An old graph of moist vs arid climate

Click to enlarge image.

Links:

The 1915 Book (PDF, 358 pages):  Civilization and Climate

The 1917 Essay (JSTOR): Climatic Change and Agricultural Exhaustion as Elements in the Fall of Rome

We move the goalposts

I've been working on a PDF about Simkhovitch's essay on exhaustion-of-the-soil as cause of the decline of Rome, and Ellsworth Huntington's response on climate change as cause of the decline of Rome. Huntington mentions Liebig -- for the opportunity to shit on Simkhovitch by saying it was all Liebig's idea and Simkhovitch just "restated" it. So I looked up Liebig. 19th century chemist. Wow! He should be on a list with James Watt and Thomas Edison as the three who created the modern world and made GDP go up faster in the 18th and 19th centuries.

To see why I'm so impressed with the guy, you can check out the first paragraph of the Justus von Liebig article at Wikipedia.

Below find some notes I made this morning, while re-reading Huntington. Here edited to be more presentable.

PS: I LOVE JSTOR OPEN ACCESS!

 
I looked up drought, for the spelling. Found Understand Drought and Know How to Respond. They say: "What Is Drought? Drought is a deficiency in precipitation over an extended period." Yeh. Then they add: "It is a part of normal climate variability in many climate zones."

Drought is "normal" now? 

That's like figuring debt is only high when it is above its trend level, or in other words, a trend of increasing debt is by definition not a problem. I object to that kind of thinking.

Normal used to be not-drought, but now drought is normal. We move the goalposts. We move the goalposts because we long for things to return to "normal". Ten years ago it was the economy we wanted back to normal. Now it is life despite covid that we want back to normal.

The economy, of course, is still not back to normal and was not, even before covid. To me our passionate desire for normalcy despite covid is a sickness as bad as covid, maybe worse.

Easy for me to say. I have zero social skills.

Under any circumstances

Ellsworth Huntington, Climatic Change and Agricultural Exhaustion as Elements in the Fall of Rome, February 1917. JSTOR Open Access. From page 27 of 37.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1883908?seq=1

Under such circumstances the poverty and discouragement of the many almost inevitably favor the concentration of power in the hands of a few.

- Ellsworth Huntington

Ancient Rome today (revised)

Simkhovitch, V. (1916): “Rome's Fall Reconsidered”. Political Science Quarterly Vol. 31, No. 2. Open Access at JSTOR:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2141560?seq=1

 

When wealth grows faster than it concentrates, wealth spreads. You get the upswing of an economic cycle. When wealth concentrates faster than it grows, you get the downswing.

 - Arthurian

I'm going to quote Simkhovitch again. I'll pick up where I left off on the 18th, this time the first few sentences of the paragraph. And I will interrupt to talk about the ideas. Page 217:

The entire history of Rome is but a series of illustrations of this story. Steady is the legislation against interest and drastic are the measures against the money lenders, but unchecked is the concentration of landed property even in spite of social resolutions and social wars.

"Steady is the legislation against interest and drastic are the measures against the money lenders," Simkhovitch says, "but unchecked is the concentration of landed property..."  

I don't see that "the concentration of landed property" has much to do with the lending of money. The people who owned the massive properties of ancient Rome probably didn't need to borrow to buy more. Adding to their property was a form of saving. The buyers had the money they needed.

The people who had to sell their properties to the massive landowner, I figure those people had been doing some borrowing. But they wouldn't have needed to borrow more just to sell their few acres of land. 

 

I believe policy should be changed to reduce our reliance on credit today, by reducing the incentives that encourage the provision and use of credit. I believe money (money that requires neither interest payment nor repayment of principal) should be increased at the same time, to sustain spending levels.

But I also believe that policy must be changed to encourage accelerated repayment of debt, to counterbalance the encouraged borrowing. (And to fight inflation. But we already have policy to fight inflation. What we lack is policy to offset the unnaturally rapid growth of debt that is caused by policy which encourages borrowing.)

Because I know policy can be highly effective, I figure that these changes will reduce the cost of using money and will therefore boost the nonfinancial economy. I believe economic policy can be highly effective. But the Simkhovitch quote suggests that he would not agree. The "steady" legislation against interest and the "drastic" measures against lenders in ancient Rome must be considered strong policy. Simkhovitch says it was not effective.

I think the Roman response was incorrectly targeted. It did not stop the concentration of wealth in ancient Rome because punishing lenders is not the way to limit the concentration of wealth.

 

To reduce and reverse the concentration of wealth in our time, I believe the business income tax must be changed. 

