from scratch (except actually do things properly this time). Realistically that won't happen, so the second-best approach is probably a Hirschmanian Exit into parallel institutions.

Links

Metascience

1. New Science is an attempt to construct a brand new, parallel research ecosystem without all the cruft of academia. Founded by Alexey Guzey and advised (among others) by Tyler Cowen and Andrew Gelman.

2. Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden Universe of Uncertainty: 73 teams study the same hypothesis with the same data. Chaos ensues. "Each model deployed to test the hypothesis was unique".

3. Tal Yarkoni and Joe Hilgard have exited academia. Some notes on The Science Reform Brain Drain. "I didn’t believe then that scientific reform would just fizzle out, given the attention and passion it elicited. Now, seeing how tenure insulates older researchers and competition weeds out those who don’t play by their rules, I understand the cynicism better."

4. Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud "The problem with this sort of low-key fraud is that it’s insidious, it’s subtle. In many ways, a fraudulent action is indistinguishable from a simple mistake. There is plausible deniability [...] Let’s make explicit academic fraud commonplace enough to cast doubt into the minds of every scientist reading an AI paper. Overall, science will benefit."

5. Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones.

6. Atoms: smart contracts for science funding. "Implicit researcher duties are now made explicit with incentives. As a result, scientific roles can become both more specialized and more diverse. PIs can focus less time on writing grants and more time on conducting research. Or the PIs who enjoy and excel at raising funds can do so and even re-deploy it to the right scientists, akin to founders who become angel investors and venture capitalists."

7. Understanding and Predicting Retractions of Published Work Based on metadata + full text. Performs surprisingly well. "Individually, SJR, abstract, country give the best performance out of all metadata features."

8. Collison, Cowen & Hsu, What We Learned Doing Fast Grants. "64% of respondents told us that the work in question wouldn’t have happened without receiving a Fast Grant."

9. Elisabeth Bik is facing legal threats. This Didier Raoult character apparently has more than 3500 publications.

10. A Retrospective on the 2014 NeurIPS Experiment: a giant post on the consistency of the review process, based on 170 papers submitted to NeurIPS. The consistency is actually fairly high, though there is "no correlation between reviewer quality scores and paper's eventual impact".

Covid

11. On the role of scientific journals in shaping the narrative around the origins of covid.

Yet this is the same prestigious journal that published a now infamous statement early last year attacking “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin“. Clearly, this was designed to stifle debate. It was signed by 27 experts but later turned out to have been covertly drafted by Peter Daszak, the British scientist with extensive ties to Wuhan Institute of Virology. To make matters worse, The Lancet then set up a commission on the origins — and incredibly, picked Daszak to chair its 12-person task force, joined by five others who signed that statement dismissing ideas the virus was not a natural occurrence.

12. Who killed the lab leak hypothesis? (twitter thread).

Forecasting

13. Avraham Eisenberg: Tales from Prediction Markets

There was a market on how many times Souljaboy would tweet during a given week. The way these markets are set up, they subtract the total number of tweets on the account at the beginning and end, so deletions can remove tweets. Someone went on his twitch stream, tipped a couple hundred dollars, and said he'd tip more if Soulja would delete a bunch of tweets. Soulja went on a deleting spree and the market went crazy.

14. The Market Consequences of Investment Advice on Reddit's Wallstreetbets: "We find average ‘buy’ recommendations result in two-day announcement returns of 1.1%.[...] 2% over the subsequent month and nearly 5% over the subsequent quarter. [...] our findings suggest that both WSB posters and users are skilled." Or as /r/wallstreetbets put it, "a group of scientists checked our sub out and came to the conclusion that we are not complete morons".

Book Reviews

15. On Sarah Ruden's translation of the gospels: Do you know how weird the gospels are?

Plenty of good reviews came out of the SSC book review contest. My favorites:

16. Double Fold, on librarians and preservation.

17. On The Natural Faculties, a defense of Galen.

18. Down And Out In Paris And London, on Orwell's experiences as a tramp and menial worker.

The Rest

19. There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically): a fantastic post on convergent evolution and the classification of 'trees'. "The common ancestor of a maple and a mulberry tree was not a tree. The common ancestor of a stinging nettle and a strawberry plant was a tree."

20. From the great new blog SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD: Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs. What if the productivity growth slowdown is due to the 1970s Controlled Substances Act? Come for the history of stimulants, stay for Tesla's views on chewing gum. Too many good quotes! Not entirely sure if it's serious or tongue-in-cheek, but that's part of the charm.

21. Toby Ord: The Edges of Our Universe

• Many galaxies that are currently outside the observable universe will become observable later.
• Less than 5% of the galaxies we can currently observe could ever be affected by us, and this is shrinking all the time.
• But we can affect some of the galaxies that are receding from us faster than the speed of light.

22. Scott Alexander Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration. The final paragraph is absolutely spot on: if the Ashkenazi advantage is cultural, then studying it is by far the most important question in the social sciences.

23. Shocks to human capital persist, shocks to physical capital do not: BOMBS, BRAINS, AND SCIENCE: THE ROLE OF HUMAN AND PHYSICAL CAPITAL FOR THE CREATION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. Also interesting for the data on Jewish contributions to German science before the war: "While 15.0% of physicists were dismissed, they published 23.8% of top journal papers before 1933, and received 64% of the citations"! h/t @cicatriz

24. Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary,1949-2017. Social mobility rates ~the same during and after communism. Aristocrats still privileged after 1949. h/t @devarbol

25. No causal associations between childhood family income and subsequent psychiatric disorders, substance misuse and violent crime arrests: a nationwide Finnish study of >650 000 individuals and their siblings. A new study from Amir Sariaslan and colleagues, corroborating earlier results from Sweden. Perhaps the Scandinavian nations with their generous social spending are different from countries with greater inequality though?

26. The Lead-Crime Hypothesis: A Meta-Analysis. "When we restrict our analysis to only high-quality studies that address endogeneity the estimated mean effect size is close to zero." That's quite the funnel plot:

27. Better air is the easiest way not to die. On particles in the air, the harm they cause, and how to avoid them. "By all means, control your body-mass, eat well, and start running. Those are important, but they’re also kind of hard. You might fail to lose weight, but if you try to fix your air, you’ll succeed. You should put the stuff with the highest return on effort first, and that’s air."

28. On Fantastic Mr. Fox and Ted Kaczynski.

By the end of the movie Mr. Fox has pillaged and salted three of the country's largest industrial farms and set a small town on fire with acorn bombs. He got symbolically castrated, lost his home, almost lost his marriage, children, and destroyed the homes and businesses of 20 people who were lucky they didn't starve to death—but he's gotten people to read his column.

29. In 1989 there was an ecoterrorist attack on California, using an invasive species of fruit fly.

30. Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online. A seemingly-Straussian (but possibly not) paper on the social epistemology of covid skepticism. "Most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution. [...] Moreover, this is a subculture shaped by mistrust of established authorities and orthodox scientific viewpoints. Its members value individual initiative and ingenuity, trusting scientific analysis only insofar as they can replicate it themselves by accessing and manipulating the data firsthand."

31. Robin Hanson: Managed Competition or Competing Managers? On how attitudes toward competition influence our judgments about things like evolution and alien civilizations. "This strong norm favoring management over competition helps explain the widespread and continuing dislike for the theory of natural selection, which explicitly declares a system of competition to be the largest encompassing system."

32. The Deep History of Human Inequality. Rousseau, Darwin, and Boehm on the question of evolution and inequality. "Going further, it could be that culture was essential for reversing polygyny. That’s because practising reverse dominance requires collective action. It’s only by working together that bachelors can depose the big boys."

33. Applied Divinity Studies on Stubborn Attachments, longtermism, progress studies, and effective altruism: The Moral Foundations of Progress. "If we stagnate now, we may be able to restart growth in the future. In comparison, an existential catastrophe is by definition unrecoverable. Given the choice, we ought to focus on stability."

34. A new essay from Houellebecq: The narcissistic fall of France.

No, we are not really dealing with a “French suicide” — to evoke the title of Eric Zemmour’s book — but a Western suicide or rather a suicide of modernity, since Asian countries are not spared. What is specifically, authentically French is the awareness of this suicide. [...] By refusing all forms of immigration, Asian countries have opted for a simple suicide, without complications or disturbances. The countries of Southern Europe are in the same situation, although one wonders if they have consciously chosen it. Migrants do land in Italy, in Spain and in Greece — but they only pass through, without helping to sort out the demographic balance, although the women of these countries are often highly desirable. No, the migrants are drawn irresistibly to the biggest and fattest cheeses, the countries of Northern Europe.

35. The Borderless Welfare State, a report from the Netherlands on the costs and benefits of immigration. Summary in English on p. 19. Scroll down for some great charts.

36. Learning to Hesitate: people tend to spend too much time gathering info on low-impact choices, and too little time gathering info on high-impact choices.

37. What if humans and chimpanzees diverged because of ticks? Hair loss as defense against ticks caused babies to be unable to cling to their mothers, which caused upright walking?! Obviously speculative, but I love this kind of speculation.

38. Wikipedia: Meteor burst communications "is a radio propagation mode that exploits the ionized trails of meteors during atmospheric entry to establish brief communications paths between radio stations up to 2,250 kilometres (1,400 mi) apart."

39. Niccolo Soldo interviews Marc Andreessen(?!?!) "I predict that we — the West — are going to WEIRDify the entire world, within the next 50 years, the next two generations. We will do this not by converting non-WEIRD people to WEIRD, but by getting their kids." His interview with "Unrepentant Baguette Merchant" PEG is also entertaining.

40. Everyone with an e-reader has run into public domain ebooks with horrible formatting/OCR errors on Amazon or Project Gutenberg. Standard Ebooks produces high-quality (and free) versions of public domain books.

41. AI-designed hardware. "We believe that more powerful AI-designed hardware will fuel advances in AI, creating a symbiotic relationship between the two fields."

42. ETH token fights back against frontrunning bots by trapping them in the position.

43. How I Taught The Iliad to Chinese Teenagers

44. On the virtues of frozen food.

45. Great non-fiction books under 250 pages.

Audio-Visual

46. DeepMind's AlphaGo documentary is quite good.

47. Doom on a holographic(?) display.

48. And here's Viagra Boys with Girls & Boys from Shrimp Sessions 2.

What I've Been Reading

Non-Fiction

• The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari. Vasari was a painter and architect who lived in the first half of the 16th century and personally knew many of the greats (including Michelangelo). In this gossipy collection of biographies he covers more than 180 artists, starting with Cimabue and Giotto in the 13thC and ending with Michelangelo and others who were still alive at the time of writing (like Titian and Jacopo Sansovino). The ideas of progress and renaissance are front and center: the great ancients, the decline in the middle ages, and finally the triumphant rebirth of art in his own era. Parts of it are excellent, but it can get a bit dry and repetitive when he describes various minor artists, so I probably wouldn't recommend the full 2000+ page unabridged version. There's a good two-part BBC documentary called Travels With Vasari. Full review forthcoming.

• Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Robert Boyd & Peter Richerson. I was curious to see if there was anything in B&R that Henrich failed to capture in his work, and the answer is broadly "no", but there are a few interesting differences: while Henrich is rather triumphalist, B&R take a much more skeptical view of cultural evolution (a Nietzschean perspective, though of course they don't cite him). Unfortunately most of the book is bogged down by a series of dull arguments against various opponents of cultural evolution. My recommendation would be to read The Secret of Our Success, then read just chapter 5 ("Culture is Maladaptive") in this one.

• Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis. A fun pot-pourri of hubristic futurist ideas (cryonics, space habitats, interstellar travel, and so on), and the wild eccentrics who come up with them (Bob Truax, Hans Moravec, Freeman Dyson). The subjects are fascinating, but the book is a bit disorganized and repetitive.

• Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer. Selections from Parerga und Paralipomena. Very funny, Schopenhauer would have been one hell of a twitter poaster. Surprisingly similar to the pragmatists in some respects. And a pessimistic inverse of Nietzsche in others: "Between the spirit of Graeco-Roman paganism and the spirit of Christianity the real antithesis is that of affirmation and denial of the will to live – in which regard Christianity is in the last resort fundamentally in the right." Will be tackling World as Will and Representation soon-ish.

• Selected Writings by William Hazlitt. How pathetic the petty political polemics of the past appear to the present... I despise his style, especially in the political pieces: cheap bluster that aims only to dazzle, never to illuminate. The puffed-up rhetoric of a third-rate ochlagogue. The non-political writings are much better—they are merely unreadable rather than actively offensive.

• The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon by Harold L. Bond. A fine, short overview. Not aimed at a general audience.

• Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, edited by Andrew Monson & Walter Scheidel. I read the three chapters on Rome and skimmed the rest. If an edited volume on the taxation regimes of pre-modern states sounds interesting topic to you, check it out. Revenue sources, coinage, debt, trade, principal agent problems in collection, constraints to budget allocation, and so on. I should probably get to Scheidel's other works at some point.

• The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered by Erwin Dekker. On the dry/academic side of things in terms of its style. Ultimately feels a bit superficial: this guy said this, the other guy said that...but we never get a critical examination of the substance of the arguments. The key take-away is that the "Austrian school" focused mostly on humbleness before evolved institutions, and emphasized the necessity of limits in order to have practical freedom.

• Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz. Fascinating subject, but written in a dry, militaristic, PR-conscious style. Even the story of Apollo 13 can become almost boring when told in this manner. Focused entirely on the mission control perspective. The most interesting aspect is how uncredentialed and inexperienced everyone was, and how quickly the space program moved. Reminiscent of Napoleon after the revolution. Feels like they really got lucky sometimes. Genius in hiring?

• The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. For some reason I read a bunch of "self-help"(-adjacent) books. This one is really anodyne compared to what I was expecting. It's mostly famous as a book read by ruthless rappers, but it's just a bunch of amusing historical anecdotes plus a boatload of confirmation bias. Greene likes the history of Japanese tea ceremonies, France during the Ancien Régime and the revolution, ancient Rome and Greece, and even takes several stories from Giorgio Vasari! Above all he likes Baltasar Gracián, whose The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence I can heartily recommend.

• Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. While 48 Laws of Power presents itself as a manual of manipulation and Influence presents itself more as a disinterested scientific study, the former is actually about airy stories of kings and courtiers while the latter is a cynical dark arts manual for manipulating your coworkers. Make of that what you will. Repetitive & overlong. Also, Cialdini loves to cite dubious social science papers—Milgram, Robber's Cave, etc. Still, the broad strokes are fairly convincing.

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman. Class-signaling behaviors, profession-signaling behaviors, and so on, viewed through the lens of theatrical presentation. Rather one-sided, I feel it misses situations that can't be boiled down to actor-audience. Nothing really surprising, I think most people will have noticed most of this stuff. Also draws on many questionable historical examples (for example he repeatedly uses the Thugs to illustrate his points).

• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone. The general observations on status, presentation, space, etc. are quite good, but when he gets into the specifics about theater and masks it's rather dull and fluffy. Would have preferred something a bit more solid.

Fiction

• Uzumaki by Junji Ito. Horror manga. Starts with a simple idea: spirals are kinda creepy. From there it spins out in every direction, finally ending up in a bizarre post-apocalyptic Lovecraftian scenario. A virtuosic display of variations on a visual theme. Fantastic art, fantastically weird. Highly recommended. Lots of crazy body horror, not for the squeamish.

• The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima. A great short novel about the sea, glory, death, and wanting to have sex with your mother. Somewhat autobiographical, in a symbolic way. Nihilism, tradition vs westernization, youth vs age, all in a lyrical and nautical style.

• Mao II by Don DeLillo. Cults, mass media, a reclusive author. Love the style, very impressionistic. Lots of great sentences and great paragraphs, unfortunately they do not combine to form a Great Novel, the ideas never coalesce into anything solid. DeLillo revisits many of his typical themes here: American foreign policy, terrorism, cults, etc. Rather presciently written in 1991, very pessimistic on the potentials of mass action. "The future belongs to crowds."

