![]() ![]() ![]() Increasingly the middle class shrinks as social unrest and bigotry grows. Worsening matters is the evidence of extreme racism towards migrant workers who like slaves in Rome “take the labor from the hardworking middle class”. The effects are perfectly evident as well as there is increasing inclination from the rich to build fallout bunkers and withdraw from civilization and politics just as the roman elites did centuries before. By every metric, the United States is even more divided and unfair than Rome before its fall. 45, and 40% of the wealth is controlled by the top 1% of the population. The Unites States of America has a Gini coefficient of. These are just a couple reasons for the fall of Rome, but what is perhaps most terrifying about the fall are the corollaries to today. Rendition of daily life in Pompeii showing interaction between upper and lower class peoples. All that was left for citizens and soldiers was economic squalor as wealth continued to be inherited by the rich, and labor was taken by the slaves of war. “Being Roman eventually meant being whatever wealth said it was, and shorn of the old ties that kept the rich and poor together out of a mutual sense of common destiny, they soon turned on one another.” Soldiers and common citizens could no longer trust that they would get what was “theirs” as the ruling upper-class tended to keep all of their wealth to themselves while maintaining slaves who did all of the work of the typical middle working class. Worsening matters was the fact that Rome had been built on expansion, militarism, and the spoils of war. “Their disinclination to lead may have been caused by forced exactions, confiscations, business concerns, tax pressured, or general economic fears, which made protecting one’s own interests seem more prudent than looking out for the interests of others.” In their selfishness the upper class romans abandoned their people when they needed them most, only further destabilizing Rome. This is made very clear in the archaeological record where before the end of the Roman Empire there was a large spike in fortified villas far from cities and people. Built at the turn of the 4th century for Roman emperor Diocletian.įurther compounding the issue was that wealthy Romans increasingly removed themselves from cities and positions of power as they saw the first signs of collapse from the edges of the empire.
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