"The richest 1 percent of the Romans during the early Republic was only 10 to 20 times
as wealthy as an average Roman citizen."
Following in Rome's Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Inequality
Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word.
There are many reasons why Imperial Rome declined, but two primary causes
that get relatively little attention are moral decay and soaring wealth inequality.
The two are of course intimately connected: once the morals of the ruling Elites
degrade, what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, too.
I've previously covered two other key characteristics of an empire in terminal decline: complacency
and intellectual sclerosis, what I have termed a failure of imagination.
Michael Grant described these causes of decline in his excellent account
The Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been recommending
since 2009:
There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which
had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo)
attitude is
a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.
LEARN MORE
THE FALL OF ROME