• Libra by Don DeLillo. A semi-fictionalized biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, based on the CIA/Cuban exiles conspiracy theory of the JFK assassination. Somewhat conventional in its style, and Pynchonesque in its attitude: conspiracies, axes of control and influence, strange coincidences, overeager pattern-matching, taking liberties with history. It's lacking the humor though. There's also a kind of meta parallel story of an FBI agent trying to piece together all the evidence, meticulously going through even the tiniest element (much like DeLillo). Pretty good, but The Names remains my favorite DeLillo.

• The Pussy by Delicious Tacos. A collection of autobiographical vignettes about sex and relationships. Starts out extremely vulgar and extremely funny, ends up in deep ugliness and despair. A tragedy disguised as a comedy. Pure blackpill fuel: a dystopian vision of work, love, aging, and human connection in our society. Slightly longer review.

• The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett. If you're interested in the extremes of experimental literature, this is a book for you. The novel at its most abstract and formless. Virtually no characters, plot, movement, imagery, dialogue, paragraphs, or really anything else you might normally associate with a novel. I wouldn't say it's a pleasurable read, but it's an interesting one at least. Isolation, existential loneliness, death.

• How It Is by Samuel Beckett. It can't possibly be sparser and more formless than The Unnamable, you think. But it is! Beckett does away even with coherent, full sentences in this one. Nothing but a series of roughly sketched impressions, in a halting and disjointed language. Not really my jam.

• Wasteland of Flint by Thomas Harlan. A fun space opera in a unique setting (an Aztec-Japanese space empire), focused on xenoarchaeology. Ancient aliens, some cool Solaris-like ideas, some really out-there imagery. Unfortunately it's mostly sequelbait and the sequels don't seem to be very good.

• Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (dropped it half-way through). Wat. My reaction to this book is just pure bewilderment. I love Ada Palmer's blog, but wtf is going on here? Am I supposed to be laughing at the terrible narrator and his horrifically bad similes? Is it for children? The magical boy protagonist and philosophy 101 stuff certainly seems to indicate so. Or maybe "young adults"? What's with the nonsensical worldbuilding (an SF/fantasy future that worships 18th century philosophers, with absurd coincidences piled on top of each other)? And apparently none of the plot is resolved by the end of the book! The whole thing reminded me of the "taxation of trade routes" stuff from the prequels, and this image kept popping into my head:

  

Aging populations, archaic pay-as-you-go systems, and undercapitalized pension funds will create huge problems for future retirees. Just how bad is it, and what should you do about it?

The Situation

In the past there were many workers and few retirees, so it seemed like a good idea to have the workers pay for old peoples' pensions and promise them the same in return. Thus the pay-as-you-go pension system was born.¹ But people stopped having children, started living longer, and the worker:retiree ratio has been falling and will continue to fall precipitously. These problems will be coming home to roost over the next few decades.

To put things into perspective: simply maintaining the current prime:aged ratio would require 383 million additional prime aged people by 2050. The math is clear, and even if fertility tripled tomorrow morning there's a huge lag until that actually starts affecting the economy.

How much will it cost? It's hard to say exactly, the projections depend on fertility, longevity, immigration, growth, and the actual pensions. Plus there are non-pension expenses to take into account: government-funded healthcare spending on retirees is going to increase as well. On the low end some (including the EU) project an increase in spending of just ~3% of GDP, but I find that highly implausible. My own forecast would be around 10% of GDP for the average advanced economy by 2050.

For countries with relatively low government spending and good growth prospects like the US this might not be a problem. For European countries that already have government spending in the 55%+ of GDP range however, things look dire.² Raising an additional 10% of GDP through taxation would result in a 20-25% cut in disposable income for the average worker for literally nothing in return. Combine that with low/zero growth and things start looking really bad.

Anyone under the age of 40 or so should expect to receive little in return for their pay-as-you-go pension system contributions. Is it unfair that today's workers slave away, are forced to give away all their money to the boomers, only to receive virtually nothing in return? Sure. Is there anything you can do about it? No. Welcome to democracy.

Regional Variation

There is enormous variation in pension systems both between and within countries. Places with relatively small pay-as-you-go systems and heavy reliance on private pensions are probably going to be fine. On the other hand there are municipalities in the US which have already started defaulting.

EU

By 2050, the German workforce is expected to shrink by about 10 million people while the number of retirees will increase by about 7 million people. Most European countries should expect little to no GDP growth in the coming decades, as workforce declines will offset productivity gains. And most of Europe isn't seeing any productivity gains anyway (though some countries, such as Germany, have been growing):

Even more terrifying is the fact that nobody really seems to care about growth in Europe. There's this idea that the EU is ruled by technocrats, but these "technocrats" seem more concerned with adding annoying popups to every website than the permanent collapse of economic growth in the European Union.

Japan has had zero GDP growth since 1995 (which was also when its workforce was at its highest point), and Europe should expect a similar future. Here's what the Nikkei 225 has looked like over the past 3 decades, by the way:

The pie is no longer growing; all that's left is the fight over who gets the biggest piece. Sam Altman is right when he argues that zero-sum economics create a toxic political environment.

In a system with economic growth, things can improve for everyone. In a system without growth, or even one with very little growth, that’s not the case—if things improve for me, it has to come at the expense of things getting worse for you. Without growth, we’re voting against someone else’s interest as much as we’re voting for our own. This ends with lots of fighting and everyone feeling screwed, broken into factions, and unmotivated. Democracy does not work well in a zero-sum world.

People either seem unaware or incapable of preparing for what is to come. Even in prosperous countries like Germany and France, median savings are below €100k. The wealthiest German cohort, those aged 55-64, have median net wealth of €180k, and the younger generations don't seem to be in a hurry to save for retirement. 42% of Europeans have less than three months’ take-home pay saved.

Japan

Despite being ahead of the curve on aging, Japan is actually in a pretty good position as it only spends ~10% of GDP on pensions. Compare that to 17% in Italy, 14.5% in France, and 10% in Germany even though those places have significantly smaller retired populations.³ How do they do it? It's a pay-as-you-go system that simply doesn't pay out very much: the average pension is only ~$2k per month for a married couple. Could you live on that budget? Despite this, they are cutting pensions, increasing the retirement age, and finding ways to get older people to keep working.

It's also worth mentioning, however, that they've been running deficits for 30 years and have a debt/GDP ratio of over 230%. Total government spending has been hovering around 40% lately, so it would seem that they have room to increase taxes if it becomes necessary.

China

China is in a nightmarish demographic position and needs to maintain rapid growth despite a declining workforce. Their age pyramid is a time bomb that's about to explode:

In 2011, every pensioner was supported by 3.1 workers. By the end of 2017, that ratio had fallen to 2.8-to-one, and the Ministry estimates that by 2050, it will be just 1.3-to-one.

In 2016 the one-child policy became the two-child policy. In 2021, the two-child policy became the three-child policy. But it's too late.

How long can China keep up the "outgrow the debt" strategy with a declining workforce? And what happens when growth stalls? This seems like one of the likelier scenarios for the next global recession. Of course many have predicted this collapse before, and they were wrong. But the demographic problem is unavoidable.

The retirement age is quite low: 60 for men and 55 for women; we can probably expect this to change which will give them a bit of breathing room. But any such changes are wildly unpopular. On top of that, pension funds are already heavily reliant on additional funding from the central government.

USA

Given its low average age and strong growth, the US is in a decent position compared to the EU and China.

But there is a large amount of variation within the country: some local governments are doing perfectly fine, while others have serious problems with defined-benefit pensions for public employees. Politicians have been promising generous pensions without bothering to fund them (with the assistance of absurd return assumptions from the funds): pensions give them the ability to offer huge payouts to special interest groups without impacting the budget immediately. The logic of public choice is so clear that there is only one really serious question left, and that is why states haven't collapsed already.

As these pensions start taking up a larger percentage of state/local revenues, things will come to a head. In Illinois, for example, pensions took up about 4% of the budget in the 90s. Today it's 25% and growing. There are three alternatives, all painful: cut pensions, cut other services, or start raising taxes. How much of that will people tolerate before they start moving out?

If this were simply a horrific problem that we were trying to deal with, it would be bad enough. But it's a horrific problem that we are ignoring, and will continue ignoring until it blows up in our faces. In the middle of the longest bull market in US stock market history, pension deficits have ballooned:

Just imagine what a decade of weak stock market returns would do.

At the federal level, Social Security has about 15 years until they have to start cutting benefits, but it won't be that expensive to shore it up. And most importantly, the US is growing, and has a lot more room left for tax increases.

What Governments Can Do

How will governments respond to the pension apocalypse? All the alternatives seem bad: pension cuts, big tax increases, vast borrowing, inflation, unprecedented immigration. Nobody wants to do any of these things, but the math must eventually balance out. In the end something's gotta give. This survey of Europeans captures the heart of the problem:

When it comes to the measures required, even those respondents who acknowledge the threat of demographic problems appear to be fairly reluctant to endorse them: most of the reform proposals are refused by the majority.

Everyone understands that governments either need to tax more or pay out less, but people aren't ready to accept either solution. Just 46% support a system that combines basic public pensions with private savings! Even conservatives in America hate the idea of cuts: just 15% of Republicans support Medicare spending cuts, while 10% support Social Security cuts. And when you spend $2T on "stimulus" at a time when there is no AD shortfall, how are you going to close the taps later? With such large political costs (old people are sympathetic, numerous, and politically influential),⁴ few politicians are willing to take the necessary steps. And the worse the worker:retiree ratio, the more political power the retirees have—this is not a self-balancing problem.

The example of Japan shows that these problems are not insurmountable, as long as politicians are willing to make difficult choices (and the people accept those choices). The earlier reforms are enacted, the easier things will go, but in most places I expect it will be impossible until a breaking point is reached. Maybe in the end we'll just get a little bit of everything and the math will balance out. But someone is going to have to make sacrifices.

The biggest danger comes not from the pension apocalypse itself, but rather from the stupid things politicians might do to avoid addressing the pension problem head-on. Some possible scenarios:

• Huge tax increases → mass emigration → death spiral
• Central banks monetize debt → hyperinflation → economic crash
• Central banks don't monetize debt → debt crisis → Greece 2.0

Grow

You can think of pension liabilities like debt: you can keep growing it forever without problem as long as you also grow your economy quickly enough. We can talk about progress studies as much as we want, but the practical reality on the ground is not encouraging when it comes to growth. Especially in Europe, it is more or less a distant dream rather than a real possibility. And things are slowing down even in the US.

China has no alternative, and so far it seems to be succeeding against all expectations (though the data is fake to some extent, see this and this). We'll see how long they can keep it up.

Pay Out Less

One possibility is, of course, a straight cut to pensions. But you have to keep in mind that old people tend to vote at higher rates than young people, and that due to demographic collapse the old people will be the most powerful voting block in these countries. People get angry when you cut spending.⁵ They get especially angry when they have paid in quite a lot of money to the pension system and will not see much in return. Even the best-managed systems (like the Dutch) will be running into trouble though.

Raise the Retirement Age

Instead of paying out less, you can try to raise the retirement age instead. This not only decreases the total amount you need to pay, but also props up the worker:retiree ratio. It also has the benefit of not affecting current retirees: bypassing that powerful bloc makes changes easier to implement from a political perspective. But people in surveys say they expect to retire around 63, so I don't know how politically viable this plan is going to be in practice.

For example, Denmark plans to raise the retirement age in step with increases in life expectancy. Under this model, a Danish worker born in 1990 can expect "early retirement" at 70 and normal retirement at 73!

To which I say: fuck off and die.

Edit: after some conversations I have decided that raising the retirement age might not be that bad. Lots of people are still able and willing to work in their 60s and 70s. The best solution would probably be a flexible system in which people can choose when to retire, and the benefits adjust accordingly (the earlier you stop working, the less you get).

Tax

Raising taxes is another possibility, but how much slack is there in income taxation given a declining base? The US (which is currently at <40% government spending/GDP) has a lot of wiggle room, and you could even say the same about China. But for Europe you have to figure that at some point they'll be hitting the downward slope of the Laffer curve. Emigration is easier than ever and the people with the greatest ability to work remotely also tend to be those who are most desirable from a fiscal perspective.

Immigration

The sheer number of people needed makes immigration a partial solution at best, and only a few countries use immigration in a way that actually helps. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland for example have fairly reasonable immigration policies that select for high human capital: Canada has the smartest immigrants in the world (average PISA math scores of 527, higher than the natives' and corresponding to an IQ around 103). But despite high population growth and productive immigrants, Canada still faces a shortfall in the near future.

Needless to say, immigration policies that select for low human capital (US: average 1st gen immigrant PISA math score 437, corresponding to an IQ around 91) only make the problem worse. In Europe, non-EU migrants are less likely to be employed and earn much less than Europeans when they are employed. You can't fill a fiscal hole by adding more fiscal burdens to your society.⁶

There is astonishingly little international competition for productive people, but I think that is going to change in the future. This process has already started, with some countries offering digital nomad visas, sometimes with tax incentives on top. In Italy some cities will pay half your rent. I imagine there will be calls for coordination to prevent a "race to the bottom", but I doubt there will be any kind of global agreement on the matter.

Debt

Hell, if zero rates persist you could just fund the whole thing with debt. Rising interest rate forecasts have been a complete meme for more than a decade now, maybe free money is the new normal. On the other hand, at high levels of debt/GDP it only takes a small rise in rates to create serious problems (and possibly trigger debt crises). But how long can this last? Perhaps the "solution" to rising rates will be inflation, just kicking the can even further down the road.

The Andrew Dobson Gambit

Inflate!

How much willingness for debt monetization is there among independent central banks? Probably not much (who knows though—remember "no bailouts"? lol) On the other hand, how long can CBs retain their independence against mounting political pressure? What's more unpopular, high inflation or pension cuts? This seems like a fairly unlikely scenario.

Transition to DC Plans

The countries that are best prepared have some combination of well-funded basic public pension system that makes sure old people don't starve, combined with defined-contribution pensions. Governments with large defined-benefit plans will either need to take serious pain, or start transitioning to defined-contribution plans. The problem with making this transition is that it's expensive immediately, and extremely difficult politically. They tried to do it in Illinois and it was shot down by the courts:

Under the Illinois Supreme Court’s 2015 precedent, a government worker’s pension benefits cannot be changed in any way after their first day working for the state.

If you thought pensioners were a powerful lobby, wait till you see what public employees get away with.

What You Can Do

First of all, understand that you need to save for retirement.

After that, just follow the standard boring investing advice. Right now is not a great time (high valuations after a 12-year bull market that quintupled the S&P500, near-zero bond yields), but I'm sure there will be good opportunities in the decades to come. The safe withdrawal rate (how much you can withdraw from your investments every year without running out of money before you die) is generally held to be around 3-4%. Suppose you can get by on $30k/year, you'll need $1m in investments. That number has to be adjusted for inflation: assuming you'll retire in 2060 and 2% inflation, that's $2.2m in 2060-dollars. Getting there isn't that difficult: saving $10k/year for 40 years with 7% annual returns will get you to $2m. The earlier you start the better.

Where to put the money? I'd go with some sort of global equity ETF, perhaps with a tilt toward the US. Beware home equity bias, unless you're American.

What happens if the political demands generated by the collapse of pension systems end up causing a hyperinflationary scenario? As long as you have the money in real estate or equities, you'll probably be fine. German stocks actually did fine in the Weimar hyperinflation era (but only if you held them through an 80% drawdown).

It's an absolutely terrible time for bonds, don't be misled by the incredible bull market of the last 40 years. 60/40 is going to look much worse in the future. Inflation goes up, you're screwed; rates go up, you're screwed. The Greek 10y bond is currently yielding 0.824%—this is a country with a debt/GDP ratio over 200%, a GDP 35% lower than it was 10 years ago, and a recent history of default. The bond market is absolutely nuts right now.

If things get bad enough you might want to protect against expropriation, which means international diversification. But I doubt things will get that bad.

Looking beyond investments, you could move to a cheaper country, which would allow you to get away with lower savings. There are nice places in SEA or South America that are both civilized and cheap. It's pretty easy for Norteamericanos and Europeans with some savings to get retiree visas. If you were retiring now, Argentina would be an interesting choice: very cheap due to the currency situation but still a safe & pleasant country. As long as your investments are in a stable currency, you can go wherever you want. On the other hand your home country might be unwilling to pay out even your meager pension if you don't actually live there, so plan accordingly.

