Kim Bowes: prediction

Transcript context

…They’re sending in tribute, right? Someone is paying attention. They are paying taxes. Taxation is one of the things that holds the whole thing together, if only as the stick and not the carrot. I think the carrot that holds it all together, strangely, is consumption, that it’s a consumer economy. There’s massive amounts of consumption. On the one hand, that binds people together because people are participating in a shared consumer universe. Economically, it produces a whole set of knock-on effects that begin locally and expand out to a much broader extent, that raise consumption levels really high, which allows this tax apparatus to keep chugging along, and when they both collapse, they collapse together. In other words, when we can’t see people consuming anymore, we suspect they’re no longer paying their taxes. It’s an interesting world from that perspective. The state and its ability to collect taxes also relies, going back to a previous question you asked me, on these nonstate networks of friends, of family, of business networks. The Roman state is largely a privatized affair. It depends on the web of commerce that is happening more generally rather than the other way around, although there’s a reciprocity of, if you like, private commerce and state commerce. Insofar as the Roman state really needs people to be exchanging goods in order for it to do the work of collecting its taxes, this consuming world actually helps float the whole boat up. That’s one of the things that I think held it together. People did it for the clothing?…

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