In discussing the plausibility of the Roman Empire having an Industrial Revolution, one of the most notable hurdles (to my mind) was their infamous fiscal policy -- inflationary currency (which had issues even before the Third Century Crisis), expensive wars (on top of a large standing army), and high spending on urban areas (bread and circuses, etc). Now even this aside, there's plenty of discussion to be had on whether a proto-industrial economy was within the medium term, and there's already a good
ongoing thread for that... but to my mind, this still leaves open the also very intriguing question of just how much better the economy of Rome could have been, had it been better managed (or managed with different priorities, however you want to put it).
So that brings me to my question -- supposing that, starting with the successors to Tiberius (so
this PoD, basically), the Principate spends the next century and a half or so avoiding the pitfalls discussed, and generally being better for commercial interests and consumer demand within the empire? We're talking devaluation of currency is avoided, spending is more focused on projects that can create a *return on investment* (ports, draining swamps for farmland, etc), and military conquests of drains on the treasury (eg Britain) are avoided; plus other smarter economic policies I may not have mentioned, providing their (more or less) plausible.