You could also have more kids. The society-wide dependency ratio is going to be pretty bad, but if you have enough kids your family dependency ratio could be relied on instead. It's probably a bad idea to have kids as a retirement strategy, but if you're leaning in that direction already why not read Caplan's book and pop out another one?

What to Expect

Some countries have a political culture that allows for tough decisions to be made and accepted, but for everyone else I think the most likely course is to kick the can down the road and muddle along while the problems accumulate, until a crisis erupts.

Worst-Case Scenario

Weimar, then war? Probably not. Societies filled with old people don't do revolution or war. The age of bangs is over; we only have whimpers to look forward to. At worst we'll see a death spiral of stagnation, brain drain, expropriation, and perhaps devaluation/inflation. Think South America. They won't let you starve, but it won't be very nice either. If the catastrophe isn't global, and you manage to keep your portfolio out of their hands, you'll be fine.

Best-Case Scenario

Cheap fusion energy or friendly superhuman general artificial intelligence?⁷ If we get a significant increase in growth, the pension problems disappear.

Everyone is familiar with Bastiat's broken window fallacy: breaking a window may seem to generate economic activity through its repair, but it's actually a loss once you take the opportunity cost into account. But what if there were positive returns to scale in breaking windows? There is a fascinating subgenre of economic research which involves looking at large-scale destruction, analyzing the long-term effects, and then concluding that the disaster was Good, Actually.

Let's take a look at some examples.

Raze the cities

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

We'll start with Hornbeck & Keniston's Creative Destruction: Barriers to Urban Growth and the Great Boston Fire of 1872. The titular fire destroyed 776 buildings (about 1/10th of Boston's housing stock at the time), and caused ~$13 million in damages to real estate and ~$60 million in lost personal property. Thirteen people died.

After the fire, there was a significant increase in land value in the burned area, which the paper attributes to positive externalities from investing in new buildings. Prior to the fire, negative externalities from other, low-quality, buildings prevented high-quality development; the coordination problems were too difficult to overcome. Mass destruction and rebuilding let the areas settle at a higher equilibrium. Crucially, the value gain is estimated to be larger than the value of the destroyed buildings:¹

The Fire is estimated to have increased land values by $5.3 million in the burned area, and by $9.0 million in the unburned area. The percent impact is greater in the burned area, but the level impact is greater in the unburned area because many more plots are affected. The estimated total impact is $14.3 million, or 1.12 times the 1872 value of buildings in the burned area.

(And you could argue that the value of the land doesn't fully capture the gains here.)

Importantly, there is no such land-value gain in situations where individual buildings burned down. It is only when destruction happens at scale that reconstruction can happen in new and more profitable configurations, because the limiting factor is externalities and coordination. Break one window and all you get is a broken window; break a ton of windows and all sorts of new possibilities emerge. The paper is not clear on the exact mechanism, but the authors speculate that it's some combination of combining plots into larger parcels, concentrating land ownership and reducing coordination costs, improved infrastructure, agglomeration gains from improved business locations, and displacement of businesses that caused negative externalities on neighbors.

Another paper along the same lines is Siodla's Razing San Francisco: The 1906 disaster as a natural experiment in urban redevelopment, which finds that the fire increased density by 60%. In a wildly prosperous city which used to be fast-growing but whose population has stagnated for the last 70 years, 60% is incredible. The key takeaway here is that mass destruction enables not just higher-value uses, but also very different forms of reconstruction.

After the fire, developers constructed much denser housing in razed areas relative to unburned areas where frictions were still in place. This result is consistent with the notion that the frictions associated with adjusting land use in cities are substantial, even in relatively free-market ones.

Whether the effect persists to this day or not is questionable: with the addition of various controls, it disappears by 1950, but I'm not sure which specification we should be looking at. Part of the issue is that modern-day redevelopment erases the positive effects of the fire.

As Christine Meisner Rosen puts it in The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America,

Prior to the fire, the manner in which improvements had been erected on the land acted as a constraint to redevelopment. The razing of the extant buildings gave rise to the possibility that the burnt area could be redesigned as it was rebuilt.

Fire isn't the only way. Bombing offers similar benefits, as Dericks & Koster show in The Billion Pound Drop: The Blitz and Agglomeration Economics in London. I love everything about this paper, right from the first sentence which includes the golden words "exogenous variation from the Blitz bombings".

This one isn't about residential density, but rather about employment density and agglomeration effects. There are economies of scale external to individual firms: knowledge spillovers, labor market effects, possibilities for specialization along the supply chain, etc. All these make the tight clustering of economic activity valuable. Dericks & Koster show that bombed locations tend to have increased building height today, and that higher density leads to greater gains from agglomeration. They estimate that the blitz led to an increase in current-day per capita income of almost 10%! That's about £50 billion per year.

When people talk about the long shadow of history, I don't think London's employment density is exactly what they have in mind, but that just goes to show how little attention we pay to zoning relative to its importance. The implications for transaction costs are also rather shocking: the value unlocked by these disasters is enormous, yet Coasean bargains in normal times seem impossible.

How much of these effects can we blame on regulation? It's not clear, some of it is just organic externalities which are naturally difficult to coordinate against, so I think we would see similar situations even under a laissez-faire zoning regime. On the other hand, as zoning regulation has proliferated perhaps the positive effects of mass destruction would be muted today. That said, a controlled demolition would cause far less damage compared to unpredictable destruction from fires or bombs: people and movables would be safe, and only the buildings would be lost.

Natural remedies

Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.

What about floods, hurricanes, or earthqukes? Let's turn our eyes to Deryugina, Kawano & Levitt's The Economic Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Its Victims: Evidence from Individual Tax Returns. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 and destroyed over 200k homes, mainly from flooding as the levees failed. Hundreds of thousands of people were permanently displaced, and the damage was estimated to cost over $100 billion. Based on comparisons against a control group of 10 similar cities, they find that relative incomes initially decreased, but then quickly recovered and kept increasing beyond their original level.

The gap in income increases to about $2,300 in the following year but, remarkably, disappears just two years after the storm. By 2008, labor incomes are $1,300 higher among the New Orleans group; this difference exceeds $2,300 by 2013.

The income gains in this case (about $1.8b between 2005-2013) were not sufficient to make up for the losses due to the flooding, but again this is mainly due to the unpredictable nature of the destruction, and it shows that output is incredibly resilient to disasters. Others find, if not a stimulating effect, then at least a quick return to pre-disaster levels of output.

This rebound appears to be driven both by victims moving to stronger labor markets and by the strengthening of the labor market in New Orleans itself. What makes the strong economic recovery even more remarkable is that the storm struck without warning. In settings where economic agents have more time to prepare for adverse events (e.g., long-term climatic changes that make an area less habitable), the adjustment costs would be expected to be lower.

For a broader view of natural disasters, we have Skidmore & Toya's Do Natural Disasters Promote Long-Run Growth? which looks at cross-national data. It's not the most convincing paper in the world: they find that climatic disasters tend to promote growth, while geologic disasters tend to slow it down, and the proposed mechanism (greater disaster risk -> more human capital investment -> greater growth) strikes me as rather dubious.

Thus, physical capital investment may fall, but there is also a substitution toward human capital investment. Disasters also provide the impetus to update the capital stock and adopt new technologies, leading to improvements in total factor productivity.

Go to war, have a revolution

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

While the previous cases have relatively clear mechanisms, war is a bit different. Its positive effects—if they exist—are more diffuse in their operation. Military R&D investments filtering down into the economy, efficiency improvements from the impetus of the war economy, and so on.

Ben-David & Papell look at 16 countries and find that growth following WWII more than doubled, even after GDP levels surpassed the pre-war path. Per-capita growth rates are 163% higher than the pre-break rates.

You don't even have to win the war to get the benefits.²

This study provides empirical evidence that, for nearly every one of the countries, the years that provide the strongest evidence for a trend break are associated with a sharp decline in GDP. These breaks are associated with World War II for most of the countries and either World War I or the Great Depression for the remainder. While countries do tend to exhibit relatively constant growth rates for extended periods of time, the occurrence of a major shock to the economy and the resultant drop in levels are usually followed by sustained growth that exceeds the earlier steady state growth.

Robert Gordon makes a similar argument in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, arguing that the necessity of the war effort forced TFP increases onto the entire economy, spilling out of the military and onto the civilian sector. Even Tyler Cowen has made arguments along these lines, writing that "the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects." (Though he does not go as far as to say war is a net positive.)

On the revolution side there's Acemoglu et al's The Consequences of Radical Reform: The French Revolution. At this point you can probably guess what they found:

Areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth [...] Revolution destroyed (the institutional underpinnings of) the power of oligarchies and elites opposed to economic change; combined with the arrival of new economic and industrial opportunities in the second half of the 19th century, this helped pave the way for future economic growth.

The success of the French reforms raises the question: why did they work when other externally-imposed reforms often fail? Most likely this is because the reforms were much more radical than is typically the case.

And then there's the Branko Milanovic thesis that communism was necessary for eventual capitalist development in Eastern Europe.

I mentioned Mancur Olson's Rise and Decline of Nations in the Gibbon review, and I have to bring him up again here. Olson's argument is that in the long run nations decline because they accumulate cruft in the form of rent-seeking special interest groups. The rest is downstream from the logic of public choice. A war or a revolution can wipe the slate clean and thus revitalize the economy. The Acemoglu paper fits into this framework very well, as Napoleon destroyed rent-extracting institutions like guilds.

Perhaps we should not simply raze the cities, but wipe out all our institutions as well. What we need is a big fat societal 'reset' button.³ Olson, of course, is equivocal:

Now that a gentler and more conventional policy prescription is close at hand, it may not frighten most readers away from the rest of the book to say that, yes, if one happens to be delicately balancing the arguments for and against revolution, the theory here does shift the balance marginally in the revolutionary direction.

In a way, we are converging on the orthodox Marxist view of the origins of the industrial revolution. Marx writes:

The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and French revolutions, they were revolutions of European significance. [...] the victory of the bourgeoisie meant at that time the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois over feudal property, of nationality over provincialism, of free trade over the guilds, of subdivision of property over primogeniture, of landownership over the subordination of the owner by means of the land, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family title, of industry over heroic idleness, of bourgeois right over mediaeval privileges.

But aren't we confusing cause and effect here? If these were bourgeois revolutions, weren't they only possible because the bourgeois had already gained sufficient power to achieve them? Olson in any case regards England as relatively stable.⁴ I leave the implications for the European Union as an exercise for the reader.

Wait a minute, this is completely insane!

Ah, well. Yes.

Maybe. Some of the arguments presented above are not exactly bulletproof. José Luis Ricón has a couple of good posts arguing against the idea that World War II caused an increase in growth. In The Productivity Impact of World War II Mobilization in the United States, Alexander Field argues that Gordon's estimates of growth from before the war are too low, and his estimates of growth after the war too high, so there's really no post-war boom at all.⁵ And with the increased destructiveness of modern warfare it is possible the calculus has changed completely.

Maybe it's just publication bias. There are thousands of destructive events; suppose 99% of them are genuinely bad, but we only get investigations of the remaining 1% because only the "good" ones can be turned into journal articles. One might argue that "destruction bad" doesn't get you published (though sometimes it does, eg terrorism bad for growth), while "destruction good" is exactly the type of contrarian bullshit beloved by academic economists the world over.

I'm not sure I buy that. Look, at least when it comes to destroying cities the mechanism isn't outlandish—there's path dependency that locks economic activity into suboptimal equilibria, and if you break out of them you can shift to more productive configurations. The power of agglomeration effects is extremely well-established. If you accept that (and you should), the only question left is whether the benefits actually exceed the costs. Now we're just haggling over the price, as Churchill said.

Scott Alexander is famously skeptical of systemic change and burning down the system. He writes:

Systems are hard. Institutions are hard. If your goal is to replace the current systems with better ones, then destroying the current system is 1% of the work, and building the better ones is 99% of it. Throughout history, dozens of movements have doomed entire civilizations by focusing on the “destroying the current system” step and expecting the “build a better one” step to happen on its own. That never works.

Yarvin responds to his fears by arguing that we can have bloodless systemic change and there's no need for fire at all. But the basic aversion to destruction goes unquestioned. "If all you have is a plan to “burn down the current system,” you do not actually have a plan at all", he says. I think they both underestimate the costs of being stuck in bad equilibria, and overestimate the pain caused by burning down the system. The problem with communist revolutions isn't the revolution, it's the communism.⁶

I started this essay with Bastiat, let's turn back to him again. In his famous essay, he contrasts that which is seen and that which is not seen: we observe the activity of the window repair, but not the opportunity cost.

To be ignorant of political economy is to allow ourselves to be dazzled by the immediate effect of a phenomenon; to be acquainted with it is to embrace in thought and in forethought the whole compass of effects.

What is seen is a disaster. What is not seen is the enormous damage caused every day by ossified structures that prevent economic activity from happening. Let us not be dazzled by the flames!

Samuel Hughes and Ben Southwood recently unveiled their policy proposal aimed at making Coasean bargains (for residential intensification) easier to realize, by distributing the gains to all local residents. The idea is to get everyone on a street together to agree to destroy it, then build up better and reap enormous profits. All I'm proposing is to do this at a slightly more ambitious scale.

Will it work? We won't know if we don't try. Let's start with a modest pilot program and tear down just one city, some place like Atlanta or Dallas. See what happens. Doesn't even have to be the whole metropolitan area, just a few key neighborhoods. You said you wanted progress studies, didn't you?

[If you missed the review you might want to check it out before or after the highlights.]

I highlighted approximately 106,000 words (or more than 250 pages), far too much to share in a blog post. Instead I have selected some highlights², picking out a handful of events and persons that stood out (plus an assortment of shorter passages):

• Julian the Apostate, the brilliant last pagan emperor whose LARPing and attempts at reform were tragically doomed.
• The barbarian invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries, and the final fall of the Western Roman Empire.
• Belisarius, the last of the last great Roman generals: a wildly successful military commander who suffered from an excess of loyalty, both to his wife and his emperor.
• Heraclius, who came to power when it seemed like the end of the Eastern Empire was near, but managed to push the Romans for one last hurrah against the Persians.
• Some episodes from the crazy fanaticism of the crusades.
• The rise of Timur (or Tamerlane), the last great steppe conqueror.
• And finally some highlights from the fall of Constantinople.

Assorted Quotes

It begins like this:

In the second century of the Christian æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence. The Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall: a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.

Some of Gibbon's best dunks:

[On Charlemagne] Of his moral virtues, chastity is not the most conspicuous.

[On St Augustine] His learning is too often borrowed, and his arguments are too often his own.

This emperor, the first of the name of Leo, has been distinguished by the title of the Great, from a succession of princes who gradually fixed in the opinion of the Greeks a very humble standard of heroic, or at least of royal, perfection.

The meekness and resignation which had distinguished the primitive disciples of the gospel was the object of the applause rather than of the imitation of their successors.

[On the historian Gregory of Tours] His style is equally devoid of elegance and simplicity. In a conspicuous station he still remained a stranger to his own age and country; and in a prolix work (the five last books contain ten years) he has omitted almost everything that posterity desires to learn. I have tediously acquired, by a painful perusal, the right of pronouncing this unfavourable sentence.

The Cyropædia is vague and languid: the Anabasis circumstantial and animated. Such is the eternal difference between fiction and truth.

[Julian] was assisted by the eloquent Mamertinus, one of the consuls elect, whose merit is loudly celebrated by the doubtful evidence of his own applause.

The harem and library of Gordian:

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of [Gordian's] inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation.

The arch of Constantine:

The triumphal arch of Constantine still remains a melancholy proof of the decline of the arts, and a singular testimony of the meanest vanity. As it was not possible to find in the capital of the empire a sculptor who was capable of adorning that public monument, the arch of Trajan, without any respect either for his memory or for the rules of propriety, was stripped of its most elegant figures. The difference of times and persons, of actions and characters, was totally disregarded. The Parthian captives appear prostrate at the feet of a prince who never carried his arms beyond the Euphrates; and curious antiquarians can still discover the head of Trajan on the trophies of Constantine. The new ornaments which it was necessary to introduce between the vacancies of ancient sculpture are executed in the rudest and most unskilful manner.

