WI Smarter Roman Economic Policy

Those are some good sources (though I'd take a number of them with a fair amount of salt); at the very least, it does appear there is a scholarly consensus that the Roman Empire had plenty of other options for financially maintaining their empire (even if economic history scholars would disagree on the particulars, as they are want to do).

I'm not trying to be a dick here, although I suspect I'm coming off as one. But I think there's a lot of misconceptions about the Roman state, i.e., its hostility to trade.
 
Having read a number of articles linked by @Analytical Engine, I can offer some more thoughts: If Walter Schneidel is to be believed, then high spending on the army seriously curbed Rome's ability to develop its state bureaucracy, in comparison to Han China; if true, this likely contributed to the rise of feudalism in later centuries and hampered the emergence of what we would consider functional states to replace the Roman Empire. And if Bruce Bartlett is to be believed,* poor fiscal policies in the latter first and second century not only laid the groundwork for a monetary collapse in the Third Century Crisis, but in doing so essentially set the empire on the course to serfdom and the manorial economics that defined much of Medieval Europe.

So in short, it's conceivable that smarter economic policies by the successors to Tiberius could alter the political and social face of the western world for millenia! What do you guys think?

*personally, I would take everything he says with a good heaping of salt
 
The problem is the Romans were never really innovative in anything except in the military department. They were at their best when they were adopting innovations from others, from which they could perfect them. So the solution really is to have this idea emerge sometime before the Roman empire is established.

I'm glad to see that the indoctrination worked with you.

Seriously the Romans were as innovative as any other culture in the same time and situation. Rome wasn't innovative in some periods, for example the Republic didn't adopt the necessary reforms fast enough. But it could change, just look at Diocletian's reshaping of the administration.
 
Developing this idea a little more -- supposing the political and economic collapse of the Crisis of the Third Century was delayed 75 years or so? So instead of 235 to 284, it starts in 310 or so?

This would mean that by the time the empire is ready to put itself back together, you've got a globally cooling climate and mass migrations of goths and whatnot ready to flood into the empire; but instead of coming to a Rome that had been governed by the Dominate for nearly a century, they find an empire tired from civil war with people alive who still remember the days of the Principate, when money still meant something and a (non-slave) man could go and live where he pleased. And now you've got hordes of Germans coming in looking to get settled, and finding common Roman folk willing to listen to an outsider who promises to return them to the glory days these old timers talk about...
 
I don't see how the Romans can avoid debasing their currency over the course of successive rulers. As I understand it, the Romans didn't grasp the inflation caused by over-minting and would only have seen the seigniorage and physical growth in the number of coins. Without the state understanding why debasing the coin is damaging to the whole economy rather than just to the prestige of the government then the temptation to debase rather than reform the revenue system would be too high, especially to pay the army. Two ways to try to avoid debasement would be:

First you could hand-wave in a theory of inflation independently arrived at by some Roman or another and have this theory understood by the government - this is a little far-fetched given that OTL inflation was barely understood 1500 years later but it's a possibility.

The Second option would be to create a situation where the strength of the currency was important as a conveyance of foreign trade. This is how Canute's England avoided debasement, by making the English Coin the most trusted in Northern Europe and thus favoured for transactions between foreigners. One way Rome might achieve this is by dramatically increasing its trade interests in the East without actually incorporating the East. That is create the situation where Roman coins are widespread in Asia and that Indian and Persianate merchants prefer to trade in Roman coin even between each other because of it's inherent trustworthiness. You'd need to break the majority hold Persia had on Rome-to-Asia trade but it's another option. This is probably not achievable either because of the minority foreign trade made up of all Roman trade. I doubt if the government in Rome would consider the surety of its coins in Eastern trade as anything which needed to be protected.
 
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