MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING DURING THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE:

The conventional explanation for Rome’s demographic collapse is wealth. People got comfortable. They stopped having children. It happens to every prosperous civilization. Nothing to be done.

This is wrong. Or rather, it is incomplete in the way that matters most.

Rome didn’t… https://t.co/i77beu6Czm pic.twitter.com/yEG9KNaD5s

— Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 (@Kristof_Poland) August 23, 2026

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Reader John Steakley writes:

Whether it was Rome in 46 B.C. or the USSR two millennia later, the test of a society all comes back to . . . bread.

I propose the socioeconomic metric “Law of Bread:”

“Bread waits for winners, and losers wait for bread.”