Augustus vs Dicoletian:

Like the modesty affected by Augustus, the state maintained by Diocletian was a theatrical representation; but it must be confessed that, of the two comedies, the former was of a much more liberal and manly character than the latter. It was the aim of the one to disguise, and the object of the other to display, the unbounded power which the emperors possessed over the Roman world.

The fantastic story of the last 7 pagan philosophers of Greece:

The surviving sect of Platonists, whom Plato would have blushed to acknowledge, extravagantly mingled a sublime theory with the practice of superstition and magic; and, as they remained alone in the midst of a Christian world, they indulged a secret rancour against the government of the church and state, whose severity was still suspended over their heads. [...] Yet the golden chain, as it was fondly styled, of the Platonic succession, continued forty-four years from the death of Proclus to the edict of Justinian, which imposed a perpetual silence on the schools of Athens, and excited the grief and indignation of the few remaining votaries of Grecian science and superstition. Seven friends and philosophers, Diogenes and Hermias, Eulalius and Priscian, Damascius, Isidore, and Simplicius, who dissented from the religion of their sovereign, embraced the resolution of seeking, in a foreign land, the freedom which was denied in their native country. They had heard, and they credulously believed, that the republic of Plato was realized in the despotic government of Persia, and that a patriotic king reigned over the happiest and most virtuous of nations.

They were soon astonished by the natural discovery that Persia resembled the other countries of the globe; that Chosroes, who affected the name of a philosopher, was vain, cruel, and ambitious; that bigotry, and a spirit of intolerance, prevailed among the Magi; that the nobles were haughty, the courtiers servile, and the magistrates unjust; that the guilty sometimes escaped, and that the innocent were often oppressed. The disappointment of the philosophers provoked them to overlook the real virtues of the Persians; and they were scandalized, more deeply perhaps than became their profession, with the plurality of wives and concubines, the incestuous marriages, and the custom of exposing dead bodies to the dogs and vultures, instead of hiding them in the earth or consuming them with fire. Their repentance was expressed by a precipitate return, and they loudly declared that they had rather die on the borders of the empire than enjoy the wealth and favour of the Barbarian. From this journey, however, they derived a benefit which reflects the purest lustre on the character of Chosroes. He required that the seven sages who had visited the court of Persia should be exempted from the penal laws which Justinian enacted against his Pagan subjects; and this privilege, expressly stipulated in a treaty of peace, was guarded by the vigilance of a powerful mediator.89 Simplicius and his companions ended their lives in peace and obscurity; and, as they left no disciples, they terminate the long list of Grecian philosophers, who may be justly praised, notwithstanding their defects, as the wisest and most virtuous of their contemporaries. The writings of Simplicius are now extant. His physical and metaphysical commentaries on Aristotle have passed away with the fashion of the times; but his moral interpretation of Epictetus is preserved in the library of nations, as a classic book, most excellently adapted to direct the will, to purify the heart, and to confirm the understanding, by a just confidence in the nature both of God and man.

Julian the Apostate (331-363)

The chapter on Julian opens in medias res:

While the Romans languished under the tyranny of eunuchs and bishops, the praises of Julian were repeated with transport in every part of the empire, except in the palace of Constantius.

After setting the scene, Gibbon then circles back to the beginning. Constantius II was one of Constantine's sons, and when he came to power he murdered everyone else in his family to avoid any challengers. The only ones to survive were Julian (Constantius' half-nephew) and his half-brother Gallus, probably because they were so young. Constantius kept Julian locked up in one of the imperial estates until he was 24 years old (though he gave him a great education), and eventually let him out because he needed someone to lead the legions in the West.

At this point Julian is just a philosophy nerd with no real-world experience whatsoever, but he takes to command like a fish to water. He is outrageously successful at crushing barbarians for a few years, then also gets involved in civil administration.

The precarious and dependent situation of Julian displayed his virtues and concealed his defects. The young hero who supported, in Gaul, the throne of Constantius was not permitted to reform the vices of the government; but he had courage to alleviate or to pity the distress of the people. Unless he had been able to revive the martial spirit of the Romans, or to introduce the arts of industry and refinement among their savage enemies, he could not entertain any rational hopes of securing the public tranquillity, either by the peace or conquest of Germany. Yet the victories of Julian suspended, for a short time, the inroads of the Barbarians, and delayed the ruin of the Western empire.

His salutary influence restored the cities of Gaul, which had been so long exposed to the evils of civil discord, barbarian war, and domestic tyranny; and the spirit of industry was revived with the hopes of enjoyment. Agriculture, manufactures, and commerce again flourished under the protection of the laws; and the curia, or civil corporations, were again filled with useful and respectable members: the youth were no longer apprehensive of marriage; and married persons were no longer apprehensive of posterity: the public and private festivals were celebrated with customary pomp; and the frequent and secure intercourse of the provinces displayed the image of national prosperity.

But there's a war in the East, and Constantius is worried that Julian is a bit too successful, so he demands that he send over about half his troops. Julian obeys and commands the troops to move out, but the troops don't want to fight on the other side of the world, and instead choose to rebel and force Julian to take up the purple:

At the hour of midnight, the impetuous multitude, with swords and bowls and torches in their hands, rushed into the suburbs; encompassed the palace; and, careless of future dangers, pronounced the fatal and irrevocable words, JULIAN AUGUSTUS! The prince, whose anxious suspense was interrupted by their disorderly acclamations, secured the doors against their intrusion; and, as long as it was in his power, secluded his person and dignity from the accidents of a nocturnal tumult. At the dawn of day, the soldiers, whose zeal was irritated by opposition, forcibly entered the palace, seized, with respectful violence, the object of their choice, guarded Julian with drawn swords through the streets of Paris, placed him on the tribunal, and with repeated shouts saluted him as their emperor. Prudence as well as loyalty inculcated the propriety of resisting their treasonable designs and of preparing for his oppressed virtue the excuse of violence. Addressing himself by turns to the multitude and to individuals, he sometimes implored their mercy, and sometimes expressed his indignation; conjured them not to sully the fame of their immortal victories; and ventured to promise that, if they would immediately return to their allegiance, he would undertake to obtain from the emperor, not only a free and gracious pardon, but even the revocation of the orders which had excited their resentment. But the soldiers, who were conscious of their guilt, chose rather to depend on the gratitude of Julian than on the clemency of the emperor. Their zeal was insensibly turned into impatience, and their impatience into rage. The inflexible Cæsar sustained, till the third hour of the day, their prayers, their reproaches, and their menaces; nor did he yield, till he had been repeatedly assured that, if he wished to live, he must consent to reign. He was exalted on a shield in the presence, and amidst the unanimous acclamations, of the troops; a rich military collar, which was offered by chance, supplied the want of a diadem; the ceremony was concluded by the promise of a moderate donative; and the new emperor, overwhelmed with real or affected grief, retired into the most secret recesses of his apartment.

The grief of Julian could proceed only from his innocence; but his innocence must appear extremely doubtful in the eyes of those who have learned to suspect the motives and the professions of princes. His lively and active mind was susceptible of the various impressions of hope and fear, of gratitude and revenge, of duty and of ambition, of the love of fame and of the fear of reproach. But it is impossible for us to calculate the respective weight and operation of these sentiments; or to ascertain the principles of action, which might escape the observation, while they guided or rather impelled the steps, of Julian himself. The discontent of the troops was produced by the malice of his enemies; their tumult was the natural effect of interest and of passion; and, if Julian had tried to conceal a deep design under the appearances of chance, he must have employed the most consummate artifice without necessity, and probably without success. He solemnly declares, in the presence of Jupiter, of the Sun, of Mars, of Minerva, and of all the other deities, that, till the close of the evening which preceded his elevation, he was utterly ignorant of the designs of the soldiers; and it may seem ungenerous to distrust the honour of a hero and the truth of a philosopher. Yet the superstitious confidence that Constantius was the enemy, and that he himself was the favourite, of the gods, might prompt him to desire, to solicit, and even to hasten the auspicious moment of his reign, which was predestined to restore the ancient religion of mankind. When Julian had received the intelligence of the conspiracy, he resigned himself to a short slumber; and afterwards related to his friends that he had seen the Genius of the empire waiting with some impatience at his door, pressing for admittance, and reproaching his want of spirit and ambition. Astonished and perplexed, he addressed his prayers to the great Jupiter; who immediately signified, by a clear and manifest omen, that he should submit to the will of heaven and of the army. The conduct which disclaims the ordinary maxims of reason excites our suspicion and eludes our inquiry.

So once again there's civil war, and Constantine is tied up in the East. Here Julian shows some of his Julius Caesar-like qualities, as he moves decisively and above all extremely rapidly, taking everyone by surprise. He splits his army in three, sends the two other groups south through Italy, and:

For himself, Julian had reserved a more difficult and extraordinary part. He selected three thousand brave and active volunteers, resolved, like their leader, to cast behind them every hope of a retreat: at the head of this faithful band, he fearlessly plunged into the recesses of the Marcian or black forest, which conceals the sources of the Danube; and, for many days, the fate of Julian was unknown to the world. The secrecy of his march, his diligence and vigour, surmounted every obstacle; he forced his way over mountains and morasses, occupied the bridges or swam the rivers, pursued his direct course, without reflecting whether he traversed the territory of the Romans or of the Barbarians, and at length emerged, between Ratisbon and Vienna, at the place where he designed to embark his troops on the Danube. By a well-concerted stratagem, he seized a fleet of light brigantines, as it lay at anchor; secured a supply of coarse provisions sufficient to satisfy the indelicate, but voracious, appetite of a Gallic army; and boldly committed himself to the stream of the Danube. The labours of his mariners, who plied their oars with incessant diligence, and the steady continuance of a favourable wind, carried his fleet above seven hundred miles in eleven days; and he had already disembarked his troops at Bononia, only nineteen miles from Sirmium, before his enemies could receive any certain intelligence that he had left the banks of the Rhine.

Julian gains troops and territory but Constantius is still the favorite by far. At the start of the next season, however, just as he's coming West to fight, Constantius dies of an illness and the whole thing ends almost bloodlessly. Thus we arrive at the last pagan emperor.

He only lasts for about 18 months, but during that time he reforms the bloated bureaucracy, writes books, and in general lives like an ascetic while LARPing as a pagan philosopher-king. He is a man out of his time, writing letters to the "senate and people of Athens" as if they're still relevant, obsessed with his religion and the arts of divination. But he can put the LARPing aside to get shit done:

These sleeping or waking visions, the ordinary effects of abstinence and fanaticism, would almost degrade the emperor to the level of an Egyptian monk. But the useless lives of Anthony or Pachomius were consumed in these vain occupations. Julian could break from the dream of superstition to arm himself for battle; and, after vanquishing in the field the enemies of Rome, he calmly retired into his tent, to dictate the wise and salutary laws of an empire, or to indulge his genius in the elegant pursuits of literature and philosophy.

Julian turns his eyes toward Persia and is initially once again outrageously successful. He leads from the front, constantly putting himself in harm's way, and (through his personal valor) manages to impose some oldschool discipline. Ammian puts this striking speech in his mouth:

After the siege of Perisabor, the firmness of the emperor was exercised by the insolent avarice of the army, who loudly complained that their services were rewarded by a trifling donative of one hundred pieces of silver. His just indignation was expressed in the grave and manly language of a Roman. “Riches are the object of your desires? those riches are in the hands of the Persians; and the spoils of this fruitful country are proposed as the prize of your valour and discipline. Believe me,” added Julian, “the Roman republic, which formerly possessed such immense treasures, is now reduced to want and wretchedness; since our princes have been persuaded, by weak and interested ministers, to purchase with gold the tranquillity of the Barbarians. The revenue is exhausted; the cities are ruined; the provinces are dispeopled. For myself, the only inheritance that I have received from my royal ancestors is a soul incapable of fear; and, as long as I am convinced that every real advantage is seated in the mind, I shall not blush to acknowledge an honourable poverty, which, in the days of ancient virtue, was considered as the glory of Fabricius. That glory, and that virtue, may be your own, if you will listen to the voice of Heaven, and of your leader. But, if you will rashly persist, if you are determined to renew the shameful and mischievous examples of old seditions, proceed.—As it becomes an emperor who has filled the first rank among men, I am prepared to die, standing; and to despise a precarious life, which, every hour, may depend on an accidental fever. If I have been found unworthy of the command, there are now among you (I speak it with pride and pleasure), there are many chiefs, whose merit and experience are equal to the conduct of the most important war. Such has been the temper of my reign that I can retire, without regret, and without apprehension, to the obscurity of a private station.”

But his end comes quickly: Julian makes a fatal logistics error, gets stuck in the desert with no food, and finally dies in a bad battle after joining the fight with no armor. In the end the Persians impose a humiliating treaty, and then Valentinian (West) and Valens (East) take over and things start going bad very quickly. The Empire is permanently divided. Valentinian is the last emperor to properly beat the barbarians in the West, and Valens takes religious repression/witch-hunting to entirely new levels ("men of letters burned their whole libraries, lest some fatal volume should expose them to the malice of the informers and the extreme penalty of the law").

In Gibbon's time Julian was extremely popular among a certain crowd. Here's how one historian describes Voltaire's views:

Voltaire finds that Julian had all the qualities of Trajan without his defects ; all the virtues of Cato without his ill humour; all that one admires in Julius Cæsar without his vices; he had the continency of Scipio, and was in all ways equal to Marcus Aurelius, the first of men. Nay, more. If he had only lived longer, he would have retarded the fall of the Roman Empire, if he could not arrest it entirely.

Gibbon is positively predisposed to him, but he doesn't ignore his weaker aspects. Ultimately he sees Julian as a tragic figure who could never really accomplish what he wanted.

When we inspect, with minute or perhaps malevolent attention, the portrait of Julian, something seems wanting to the grace and perfection of the whole figure. His genius was less powerful and sublime than that of Cæsar; nor did he possess the consummate prudence of Augustus. The virtues of Trajan appear more steady and natural, and the philosophy of Marcus is more simple and consistent. Yet Julian sustained adversity with firmness, and prosperity with moderation. After an interval of one hundred and twenty years from the death of Alexander Severus, the Romans beheld an emperor who made no distinction between his duties and his pleasures; who laboured to relieve the distress, and to revive the spirit, of his subjects; and who endeavoured always to connect authority with merit, and happiness with virtue. Even faction, and religious faction, was constrained to acknowledge the superiority of his genius, in peace as well as in war; and to confess, with a sigh, that the apostate Julian was a lover of his country, and that he deserved the empire of the world.

The philosopher expressed a very reasonable wish that the disciple of Plato might have reposed amidst the groves of the academy: while the soldiers exclaimed in bolder accents that the ashes of Julian should have been mingled with those of Cæsar, in the field of Mars, and among the ancient monuments of Roman virtue. The history of princes does not very frequently renew the example of a similar competition.

4th-5th Century Invasions, Fall of the West

The turning point is probably Valens' loss against the Goths at the battle of Hadrianople in 378. The Goths then settle in the empire, and in the aftermath huge numbers of barbarians stream into the Roman world ( Vandals, Huns, Alans, Franks, Burgundians, and more). In the middle of this, the Romans just can't stop the civil wars. And they fight using mercenary armies filled with barbarians.

At a time when it was universally confessed that almost every man in the empire was superior in personal merit to the princes whom the accident of their birth had seated on the throne, a rapid succession of usurpers, regardless of the fate of their predecessors, still continued to arise. This mischief was peculiarly felt in the provinces of Spain and Gaul, where the principles of order and obedience had been extinguished by war and rebellion.

Simultaneously, Christianity achieves its final victory over paganism (which included the conversion of the invading barbarians).

At the start of the 5th century, the west was ruled by the comically incompetent Honorius, and his incredibly good half-Vandal general Stilicho.

His subjects, who attentively studied the character of their young sovereign, discovered that Honorius was without passions, and consequently without talents; and that his feeble and languid disposition was alike incapable of discharging the duties of his rank or of enjoying the pleasures of his age. In his early youth he made some progress in the exercise of riding and drawing the bow: but he soon relinquished these fatiguing occupations, and the amusement of feeding poultry became the serious and daily care of the monarch of the West, who resigned the reins of empire to the firm and skilful hand of his guardian Stilicho. The experience of history will countenance the suspicion that a prince who was born in the purple received a worse education than the meanest peasant of his dominions; and that the ambitious minister suffered him to attain the age of manhood without attempting to excite his courage or to enlighten his understanding. The predecessors of Honorius were accustomed to animate by their example, or at least by their presence, the valour of the legions; and the dates of their laws attest the perpetual activity of their motions through the provinces of the Roman world. But the son of Theodosius passed the slumber of his life, a captive in his palace, a stranger in his country, and the patient, almost the indifferent, spectator of the ruin of the Western empire, which was repeatedly attacked, and finally subverted, by the arms of the Barbarians. In the eventful history of a reign of twenty-eight years, it will seldom be necessary to mention the name of the emperor Honorius.

And so we come to Alaric, king of the Visigoths.

While the oration of Synesius and the downfall of the Barbarians were the topics of popular conversation, an edict was published at Constantinople, which declared the promotion of Alaric to the rank of master-general of the Eastern Illyricum. The Roman provincials and the allies, who had respected the faith of treaties, were justly indignant that the ruin of Greece and Epirus should be so liberally rewarded. The Gothic conqueror was received as a lawful magistrate, in the cities which he had so lately besieged. The fathers whose sons he had massacred, the husbands whose wives he had violated, were subject to his authority; and the success of his rebellion encouraged the ambition of every leader of the foreign mercenaries. The use to which Alaric applied his new command distinguishes the firm and judicious character of his policy. He issued his orders to the four magazines and manufactures of offensive and defensive arms, Margus, Ratiaria, Naissus, and Thessalonica, to provide his troops with an extraordinary supply of shields, helmets, swords, and spears; the unhappy provincials were compelled to forge the instruments of their own destruction; and the Barbarians removed the only defect which had sometimes disappointed the efforts of their courage. The birth of Alaric, the glory of his past exploits, and the confidence in his future designs, insensibly united the body of the nation under his victorious standard; and with the unanimous consent of the Barbarian chieftains, the master-general of Illyricum was elevated, according to ancient custom, on a shield, and solemnly proclaimed king of the Visigoths. Armed with this double power, seated on the verge of the two empires, he alternately sold his deceitful promises to the courts of Arcadius and Honorius; till he declared and executed his resolution of invading the dominions of the West. The provinces of Europe which belonged to the Eastern emperor were already exhausted; those of Asia were inaccessible; and the strength of Constantinople had resisted his attack. But he was tempted by the fame, the beauty, the wealth of Italy, which he had twice visited; and he secretly aspired to plant the Gothic standard on the walls of Rome, and to enrich his army with the accumulated spoils of three hundred triumphs.

The safety of Rome was entrusted to the counsels and the sword of Stilicho; but such was the feeble and exhausted state of the empire that it was impossible to restore the fortifications of the Danube, or to prevent, by a vigorous effort, the invasion of the Germans. The hopes of the vigilant minister of Honorius were confined to the defence of Italy. He once more abandoned the provinces, recalled the troops, pressed the new levies, which were rigorously exacted and pusillanimously eluded, employed the most efficacious means to arrest, or allure, the deserters, and offered the gift of freedom, and of two pieces of gold, to all the slaves who would enlist. By these efforts he painfully collected, from the subjects of a great empire, an army of thirty or forty thousand men, which, in the days of Scipio or Camillus, would have been instantly furnished by the free citizens of the territory of Rome. The thirty legions of Stilicho were reinforced by a large body of Barbarian auxiliaries; the faithful Alani were personally attached to his service; and the troops of Huns and of Goths, who marched under the banners of their native princes, Huldin and Sarus, were animated by interest and resentment to oppose the ambition of Radagaisus. The king of the confederate Germans passed, without resistance, the Alps, the Po, and the Apennine, leaving on one hand the inaccessible palace of Honorius, securely buried among the marshes of Ravenna, and, on the other, the camp of Stilicho, who had fixed his headquarters at Ticinum, or Pavia, but who seems to have avoided a decisive battle, till he had assembled his distant forces. Many cities of Italy were pillaged, or destroyed, and the siege of Florence by Radagaisus is one of the earliest events in the history of that celebrated republic, whose firmness checked and delayed the unskilful fury of the Barbarians. The senate and people trembled at their approach within an hundred and eighty miles of Rome, and anxiously compared the danger which they had escaped with the new perils to which they were exposed. Alaric was a Christian and a soldier, the leader of a disciplined army; who understood the laws of war, who respected the sanctity of treaties, and who had familiarly conversed with the subjects of the empire in the same camps, and the same churches. The savage Radagaisus was a stranger to the manners, the religion, and even the language, of the civilized nations of the South. The fierceness of his temper was exasperated by cruel superstition, and it was universally believed that he had bound himself by a solemn vow to reduce the city into a heap of stones and ashes, and to sacrifice the most illustrious of the Roman senators on the altars of those gods who were appeased by human blood. The public danger, which should have reconciled all domestic animosities, displayed the incurable madness of religious faction. The oppressed votaries of Jupiter and Mercury respected, in the implacable enemy of Rome, the character of a devout Pagan; loudly declared that they were more apprehensive of the sacrifices than of the arms of Radagaisus, and secretly rejoiced in the calamities of their country which condemned the faith of their Christian adversaries.

Being a great general at this time did not work out very well.

Stilicho supported, with calm resignation, the injurious names of traitor and parricide; repressed the unseasonable zeal of his followers, who were ready to attempt an ineffectual rescue; and, with a firmness not unworthy of the last of the Roman generals, submitted his neck to the sword of Heraclian.

With Stilicho lost and Romans attacking the foederatio throughout Italy, there's a mass desertion to Alaric.

By the imprudent conduct of the ministers of Honorius, the republic lost the assistance, and deserved the enmity, of thirty thousand of her bravest soldiers; and the weight of that formidable army, which alone might have determined the event of the war, was transferred from the scale of the Romans into that of the Goths.

Alaric finally sets his sights on Rome.

During a period of six hundred and nineteen years, the seat of empire had never been violated by the presence of a foreign enemy. The unsuccessful expedition of Hannibal served only to display the character of the senate and people; of a senate degraded, rather than ennobled, by the comparison of an assembly of kings; and of a people to whom the ambassador of Pyrrhus ascribed the inexhaustible resources of the Hydra.Each of the senators, in the time of the Punic war, had accomplished his term of military service, either in a subordinate or a superior station; and the decree which invested with temporary command all those who had been consuls or censors or dictators gave the republic the immediate assistance of many brave and experienced generals. In the beginning of the war, the Roman people consisted of two hundred and fifty thousand citizens of an age to bear arms. Fifty thousand had already died in the defence of their country; and the twenty-three legions which were employed in the different camps of Italy, Greece, Sardinia, Sicily, and Spain, required about one hundred thousand men. But there still remained an equal number in Rome, and the adjacent territory, who were animated by the same intrepid courage; and every citizen was trained, from his earliest youth, in the discipline and exercises of a soldier. Hannibal was astonished by the constancy of the senate, who, without raising the siege of Capua or recalling their scattered forces, expected his approach. He encamped on the banks of the Anio, at the distance of three miles from the city; and he was soon informed that the ground on which he had pitched his tent was sold for an adequate price at a public auction and that a body of troops was dismissed by an opposite road, to reinforce the legions of Spain.6 He led his Africans to the gates of Rome, where he found three armies in order of battle, prepared to receive him; but Hannibal dreaded the event of a combat from which he could not hope to escape, unless he destroyed the last of his enemies; and his speedy retreat confessed the invincible courage of the Romans.

From the time of the Punic war the uninterrupted succession of senators had preserved the name and image of the republic; and the degenerate subjects of Honorius ambitiously derived their descent from the heroes who had repulsed the arms of Hannibal and subdued the nations of the earth.

Eventually the gates are thrown open and a puppet emperor under Gothic control is installed, but the transition is relatively peaceful. Honorius is still hiding in Ravenna and the situation is really strange. The new emperor soon loses his position, Alaric seems to want to negotiate some sort of peace but it's not happening, there's an endless series of double backstabbings, etc. In the end Alaric turns back toward Rome again, this time with some serious plundering in mind.

The crime and folly of the court of Ravenna was expiated a third time by the calamities of Rome. The king of the Goths, who no longer dissembled his appetite for plunder and revenge, appeared in arms under the walls of the capital; and the trembling senate, without any hopes of relief, prepared, by a desperate resistance, to delay the ruin of their country. But they were unable to guard against the secret conspiracy of their slaves and domestics; who, either from birth or interest, were attached to the cause of the enemy. At the hour of midnight, the Salarian gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilized so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.

Whether fame or conquest or riches were the object of Alaric, he pursued that object with an indefatigable ardour, which could neither be quelled by adversity nor satiated by success. No sooner had he reached the extreme land of Italy than he was attacked by the neighbouring prospect of a fertile and peaceful island. Yet even the possession of Sicily he considered only as an intermediate step to the important expedition which he already meditated against the continent of Africa. The straits of Rhegium and Messina are twelve miles in length, and in the narrowest passage about one mile and a half broad; and the fabulous monsters of the deep, the rocks of Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis, could terrify none but the most timid and unskilful mariners. Yet, as soon as the first division of the Goths had embarked, a sudden tempest arose, which sunk or scattered many of the transports; their courage was daunted by the terrors of a new element; and the whole design was defeated by the premature death of Alaric, which fixed, after a short illness, the fatal term of his conquests.

Meanwhile in Gaul, there's an invasion of Goths, Franks, and Burgundians with similar effects.

Whilst Italy was ravaged by the Goths and a succession of feeble tyrants oppressed the provinces beyond the Alps, the British island separated itself from the body of the Roman empire. The regular forces, which guarded that remote province, had been gradually withdrawn; and Britain was abandoned, without defence, to the Saxon pirates and the savages of Ireland and Caledonia. The Britons, reduced to this extremity, no longer relied on the tardy and doubtful aid of a declining monarch. They assembled in arms, repelled the invaders, and rejoiced in the important discovery of their own strength. Afflicted by similar calamities and actuated by the same spirit, the Armorican provinces (a name which comprehended the maritime countries of Gaul between the Seine and the Loire) resolved to imitate the example of the neighbouring island. They expelled the Roman magistrates who acted under the authority of the usurper Constantine; and a free government was established among a people who had so long been subject to the arbitrary will of a master.

A bit later, Attila appears and crushes everything in his path, from Gaul into Italy.

The Huns might be provoked to insult the misery of their slaves, over whom they exercised a despotic command; but their manners were not susceptible of a refined system of oppression; and the efforts of courage and diligence were often recompensed by the gift of freedom. The historian Priscus, whose embassy is a course of curious instruction, was accosted, in the camp of Attila, by a stranger, who saluted him in the Greek language, but whose dress and figure displayed the appearance of a wealthy Scythian. In the siege of Viminacium, he had lost, according to his own account, his fortune and liberty; he became the slave of Onegesius; but his faithful services, against the Romans and the Acatzires, had gradually raised him to the rank of the native Huns; to whom he was attached by the domestic pledges of a new wife and several children. The spoils of war had restored and improved his private property; he was admitted to the table of his former lord; and the apostate Greek blessed the hour of his captivity, since it had been the introduction to an happy and independent state; which he held by the honourable tenure of military service. This reflection naturally produced a dispute on the advantages, and defects, of the Roman government, which was severely arraigned by the apostate, and defended by Priscus in a prolix and feeble declamation. The freedom of Onegesius exposed, in true and lively colours, the vices of a declining empire, of which he had so long been the victim; the cruel absurdity of the Roman princes, unable to protect their subjects against the public enemy, unwilling to trust them with arms for their own defence; the intolerable weight of taxes, rendered still more oppressive by the intricate or arbitrary modes of collection; the obscurity of numerous and contradictory laws; the tedious and expensive forms of judicial proceedings; the partial administration of justice; and the universal corruption, which increased the influence of the rich, and aggravated the misfortunes of the poor. A sentiment of patriotic sympathy was at length revived in the breast of the fortunate exile; and he lamented, with a flood of tears, the guilt or weakness of those magistrates who had perverted the wisest and most salutary institutions.

Then in the middle of the 5th century, Genseric and his Vandals sack Rome once again.

On the third day after the tumult, Genseric boldly advanced from the port of Ostia to the gates of the defenceless city. Instead of a sally of the Roman youth, there issued from the gates an unarmed and venerable procession of the bishop at the head of his clergy.

The spectator, who casts a mournful view over the ruins of ancient Rome, is tempted to accuse the memory of the Goths and Vandals, for the mischief which they had neither leisure, nor power, nor perhaps inclination, to perpetrate. The tempest of war might strike some lofty turrets to the ground; but the destruction which undermined the foundations of those massy fabrics was prosecuted, slowly and silently, during a period of ten centuries; and the motives of interest that afterwards operated without shame or control were severely checked by the taste and spirit of the emperor Majorian. The decay of the city had gradually impaired the value of the public works. The circus and theatres might still excite, but they seldom gratified, the desires of the people; the temples, which had escaped the zeal of the Christians, were no longer inhabited either by gods or men; the diminished crowds of the Romans were lost in the immense space of their baths and porticoes; and the stately libraries and halls of justice became useless to an indolent generation, whose repose was seldom disturbed either by study or business. The monuments of consular, or Imperial, greatness were no longer revered as the immortal glory of the capital; they were only esteemed as an inexhaustible mine of materials, cheaper and more convenient than the distant quarry.

The Vandals turn to piracy across almost the entire Mediterranean:

The Vandals repeatedly visited the coasts of Spain, Liguria, Tuscany, Campania, Lucania, Bruttium, Apulia, Calabria, Venetia, Dalmatia, Epirus, Greece, and Sicily; they were tempted to subdue the island of Sardinia, so advantageously placed in the centre of the Mediterranean; and their arms spread desolation, or terror, from the columns of Hercules to the mouth of the Nile. As they were more ambitious of spoil than of glory, they seldom attacked any fortified cities or engaged any regular troops in the open field. But the celerity of their motions enabled them, almost at the same time, to threaten and to attack the most distant objects which attracted their desires; and, as they always embarked a sufficient number of horses, they had no sooner landed than they swept the dismayed country with a body of light cavalry. Yet, notwithstanding the example of their king, the native Vandals and Alani insensibly declined this toilsome and perilous warfare; the hardy generation of the first conquerors was almost extinguished, and their sons, who were born in Africa, enjoyed the delicious baths and gardens which had been acquired by the valour of their fathers. Their place was readily supplied by a various multitude of Moors and Romans, of captives and outlaws; and those desperate wretches who had already violated the laws of their country were the most eager to promote the atrocious acts which disgrace the victories of Genseric.

Italy ends up as a weak Gothic kingdom under Odoacer, though the trappings of Rome are hard to shake off.

The laws of the emperors were strictly enforced, and the civil administration of Italy was still exercised by the Prætorian præfect and his subordinate officers. Odoacer devolved on the Roman magistrates the odious and oppressive task of collecting the public revenue; but he reserved for himself the merit of seasonable and popular indulgence.

Notwithstanding the prudence and success of Odoacer, his kingdom exhibited the sad prospect of misery and desolation. Since the age of Tiberius, the decay of agriculture had been felt in Italy; and it was a subject of complaint that the life of the Roman people depended on the accidents of the winds and waves. In the division and the decline of the empire, the tributary harvests of Egypt and Africa were withdrawn; the numbers of the inhabitants continually diminished with the means of subsistence; and the country was exhausted by the irretrievable losses of war, famine,100 and pestilence.

The Western Empire finally ends, the last emperor being Romulus Agustulus.

Royalty was familiar to the Barbarians, and the submissive people of Italy was prepared to obey, without a murmur, the authority which he should condescend to exercise as the vicegerent of the emperor of the West. But Odoacer had resolved to abolish that useless and expensive office; and such is the weight of antique prejudice that it required some boldness and penetration to discover the extreme facility of the enterprise. The unfortunate Augustulus was made the instrument of his own disgrace; he signified his resignation to the senate; and that assembly, in their last act of obedience to a Roman prince, still affected the spirit of freedom and the forms of the constitution. An epistle was addressed, by their unanimous decree, to the emperor Zeno, the son-in-law and successor of Leo; who had lately been restored, after a short rebellion, to the Byzantine throne. They solemnly “disclaim the necessity, or even the wish, of continuing any longer the Imperial succession in Italy; since, in their opinion, the majesty of a sole monarch is sufficient to pervade and protect, at the same time, both the East and the West. In their own name, and in the name of the people, they consent that the seat of universal empire shall be transferred from Rome to Constantinople; and they basely renounce the right of choosing their master, the only vestige that yet remained of the authority which had given laws to the world. The republic (they repeat that name without a blush) might safely confide in the civil and military virtues of Odoacer; and they humbly request that the emperor would invest him with the title of Patrician and the administration of the diocese of Italy.”

In the space of twenty years since the death of Valentinian, nine emperors had successively disappeared; and the son of Orestes, a youth recommended only by his beauty, would be the least entitled to the notice of posterity, if his reign, which was marked by the extinction of the Roman empire in the West, did not leave a memorable æra in the history of mankind.

Belisarius (500-565)

The last of the last great Roman generals, he began from a relatively humble position:

The silence of a loquacious secretary may be admitted to prove that the youth of Belisarius could not afford any subject of praise: he served, most assuredly with valour and reputation, among the private guards of Justinian; and, when his patron became emperor, the domestic was promoted to military command.

When Justinian rose to the throne, Belsiarius got a command in the war against the Persians and managed to distinguish himself. He also helped end the Nika Riots, cementing Justinian's power. His wife Antonina was extremely close to the empress Theodora, and seems to have had a lot of power over him (to the point where she was making significant military decisions).

His first great mission is against the Vandals in North Africa. The Byzantines no longer primarily fight with legions, but with cataphracts: armored mounted archers.

Five hundred transports, navigated by twenty thousand mariners of Egypt, Cilicia, and Ionia, were collected in the harbour of Constantinople. The smallest of these vessels may be computed at thirty, the largest at five hundred, tons; and the fair average will supply an allowance, liberal but not profuse, of about one hundred thousand tons, for the reception of thirty-five thousand soldiers and sailors, of five thousand horses, of arms, engines, and military stores, and of a sufficient stock of water and provisions for a voyage, perhaps, of three months. The proud galleys, which in former ages swept the Mediterranean with so many hundred oars, had long since disappeared; and the fleet of Justinian was escorted only by ninety-two light brigantines, covered from the missile weapons of the enemy, and rowed by two thousand of the brave and robust youth of Constantinople. Twenty-two generals are named, most of whom were afterwards distinguished in the wars of Africa and Italy; but the supreme command, both by land and sea, was delegated to Belisarius alone, with a boundless power of acting according to his discretion as if the emperor himself were present.

The experience of past faults, which may sometimes correct the mature age of an individual, is seldom profitable to the successive generations of mankind. The nations of antiquity, careless of each other’s safety, were separately vanquished and enslaved by the Romans. This awful lesson might have instructed the Barbarians of the West to oppose, with timely counsels and confederate arms, the unbounded ambition of Justinian. Yet the same error was repeated, the same consequences were felt, and the Goths, both of Italy and Spain, insensible of their approaching danger, beheld with indifference, and even with joy, the rapid downfall of the Vandals.

Belisarius crushes the Vandals despite having a much smaller force, takes Carthage, and returns North Africa to Roman hands. At this point Justinian decides to test his loyalty by offering him the choice between governorship of the province and returning to Constantinople for a triumph. Belisarius chooses the latter.

He's on a roll now and Justinian sends him to Italy against the Goths. They don't have much in the way of troops, but Belissarius makes the most of it. The campaign is incredibly exciting but far too long to include here. In short, Belisarius works his way north and after a couple years of successful warring he takes Rome unopposed, only to be stuck there as the Goths besiege him for more than a year. But his veterans defend the city admirably, the Goths take huge losses, and pressures from the North force them to retreat. The Franks see the chaos as an opportunity to invade and bring in a huge army over the Alps in order to pillage anything they can find. But things don't work out well for them:

If it were not a melancholy truth that the first and most cruel sufferings must be the lot of the innocent and helpless, history might exult in the misery of the conquerors, who, in the midst of riches, were left destitute of bread or wine, reduced to drink the waters of the Po, and to feed on the flesh of distempered cattle. The dysentery swept away one third of their army; and the clamours of his subjects, who were impatient to pass the Alps, disposed Theodebert to listen with respect to the mild exhortations of Belisarius. The memory of this inglorious and destructive warfare was perpetuated on the medals of Gaul; and Justinian, without unsheathing his sword, assumed the title of conqueror of the Franks. The Merovingian prince was offended by the vanity of the emperor; he affected to pity the fallen fortunes of the Goths; and his insidious offer of a federal union was fortified by the promise or menace of descending from the Alps at the head of five hundred thousand men. His plans of conquest were boundless and perhaps chimerical. The king of Austrasia threatened to chastise Justinian, and to march to the gates of Constantinople; he was overthrown and slain by a wild bull, as he hunted in the Belgic or German forests.

Thus the Byzantines regain control of the whole of Italy. This is how Gibbon summarizes Belisarius's achievement:

The spectator and historian of his exploits has observed that, amidst the perils of war, he was daring without rashness, prudent without fear, slow or rapid according to the exigencies of the moment; that in the deepest distress, he was animated by real or apparent hope; but that he was modest and humble in the most prosperous fortune. By these virtues he equalled, or excelled, the ancient masters of the military art. Victory, by sea and land, attended his arms. He subdued Africa, Italy, and the adjacent islands; led away captives the successors of Genseric and Theodoric; filled Constantinople with the spoils of their palaces; and in the space of six years recovered half the provinces of the Western empire. In his fame and merit, in wealth and power, he remained without a rival, the first of the Roman subjects; the voice of envy could only magnify his dangerous importance; and the emperor might applaud his own discerning spirit which had discovered and raised the genius of Belisarius.

After securing the West, he is sent east again. Meanwhile, Procopius reports that Antonina had multiple affairs, including one with Belisarius's godson Theodosius. Belisarius is the only man in the world unaware of that fact.

During their residence at Carthage, he surprised the two lovers in a subterraneous chamber, solitary, warm, and almost naked. Anger flashed from his eyes. “With the help of this young man,” said the unblushing Antonina, “I was secreting our most precious effects from the knowledge of Justinian.” The youth resumed his garments, and the pious husband consented to disbelieve the evidence of his own senses. From this pleasing and perhaps voluntary delusion Belisarius was awakened at Syracuse, by the officious information of Macedonia; and that female attendant, after requiring an oath for her security, produced two chamberlains, who, like herself, had often beheld the adulteries of Antonina. An hasty flight into Asia saved Theodosius from the justice of an injured husband, who had signified to one of his guards the order of his death; but the tears of Antonina, and her artful seductions, assured the credulous hero of her innocence; and he stooped, against his faith and judgment, to abandon those imprudent friends who had presumed to accuse or doubt the chastity of his wife. The revenge of a guilty woman is implacable and bloody: the unfortunate Macedonia, with the two witnesses, were secretly arrested by the minister of her cruelty; their tongues were cut out, their bodies were hacked into small pieces, and their remains were cast into the sea of Syracuse.

Eventually Antonina's son Photius alerts Belisarius and forms a conspiracy with him.

Enraged by his own wrongs and by the dishonour of his blood, he cast away in his turn the sentiments of nature, and revealed to Belisarius the turpitude of a woman who had violated all the duties of a mother and a wife. From the surprise and indignation of the Roman general, his former credulity appears to have been sincere: he embraced the knees of the son of Antonina, adjured him to remember his obligations rather than his birth, and confirmed at the altar their holy vows of revenge and mutual defence. The dominion of Antonina was impaired by absence; and, when she met her husband, on his return from the Persian confines, Belisarius, in his first and transient emotions, confined her person and threatened her life.

But the empress sides with Antonina, Belisarius does nothing and maintains his loyalty, while Theodosius is executed, and Photius is sent to the dungeons by his own mother.

At the end of the campaign, Belisarius was recalled; he complied, as usual, with the Imperial mandate. His mind was not prepared for rebellion; his obedience, however adverse to the dictates of honour, was consonant to the wishes of his heart; and, when he embraced his wife, at the command, and perhaps in the presence, of the empress, the tender husband was disposed to forgive or to be forgiven. [...] The grief of Antonina could only be assuaged by the sufferings of her son. A youth of consular rank, and a sickly constitution, was punished, without a trial, like a malefactor and a slave; yet such was the constancy of his mind that Photius sustained the tortures of the scourge and the rack without violating the faith which he had sworn to Belisarius. After this fruitless cruelty, the son of Antonina, while his mother feasted with the empress, was buried in her subterraneous prisons, which admitted not the distinction of night and day.

Being a great general in these times was not a very nice position to be in. Too much success and the emperor inevitably saw you as a threat. Aëtius and Stilicho were in a similar position to Belisarius and both were killed. In return for his loyalty and vast conquests, all he got was a pathetic downfall:

In the succeeding campaign, Belisarius was again sent against the Persians: he saved the East, but he offended Theodora, and perhaps the emperor himself. The malady of Justinian had countenanced the rumour of his death; and the Roman general, on the supposition of that probable event, spoke the free language of a citizen and a soldier. His colleague Buzes, who concurred in the same sentiments, lost his rank, his liberty, and his health, by the persecution of the empress; but the disgrace of Belisarius was alleviated by the dignity of his own character, and the influence of his wife, who might wish to humble, but could not desire to ruin, the partner of her fortunes. Even his removal was coloured by the assurance that the sinking state of Italy would be retrieved by the single presence of its conqueror. But no sooner had he returned, alone and defenceless, than an hostile commission was sent to the East, to seize his treasures and criminate his actions; the guards and veterans who followed his private banner were distributed among the chiefs of the army, and even the eunuchs presumed to cast lots for the partition of his martial domestics.

When he passed with a small and sordid retinue through the streets of Constantinople, his forlorn appearance excited the amazement and compassion of the people. Justinian and Theodora received him with cold ingratitude; the servile crowd with insolence and contempt; and in the evening he retired with trembling steps to his deserted palace. An indisposition, feigned or real, had confined Antonina to her apartment: and she walked disdainfully silent in the adjacent portico, while Belisarius threw himself on his bed, and expected, in an agony of grief and terror, the death which he had so often braved under the walls of Rome. Long after sunset a messenger was announced from the empress; he opened, with anxious curiosity, the letter which contained the sentence of his fate. “You cannot be ignorant how much you have deserved my displeasure. I am not insensible of the services of Antonina. To her merits and intercession I have granted your life, and permit you to retain a part of your treasures, which might be justly forfeited to the state. Let your gratitude, where it is due, be displayed, not in words, but in your future behaviour.” I know not how to believe or to relate the transports with which the hero is said to have received this ignominious pardon. He fell prostrate before his wife; he kissed the feet of his saviour; and he devoutly promised to live the grateful and submissive slave of Antonina. A fine of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds sterling was levied on the fortunes of Belisarius; and with the office of count, or master of the royal stables, he accepted the conduct of the Italian war. At his departure from Constantinople, his friends, and even the public, were persuaded that, as soon as he regained his freedom, he would renounce his dissimulation, and that his wife, Theodora, and perhaps the emperor himself, would be sacrificed to the just revenge of a virtuous rebel. Their hopes were deceived; and the unconquerable patience and loyalty of Belisarius appear either below or above the character of a MAN.

Heraclius (575-641)

Heraclius comes to power about a decade into the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-28, and the situation is absolutely dire. The weakened Byzantines are incapable of resisting the Persian incursions and lose virtually everything in the middle east, and even some islands in the Aegean. To make things even worse, the Persians have allied with the Avars who are attacking the Byzantines from the North. It looks like the Eastern Roman Empire is nearing its end. Things are looking so bad that Heraclius decides to move out from Constantinople:

By these implacable enemies Heraclius, on either side, was insulted and besieged; and the Roman empire was reduced to the walls of Constantinople, with the remnant of Greece, Italy, and Africa, and some maritime cities, from Tyre to Trebizond, of the Asiatic coast. After the loss of Egypt, the capital was afflicted by famine and pestilence; and the emperor, incapable of resistance and hopeless of relief, had resolved to transfer his person and government to the more secure residence of Carthage. His ships were already laden with the treasures of the palace; but his flight was arrested by the patriarch, who armed the powers of religion in the defence of his country, led Heraclius to the altar of St. Sophia, and extorted a solemn oath that he would live and die with the people whom God had entrusted to his care.

And so Heraclius decides to take the field.

Of the characters conspicuous in history, that of Heraclius is one of the most extraordinary and inconsistent. In the first and last years of a long reign, the emperor appears to be the slave of sloth, of pleasure, or of superstition, the careless and impotent spectator of the public calamities. But the languid mists of the morning and evening are separated by the brightness of the meridian sun: the Arcadius of the palace arose the Cæsar of the camp; and the honour of Rome and Heraclius was gloriously retrieved by the exploits and trophies of six adventurous campaigns. It was the duty of the Byzantine historians to have revealed the causes of his slumber and vigilance. At this distance we can only conjecture that he was endowed with more personal courage than political resolution; that he was detained by the charms, and perhaps the arts, of his niece Martina, with whom, after the death of Eudocia, he contracted an incestuous marriage; and that he yielded to the base advice of the counsellors, who urged, as a fundamental law, that the life of the emperor should never be exposed in the field. Perhaps he was awakened by the last insolent demand of the Persian conqueror; but, at the moment when Heraclius assumed the spirit of an hero, the only hopes of the Romans were drawn from the vicissitudes of fortune, which might threaten the proud prosperity of Chosroes and must be favourable to those who had attained the lowest period of depression.

The plan was as simple as it was incredible: leave the Persians to occupy Anatolia; sail the Black Sea, cross the Caucasus, and strike behind their backs into the heart of Persia. "Since the days of Scipio and Hannibal, no bolder enterprise has been attempted", Gibbon writes. Like the emperors of old, Heraclius went out at the head of his army.

When the legions of Lucullus and Pompey first passed the Euphrates, they blushed at their easy victory over the natives of Armenia. But the long experience of war had hardened the minds and bodies of that effeminate people; their zeal and bravery were approved in the service of a declining empire; they abhorred and feared the usurpation of the house of Sassan, and the memory of persecution envenomed their pious hatred of the enemies of Christ. The limits of Armenia, as it had been ceded to the emperor Maurice, extended as far as the Araxes; the river submitted to the indignity of a bridge; and Heraclius, in the footsteps of Mark Antony, advanced towards the city of Tauris or Gandzaca, the ancient and modern capital of one of the provinces of Media. At the head of forty thousand men, Chosroes himself had returned from some distant expedition to oppose the progress of the Roman arms; but he retreated on the approach of Heraclius, declining the generous alternative of peace or of battle. [...] The rapid conquests of Heraclius were suspended only by the winter season; a motive of prudence, or superstition, determined his retreat into the province of Albania, along the shores of the Caspian; and his tents were most probably pitched in the plains of Mogan, the favourite encampment of Oriental princes.

The success continues over multiple seasons of fighting across the entire Middle East:

Amidst the glories of the succeeding campaign, Heraclius is almost lost to our eyes and to those of the Byzantine historians. From the spacious and fruitful plains of Albania, the emperor appears to follow the chain of Hyrcanian mountains, to descend into the province of Media or Irak, and to carry his victorious arms as far as the royal cities of Casbin and Ispahan, which had never been approached by a Roman conqueror. Alarmed by the danger of his kingdom, the powers of Chosroes were already recalled from the Nile and the Bosphorus, and three formidable armies surrounded, in a distant and hostile land, the camp of the emperor. The Colchian allies prepared to desert his standard; and the fears of the bravest veterans were expressed, rather than concealed, by their desponding silence. “Be not terrified,” said the intrepid Heraclius, “by the multitude of your foes. With the aid of Heaven, one Roman may triumph over a thousand barbarians. But, if we devote our lives for the salvation of our brethren, we shall obtain the crown of martyrdom, and our immortal reward will be liberally paid by God and posterity.” These magnanimous sentiments were supported by the vigour of his actions. He repelled the threefold attack of the Persians, improved the divisions of their chiefs, and, by a well-concerted train of marches, retreats, and successful actions, finally chased them from the field into the fortified cities of Media and Assyria. In the severity of the winter season, Sarbaraza deemed himself secure in the walls of Salban; he was surprised by the activity of Heraclius, who divided his troops and performed a laborious march in the silence of the night. The flat roofs of the houses were defended with useless valour against the darts and torches of the Romans; the satraps and nobles of Persia, with their wives and children, and the flower of their martial youth, were either slain or made prisoners. The general escaped by a precipitate flight, but his golden armour was the prize of the conqueror; and the soldiers of Heraclius enjoyed the wealth and repose which they had so nobly deserved. On the return of spring, the emperor traversed in seven days the mountains of Curdistan, and passed without resistance the rapid stream of the Tigris. Oppressed by the weight of their spoils and captives, the Roman army halted under the walls of Amida; and Heraclius informed the senate of Constantinople of his safety and success, which they had already felt by the retreat of the besiegers. The bridges of the Euphrates were destroyed by the Persians; but, as soon as the emperor had discovered a ford, they hastily retired to defend the banks of the Sarus, in Cilicia. That river, an impetuous torrent, was about three hundred feet broad; the bridge was fortified with strong turrets; and the banks were lined with barbarian archers. After a bloody conflict, which continued till the evening, the Romans prevailed in the assault, and a Persian of gigantic size was slain and thrown into the Sarus by the hand of the emperor himself. The enemies were dispersed and dismayed; Heraclius pursued his march to Sebaste in Cappadocia; and, at the expiration of three years, the same coast of the Euxine applauded his return from a long and victorious expedition.

Around this time,the Avars try to take Constantinople but are repulsed. And just like the Persians were allied with the Avars, Heraclius makes an alliance with the Turks against the Persians.

The war concludes with the Battle of Nineveh, but the sources leave something to be desired:

Deprived of his firmest support, and doubtful of the fidelity of his subjects, the greatness of Chosroes was still conspicuous in its ruins. The number of five hundred thousand may be interpreted as an Oriental metaphor, to describe the men and arms, the horses and elephants, that covered Media and Assyria against the invasion of Heraclius. Yet the Romans boldly advanced from the Araxes to the Tigris, and the timid prudence of Rhazates was content to follow them by forced marches through a desolate country, till he received a peremptory mandate to risk the fate of Persia in a decisive battle. Eastward of the Tigris, at the end of the bridge of Mosul, the great Nineveh had formerly been erected;78 the city, and even the ruins of the city, had long since disappeared;79 the vacant space afforded a spacious field for the operations of the two armies. But these operations are neglected by the Byzantine historians, and, like the authors of epic poetry and romance, they ascribe the victory not to the military conduct, but to the personal valour, of their favourite hero. [...] From the palace of Dastagerd, he pursued his march within a few miles of Modian or Ctesiphon, till he was stopped, on the banks of the Arba, by the difficulty of the passage, the rigour of the season, and perhaps the fame of an impregnable capital.

Among the spoils, the Byzantines recover 300 Roman eagles, as well as (what they believed to be) the True Cross which had been captured by the Persians. Chosroes is finally killed by his son who takes the sceptre, and the two great Empires strike a peace.

But this great fight has exhausted both combatants, which makes things very easy for what's coming from the East:

The loss of two hundred thousand soldiers who had fallen by the sword was of less fatal importance than the decay of arts, agriculture, and population, in this long and destructive war; and, although a victorious army had been formed under the standard of Heraclius, the unnatural effort appears to have exhausted rather than exercised their strength. While the emperor triumphed at Constantinople or Jerusalem, an obscure town on the confines of Syria was pillaged by the Saracens, and they cut in pieces some troops who advanced to its relief: an ordinary and trifling occurrence, had it not been the prelude of a mighty revolution. These robbers were the apostles of Mahomet; their fanatic valour had emerged from the desert; and in the last eight years of his reign Heraclius lost to the Arabs the same provinces which he had rescued from the Persians.

This is the final episode of the Eastern empire which Gibbon is really interested in. In this wonderful passage he denigrates the Byzantines and makes the case for liberty by comparing them to the Greeks of the classical era:

From the time of Heraclius, the Byzantine theatre is contracted and darkened; the line of empire, which had been defined by the laws of Justinian and the arms of Belisarius, recedes on all sides from our view; the Roman name, the proper subject of our inquiries, is reduced to a narrow corner of Europe, to the lonely suburbs of Constantinople; and the fate of the Greek empire has been compared to that of the Rhine, which loses itself in the sands before its waters can mingle with the ocean. The scale of dominion is diminished to our view by the distance of time and place; nor is the loss of external splendour compensated by the nobler gifts of virtue and genius. In the last moments of her decay, Constantinople was doubtless more opulent and populous than Athens at her most flourishing æra, when a scanty sum of six thousand talents, or twelve hundred thousand pounds sterling, was possessed by twenty-one thousand male citizens of an adult age. But each of these citizens was a freeman, who dared to assert the liberty of his thoughts, words, and actions; whose person and property were guarded by equal law; and who exercised his independent vote in the government of the republic. Their numbers seem to be multiplied by the strong and various discriminations of character: under the shield of freedom, on the wings of emulation and vanity, each Athenian aspired to the level of the national dignity; from this commanding eminence some chosen spirits soared beyond the reach of a vulgar eye; and the chances of superior merit in a great and populous kingdom, as they are proved by experience, would excuse the computation of imaginary millions. The territories of Athens, Sparta, and their allies do not exceed a moderate province of France or England; but, after the trophies of Salamis and Platæa, they expand in our fancy to the gigantic size of Asia, which had been trampled under the feet of the victorious Greeks. But the subjects of the Byzantine empire, who assume and dishonour the names both of Greeks and Romans, present a dead uniformity of abject vices, which are neither softened by the weakness of humanity nor animated by the vigour of memorable crimes.

Crusades (1095-1291)

There's chivalry and knights and everything is very picturesque and fantastical—the characters feel like they're pulled out of a novel with elves and orcs: brave heroes like Tancred, Bohemond, and Baldwin. The crusades (and especially the first one) were also really shambolic affairs, and gave Gibbon a chance to do battle against Christianity. Simply getting to the Holy Land was difficult and the crusaders were more of an unruly mob than a disciplined army.

Some counts and gentlemen, at the head of three thousand horse, attended the motions of the multitude to partake in the spoil; but their genuine leaders (may we credit such folly?) were a goose and a goat, who were carried in the front, and to whom these worthy Christians ascribed an infusion of the divine Spirit. Of these and of other bands of enthusiasts, the first and most easy warfare was against the Jews, the murderers of the Son of God. In the trading cities of the Moselle and the Rhine, their colonies were numerous and rich; and they enjoyed, under the protection of the emperor and the bishops, the free exercise of their religion. At Verdun, Treves, Mentz, Spires, Worms, many thousands of that unhappy people were pillaged and massacred; nor had they felt a more bloody stroke since the persecution of Hadrian.

In Hungary the crusaders get into fights with the (Christian) locals and lose. When they arrive in Byzantium they start to pillage indiscriminately until Alexius ferries them over the Bosporus and points them toward the Turks. Gibbon obviously exaggerates the numbers, but it was pretty bad.

Of the first crusaders, three hundred thousand had already perished, before a single city was rescued from the infidels, before their graver and more noble brethren had completed the preparations of their enterprise.

Eventually they gather a critical mass and start taking cities. First Nice, then onto Antioch:

In the slow and successive labours of a siege the crusaders were supine and ignorant, without skill to contrive, or money to purchase, or industry to use the artificial engines and implements of assault. In the conquest of Nice they had been powerfully assisted by the wealth and knowledge of the Greek emperor: his absence was poorly supplied by some Genoese and Pisan vessels that were attracted by religion or trade to the coast of Syria; the stores were scanty, the return precarious, and the communication difficult and dangerous. Indolence or weakness had prevented the Franks from investing the entire circuit; and the perpetual freedom of two gates relieved the wants, and recruited the garrison, of the city. At the end of seven months, after the ruin of their cavalry, and an enormous loss by famine, desertion, and fatigue, the progress of the crusaders was imperceptible, and their success remote, if the Latin Ulysses, the artful and ambitious Bohemond, had not employed the arms of cunning and deceit.

In the eventful period of the siege and defence of Antioch, the crusaders were alternately exalted by victory or sunk in despair; either swelled with plenty or emaciated with hunger. A speculative reasoner might suppose that their faith had a strong and serious influence on their practice; and that the soldiers of the cross, the deliverers of the holy sepulchre, prepared themselves by a sober and virtuous life for the daily contemplation of martyrdom. Experience blows away this charitable illusion; and seldom does the history of profane war display such scenes of intemperance and prostitution as were exhibited under the walls of Antioch. The grove of Daphne no longer flourished; but the Syrian air was still impregnated with the same vices; the Christians were seduced by every temptation that nature either prompts or reprobates; the authority of the chiefs was despised; and sermons and edicts were alike fruitless against those scandalous disorders, not less pernicious to military discipline than repugnant to evangelic purity.

Then onto Jerusalem, which falls after a protracted siege:

About four hundred and sixty years after the conquest of Omar, the holy city was rescued from the Mahometan yoke. In the pillage of public and private wealth, the adventurers had agreed to respect the exclusive property of the first occupant; and the spoils of the great mosque, seventy lamps and massy vases of gold and silver, rewarded the diligence, and displayed the generosity, of Tancred. A bloody sacrifice was offered by his mistaken votaries to the God of the Christians; resistance might provoke, but neither age nor sex could mollify, their implacable rage; they indulged themselves three days in a promiscuous massacre; and the infection of the dead bodies produced an epidemic disease. After seventy thousand Moslems had been put to the sword, and the harmless Jews had been burnt in their synagogue, they could still reserve a multitude of captives whom interest or lassitude persuaded them to spare. Of these savage heroes of the cross, Tancred alone betrayed some sentiments of compassion; yet we may praise the more selfish lenity of Raymond, who granted a capitulation and safe-conduct to the garrison of the citadel.66 The holy sepulchre was now free; and the bloody victors prepared to accomplish their vow. Bareheaded and barefoot, with contrite hearts, and in an humble posture, they ascended the hill of Calvary, amidst the loud anthems of the clergy; kissed the stone which had covered the Saviour of the world; and bedewed with tears of joy and penitence the monument of their redemption.

The next two crusades were basically the same thing over and over again.

However splendid it may seem, a regular story of the crusades would exhibit a perpetual return of the same causes and effects; and the frequent attempts for the defence and recovery of the Holy Land would appear so many faint and unsuccessful copies of the original.

There's a lot of back and forth with Islamic forces, Saladin and all that. If we fast-forward to Barbarossa and the third crusade in 1190, we are met with similar failures:

Forty campaigns in Germany and Italy had taught Barbarossa to command; and his soldiers, even the princes of the empire, were accustomed under his reign to obey. As soon as he lost sight of Philadelphia and Laodicea, the last cities of the Greek frontier, he plunged into the salt and barren desert, a land (says the historian) of horror and tribulation. During twenty days, every step of his fainting and sickly march was besieged by the innumerable hordes of Turkmans, whose numbers and fury seemed after each defeat to multiply and inflame. The emperor continued to struggle and to suffer; and such was the measure of his calamities that, when he reached the gates of Iconium, no more than one thousand knights were able to serve on horseback. By a sudden and resolute assault, he defeated the guards, and stormed the capital, of the sultan, who humbly sued for pardon and peace. The road was now open, and Frederic advanced in a career of triumph, till he was unfortunately drowned in a petty torrent of Cilicia. The remainder of his Germans was consumed by sickness and desertion, and the emperor’s son expired with the greatest part of his Swabian vassals at the siege of Acre. Among the Latin heroes, Godfrey of Bouillon and Frederic Barbarossa alone could achieve the passage of the Lesser Asia; yet even their success was a warning, and in the last and most experienced ages of the crusades every nation preferred the sea to the toils and perils of an inland expedition.

The stories about Richard Cœur de Lion are so unbelievable Gibbon questions whether he is writing history or fiction:

After his return to Acre, on the news that Jaffa was surprised by the sultan, he sailed with some merchant vessels, and leaped foremost on the beach; the castle was relieved by his presence; and sixty thousand Turks and Saracens fled before his arms. The discovery of his weakness provoked them to return in the morning; and they found him carelessly encamped before the gates with only seventeen knights and three hundred archers. Without counting their numbers, he sustained their charge; and we learn from the evidence of his enemies, that the king of England, grasping his lance, rode furiously along their front, from the right to the left wing, without meeting an adversary who dared to encounter his career. Am I writing the history of Orlando or Amadis?

This is how he sums up the whole enterprise:

The enthusiasm of the first crusade is a natural and simple event, while hope was fresh, danger untried, and enterprise congenial to the spirit of the times. But the obstinate perseverance of Europe may indeed excite our pity and admiration; that no instruction should have been drawn from constant and adverse experience; that the same confidence should have repeatedly grown from the same failures; that six succeeding generations should have rushed headlong down the precipice that was open before them; and that men of every condition should have staked their public and private fortunes on the desperate adventure of possessing or recovering a tomb-stone two thousand miles from their country.

And then there's my favorite crusade, the fourth. The crusaders hire the Venetians to take them over in their fleet, but when the time comes they don't have the money they promised to pay. So the blind 95 year old doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, proposes a deal: attack the Zarans (in modern Croatia) for us and pay what you owe from the spoils. There's a whole thing with the Pope, but the crusaders do it anyway. And in this mess, Alexius Angelus arrives and asks for their help to dethrone his uncle, the Byzantine emperor. Of course, they go for it. Thus the Latins end up conquering the remains of the Eastern empire, and Gibbon gives us the implausible image of the blind Dandolo storming the walls.

In the midst of the conflict, the doge, a venerable and conspicuous form, stood aloft, in complete armour, on the prow of his galley. The great standard of St. Mark was displayed before him; his threats, promises, and exhortations urged the diligence of the rowers; his vessel was the first that struck; and Dandolo was the first warrior on the shore. The nations admired the magnanimity of the blind old man, without reflecting that his age and infirmities diminished the price of life and enhanced the value of immortal glory.

The conquest is pretty brutal, the city burns, and then the Latins immediately start fighting between themselves. The Greeks resist, the Bulgarians invade, it's a complete clusterfuck. Ultimately Latin rule only lasts for about 60 years, at which point the Greeks take over again.

After some ages of oblivion, Greece was awakened to new misfortunes by the arms of the Latins. In the two hundred and fifty years between the first and the last conquest of Constantinople, that venerable land was disputed by a multitude of petty tyrants; without the comforts of freedom and genius, her ancient cities were again plunged in foreign and intestine war; and, if servitude be preferable to anarchy, they might repose with joy under the Turkish yoke.

Timur (1336-1405)

In the final couple of volumes, Gibbon ranges far and wide in order to avoid talking about the Byzantines. One of the most interesting subjects is Timur (or Tamerlane), the last great steppe conqueror. He was born in what is today Uzbekistan, into a Turkish/Mongol clan, and entered the raiding life at a very young age. Gibbon gives us what feels like a semi-mythical origin story:

From the twelfth year of his age Timour had entered the field of action; in the twenty-fifth, he stood forth as the deliverer of his country; and the eyes and wishes of the people were turned towards an hero who suffered in their cause. The chiefs of the law and of the army had pledged their salvation to support him with their lives and fortunes; but in the hour of danger they were silent and afraid; and, after waiting seven days on the hills of Samarcand, he retreated to the desert with only sixty horsemen. The fugitives were overtaken by a thousand Getes, whom he repulsed with incredible slaughter, and his enemies were forced to exclaim, “Timour is a wonderful man; fortune and the divine favour are with him.” But in this bloody action his own followers were reduced to ten, a number which was soon diminished by the desertion of three Carizmians. He wandered in the desert with his wife, seven companions, and four horses; and sixty-two days was he plunged in a loathsome dungeon, from whence he escaped by his own courage and the remorse of the oppressor. After swimming the broad and rapid stream of the Jihoon, or Oxus, he led during some months the life of a vagrant and outlaw, on the borders of the adjacent states. But his fame shone brighter in adversity; he learned to distinguish the friends of his person, the associates of his fortune, and to apply the various characters of men for their advantage, and above all for his own.

On his return to his native country, Timour was successively joined by the parties of his confederates, who anxiously sought him in the desert; nor can I refuse to describe, in his pathetic simplicity, one of their fortunate encounters. He presented himself as a guide to three chiefs, who were at the head of seventy horse. “When their eyes fell upon me,” says Timour, “they were overwhelmed with joy; and they alighted from their horses; and they came and kneeled; and they kissed my stirrup. I also came down from my horse, and took each of them in my arms. And I put my turban on the head of the first chief; and my girdle, rich in jewels and wrought with gold, I bound on the loins of the second; and the third I clothed in my own coat. And they wept, and I wept also; and the hour of prayer was arrived, and we prayed. And we mounted our horses and came to my dwelling; and I collected my people and made a feast.” His trusty bands were soon increased by the bravest of the tribes; he led them against a superior foe; and after some vicissitudes of war the Getes were finally driven from the kingdom of Transoxiana. He had done much for his own glory; but much remained to be done, much art to be exerted, and some blood to be spilt, before he could teach his equals to obey him as their master. [...] A fertile kingdom, five hundred miles in length and in breadth, might have satisfied the ambition of a subject; but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world; and before his death the crown of Zagatai was one of the twenty-seven crowns which he had placed on his head.

After gaining control of the Chagatai Khanate, he spends the next several decades campaigning incessantly, constantly expanding his empire. Anyone who tries to oppose him is crushed. One side-effect is to delay the conquest of Constantinople as the Turks are bound up in a war against Timur. His conquest tends to be extraordinarily brutal:

Abandoned by their prince, the inhabitants of Damascus still defended their walls; and Timour consented to raise the siege, if they would adorn his retreat with a gift or ransom; each article of nine pieces. But no sooner had he introduced himself into the city, under colour of a truce, than he perfidiously violated the treaty; imposed a contribution of ten millions of gold; and animated his troops to chastise the posterity of those Syrians who had executed or approved the murder of the grandson of Mahomet. A family which had given honourable burial to the head of Hosein, and a colony of artificers whom he sent to labour at Samarcand, were alone reserved in the general massacre; and, after a period of seven centuries, Damascus was reduced to ashes, because a Tartar was moved by religious zeal to avenge the blood of an Arab. The losses and fatigues of the campaign obliged Timour to renounce the conquest of Palestine and Egypt; but in his return to the Euphrates he delivered Aleppo to the flames; and justified his pious motive by the pardon and reward of two thousand sectaries of Ali, who were desirous to visit the tomb of his son.

I have expatiated on the personal anecdotes which mark the character of the Mogul hero; but I shall briefly mention that he erected on the ruins of Bagdad a pyramid of ninety thousand heads; again visited Georgia; encamped on the banks of Araxes; and proclaimed his resolution of marching against the Ottoman emperor. Conscious of the importance of the war, he collected his forces from every province; eight hundred thousand men were enrolled on his military list;30 but the splendid commands of five and ten thousand horse may be rather expressive of the rank and pension of the chiefs than of the genuine number of effective soldiers.31 In the pillage of Syria, the Moguls had acquired immense riches; but the delivery of their pay and arrears for seven years more firmly attached them to the Imperial standard.

During this diversion of the Mogul arms, Bajazet had two years to collect his forces for a more serious encounter. They consisted of four hundred thousand horse and foot,32 whose merit and fidelity were of an unequal complexion. We may discriminate the Janizaries, who have been gradually raised to an establishment of forty thousand men; a national cavalry, the Spahis of modern times; twenty thousand cuirassiers of Europe, clad in black and impenetrable armour; the troops of Anatolia, whose princes had taken refuge in the camp of Timour, and a colony of Tartars, whom he had driven from Kipzak, and to whom Bajazet had assigned a settlement in the plains of Hadrianople. [...] he returned on the wings of indignation to the relief of Angora; and, as both generals were alike impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timour and the shame of Bajazet.

The territory he eventually comes to control is immense, and for his final campaign he turns his eyes toward China, where the Mongolians had recently been driven out.

From the Irtish and Volga to the Persian Gulf, and from the Ganges to Damascus and the Archipelago, Asia was in the hand of Timour; his armies were invincible, his ambition was boundless, and his zeal might aspire to conquer and convert the Christian kingdoms of the West, which already trembled at his name. He touched the utmost verge of the land; but an insuperable, though narrow sea, rolled between the two continents of Europe and Asia, and the lord of so many tomans, or myriads of horse, was not master of a single galley. The two passages of the Bosphorus and Hellespont, of Constantinople and Gallipoli, were possessed, the one by the Christians, the other by the Turks. On this great occasion, they forgot the difference of religion, to act with union and firmness in the common cause: the double straits were guarded with ships and fortifications, and they separately withheld the transports which Timour demanded of either nation, under the pretence of attacking their enemy.

But the fears and fancy of nations ascribed to the ambitious Tamerlane a new design of vast and romantic compass; a design of subduing Egypt and Africa, marching from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean, entering Europe by the Straits of Gibraltar, and, after imposing his yoke on the kingdoms of Christendom, of returning home by the deserts of Russia and Tartary. This remote, and perhaps imaginary, danger was averted by the submission of the sultan of Egypt; the honours of the prayer and the coin attested at Cairo the supremacy of Timour; and a rare gift of a giraffe, or camelopard, and nine ostriches, represented at Samarcand the tribute of the African world. Our imagination is not less astonished by the portrait of a Mogul, who, in his camp before Smyrna, meditates and almost accomplishes the invasion of the Chinese empire.

Timur is well-prepared, but things don't go very well.

Before he evacuated Anatolia, Timour dispatched beyond the Sihoon a numerous army, or rather colony, of his old and new subjects, to open the road, to subdue the Pagan Calmucks and Mungals, and to found cities and magazines in the desert; and, by the diligence of his lieutenant, he soon received a perfect map and description of the unknown regions from the source of the Irtish to the wall of China. During these preparations the emperor achieved the final conquest of Georgia; passed the winter on the banks of the Araxes, appeased the troubles of Persia, and slowly returned to his capital after a campaign of four years and nine months.

Neither age nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timour; he mounted on horseback, passed the Sihoon on the ice, marched seventy-six parasangs, three hundred miles, from his capital, and pitched his last camp in the neighbourhood of Otrar, where he was expected by the angel of death. Fatigue, and the indiscreet use of iced water, accelerated the progress of his fever; and the conqueror of Asia expired in the seventieth year of his age, thirty-five years after he had ascended the throne of Zagatai. His designs were lost; his armies were disbanded; China was saved; and, fourteen years after his decease, the most powerful of his children sent an embassy of friendship and commerce to the court of Pekin.

Overall, Gibbon's assessment of Timur is negative: the widespread destruction and mass murder cannot be expiated by the positive aspects of his rule.

Timour might boast that, at his accession to the throne, Asia was the prey of anarchy and rapine, whilst under his prosperous monarchy, a child, fearless and unhurt, might carry a purse of gold from the east to the west. Such was his confidence of merit that from this reformation he derived excuse for his victories and a title to universal dominion. [...] If some partial disorders, some local oppressions, were healed by the sword of Timour, the remedy was far more pernicious than the disease. By their rapine, cruelty, and discord, the petty tyrants of Persia might afflict their subjects; but whole nations were crushed under the footsteps of the reformer. The ground which had been occupied by flourishing cities was often marked by his abominable trophies, by columns or pyramids of human heads. Astracan, Carizme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Boursa, Smyrna, and a thousand others, were sacked, or burnt, or utterly destroyed, in his presence, and by his troops; and perhaps his conscience would have been startled if a priest or philosopher had dared to number the millions of victims whom he had sacrificed to the establishment of peace and order.

And once again, the conquests of the Steppe warriors don't last very long:

Whatsoever might be the blessings of his administration, they evaporated with his life. [...] A fragment of the empire was upheld with some glory by Sharokh, his youngest son; but after his decease, the scene was again involved in darkness and blood; and before the end of a century Transoxiana and Persia were trampled by the Uzbeks from the North, and the Turkmans of the black and white sheep. The race of Timour would have been extinct, if an hero, his descendant in the fifth degree, had not fled before the Uzbek arms to the conquest of Hindostan. His successors (the Great Moguls) extended their sway from the mountains of Cashmir to Cape Comorin, and from Candahar to the Gulf of Bengal. Since the reign of Aurungzebe, their empire has been dissolved; their treasures of Delhi have been rifled by a Persian robber; and the riches of their kingdoms is now possessed by a company of Christian merchants, of a remote island in the Northern Ocean.

The Fall

After being gradually worn down, conquered by the Latins, retaken by the Greeks, then threatened by the Ottomans, and saved by the distraction of Timur's invasion, in 1453 the time has finally come. Mehmed II brings out his giant cannon, and the Byzantines struggle to find any men to defend the city.

In her last decay, Constantinople was still peopled with more than an hundred thousand inhabitants; but these numbers are found in the accounts, not of war, but of captivity; and they mostly consisted of mechanics, of priests, of women, and of men devoid of that spirit which even women have sometimes exerted for the common safety. I can suppose, I could almost excuse, the reluctance of subjects to serve on a distant frontier, at the will of a tyrant; but the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature. By the emperor’s command, a particular inquiry had been made through the streets and houses, how many of the citizens, or even of the monks, were able and willing to bear arms for their country. The lists were intrusted to Phranza; and, after a diligent addition, he informed his master, with grief and surprise, that the national defence was reduced to four thousand nine hundred and seventy Romans.

It still takes more than a month.

After a siege of forty days, the fate of Constantinople could no longer be averted. The diminutive garrison was exhausted by a double attack; the fortifications, which had stood for ages against hostile violence, were dismantled on all sides by the Ottoman cannon; many breaches were opened; and near the gate of St. Romanus four towers had been levelled with the ground. For the payment of his feeble and mutinous troops, Constantine was compelled to despoil the churches, with the promise of a fourfold restitution; and his sacrilege offered a new reproach to the enemies of the union. A spirit of discord impaired the remnant of the Christian strength; the Genoese and Venetian auxiliaries asserted the pre-eminence of their respective service; and Justiniani and the Great Duke, whose ambition was not extinguished by the common danger, accused each other of treachery and cowardice.

Finally, on the 29th of May, the Ottomans breach the city.

At daybreak, without the customary signal of the morning-gun, the Turks assaulted the city by sea and land; and the similitude of a twined or twisted thread has been applied to the closeness and continuity of their line of attack.45 The foremost ranks consisted of the refuse of the host, a voluntary crowd, who fought without order or command; of the feebleness of age or childhood, of peasants and vagrants, and of all who had joined the camp in the blind hope of plunder and martyrdom. The common impulse drove them onwards to the wall; the most audacious to climb were instantly precipitated; and not a dart, not a bullet of the Christians was idly wasted on the accumulated throng. But their strength and ammunition were exhausted in this laborious defence; the ditch was filled with the bodies of the slain; they supported the footsteps of their companions; and of this devoted vanguard the death was more serviceable than the life. Under their respective bashaws and sanjaks, the troops of Anatolia and Romania were successively led to the charge: their progress was various and doubtful; but, after a conflict of two hours, the Greeks still maintained and improved their advantage; and the voice of the emperor was heard, encouraging his soldiers to achieve, by a last effort, the deliverance of their country. In that fatal moment, the Janizaries arose, fresh, vigorous, and invincible. The sultan himself on horseback, with an iron mace in his hand, was the spectator and judge of their valour; he was surrounded by ten thousand of his domestic troops, whom he reserved for the decisive occasion; and the tide of battle was directed and impelled by his voice and eye. His numerous ministers of justice were posted behind the line, to urge, to restrain, and to punish; and, if danger was in the front, shame and inevitable death were in the rear of the fugitives. The cries of fear and of pain were drowned in the martial music of drums, trumpets, and attaballs; and experience has proved that the mechanical operation of sounds, by quickening the circulation of the blood and spirits, will act on the human machine more forcibly than the eloquence of reason and honour. From the lines, the galleys, and the bridge, the Ottoman artillery thundered on all sides; and the camp and city, the Greeks and the Turks, were involved in a cloud of smoke, which could only be dispelled by the final deliverance or destruction of the Roman empire. The single combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy and engage our affections: the skilful evolutions of war may inform the mind, and improve a necessary though pernicious science. But, in the uniform and odious pictures of a general assault, all is blood, and horror, and confusion; nor shall I strive, at the distance of three centuries and a thousand miles, to delineate a scene of which there could be no spectators, and of which the actors themselves were incapable of forming any just or adequate idea.

The number of the Ottomans was fifty, perhaps an hundred, times superior to that of the Christians; the double walls were reduced by the cannon to an heap of ruins; in a circuit of several miles, some places must be found more easy of access or more feebly guarded; and, if the besiegers could penetrate in a single point, the whole city was irrecoverably lost. The first who deserved the sultan’s reward was Hassan, the Janizary, of gigantic stature and strength. With his scymetar in one hand and his buckler in the other, he ascended the outward fortification; of the thirty Janizaries, who were emulous of his valour, eighteen perished in the bold adventure. Hassan and his twelve companions had reached the summit: the giant was precipitated from the rampart; he rose on one knee, and was again oppressed by a shower of darts and stones. But his success had proved that the achievement was possible: the walls and towers were instantly covered with a swarm of Turks; and the Greeks, now driven from the vantage-ground, were overwhelmed by increasing multitudes.

Constantine XI goes down fighting.

Amidst these multitudes, the emperor, who accomplished all the duties of a general and a soldier, was long seen, and finally lost. The nobles who fought round his person sustained, till their last breath, the honourable names of Palæologus and Cantacuzene: his mournful exclamation was heard, “Cannot there be found a Christian to cut off my head?” and his last fear was that of falling alive into the hands of the infidels. The prudent despair of Constantine cast away the purple; amidst the tumult, he fell by an unknown hand, and his body was buried under a mountain of the slain. After his death, resistance and order were no more; the Greeks fled towards the city; and many were pressed and stifled in the narrow pass of the gate of St. Romanus. The victorious Turks rushed through the breaches of the inner wall; and, as they advanced into the streets, they were soon joined by their brethren, who had forced the gate Phenar on the side of the harbour. In the first heat of the pursuit, about two thousand Christians were put to the sword; but avarice soon prevailed over cruelty; and the victors acknowledged that they should immediately have given quarter, if the valour of the emperor and his chosen bands had not prepared them for a similar opposition in every part of the capital. It was thus, after a siege of fifty-three days, that Constantinople, which had defied the power of Chosroes, the Chagan, and the caliphs, was irretrievably subdued by the arms of Mahomet the Second. Her empire only had been subverted by the Latins; her religion was trampled in the dust by the Moslem conquerors.

The city is plundered, and Gibbon has his eye on the lost manuscripts and their preservation for the future.

Perhaps, instead of joining the public clamour, a philosopher will observe that in the decline of the arts the workmanship could not be more valuable than the work, and that a fresh supply of visions and miracles would speedily be renewed by the craft of the priest and the credulity of the people. He will more seriously deplore the loss of the Byzantine libraries, which were destroyed or scattered in the general confusion: one hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have disappeared; ten volumes might be purchased for a single ducat; and the same ignominious price, too high perhaps for a shelf of theology, included the whole works of Aristotle and Homer, the noblest productions of the science and literature of ancient Greece. We may reflect with pleasure that an inestimable portion of our classic treasures was safely deposited in Italy; and that the mechanics of a German town had invented an art which derides the havoc of time and barbarism.