In our economy, a business spends its capital to create output, then sells the output to recover its capital plus a profit. But under our existing tax code, only the profit is subject to income tax. Recovered capital is not taxed, because property is held to be sacred. (This is not tax advice. It is a general overview. Do not try to do your taxes based on what I'm saying.) Recovered capital is not taxed, because property is held to be sacred.

The failure to tax capital (the failure, that is, to tax gross business receipts) creates a tax advantage for business that is not available to consumers. This tax advantage shifts income and wealth from consumers to businesses. Among businesses, the greatest tax advantage goes to the business with the most capital to spend. The least advantage goes to the business with the least capital to spend. Property-is-sacred policy, therefore, if allowed to continue, will lead to ever-more-extreme concentration of wealth. More extreme, even, than what we have at present. 

The property-is-sacred principle is embedded in our tax code. Our tax code is creating the extreme concentration of wealth. And the concentration of wealth is leading us, as it led Rome, to the fall of civilization. Our tax code must change.

The property-is-sacred principle is embedded in our thinking. Therefore it appears in the tax code, in our encouragement of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and everywhere economic policy reaches. This, more than anything, is what must change. Our thinking must change. 

It is not property, but civilization that is sacred.

The principle of parallel evolution supports the view that ancient Rome would have had property-is-sacred policy similar to our own.

Based on what Simkhovitch says, the property-is-sacred principle was not constrained in ancient Rome. Nor was it constrained if we judge by the size of latifundia -- they became "as large as provinces" Simkhovitch says on page 222, in the Rome's Fall Reconsidered essay linked above.

The latifundia are evidence that Rome had property-is-sacred policy. The rise of such massive concentrations of "landed property" is evidence of it.

The latifundia are evidence also that Rome created no policy that effectively undermined the property-is-sacred principle and the resulting concentration of wealth.

Given the reverence people have for the property-is-sacred principle, that principle continues to operate until the government no longer exists, the government that wrote it into the tax code. When that government falls, the latifundia become the new centers of government -- subject, of course, to things being worked out hands-on during the darkest, most militaristic free-for-all centuries of the dark age. 

Long after the dark age, the ultimate form of property-is-sacred emerges: divine right of kings.

I want to put a stop to the concentration of wealth by eliminating property-is-sacred from our tax code.

Exhaustion of the soil led to a general decline of income because most of the people in ancient Rome were farmers. Simkhovitch says exhaustion of the soil made farming unproductive, leaving income unable to meet "ordinary expenses". We can see this as a chain of causality:

Exhaustion of the soil => decreasing productivity => declining income

"The progressive exhaustion of the soil", Simkhovitch writes, "was quite sufficient to doom Rome".

His most significant expression of the forces at work appears on page 217: "The increasing weight of accumulated interest on the loan and the decreasing productivity of the land seal the fate of the landowner." This combination of forces is nearly identical to that described by J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev in Fisher Dynamics in Household Debt: The Case of the United States, 1929-2011:

In particular, the 1980s can be understood as a slow-motion debt deflation (or debt-disinflation), with the combination of slower nominal income growth and higher interest rates producing rising debt-income ratios despite a substantial fall in household spending relative to income.

The fall of Rome was caused by declining income, the growth of debt, and the inability or refusal to resolve these problems. We face exactly the same problems and we, too, are unwilling or unable to resolve them. 

In our case, though, the problems do not arise from exhaustion of the soil. The primary source in our case is bad economic policy.

In our time, exhaustion of the soil is not responsible for the decline of income. Rather, policymakers believe that inflation results primarily from excessive wage increases. The relative decline of income is largely a result of anti-inflation policy. At EconomicsHelp we read:

Rising wages are a key cause of cost-push inflation because wages are the most significant cost for many firms.

If this is both true and relevant, or even if it is only what people believe, it is enough to make wage restraint perhaps our most effective and certainly our most used approach to controlling inflation.

In our time, the relative decline of income is not responsible for our growing debt. Rather, policymakers believe that using credit is good for growth. The inexplicably massive debt of our time is largely a result of policies built on the notion that the use of credit is always good for economic growth. Two quotes I presented a few years back:

• Steve Waldman: "I am not a fan of the Great Moderation. Central bankers and economists found it pleasant at the time, but sustaining that comfort required that cash wage growth be suppressed [and] that credit be expanded..."
• Edward Harrison: "Also, regarding economic policy in the United States, policy makers aren’t gathering around a table and asking “how can we drive down wages and goose consumption at the same time?” Rather, this is the de facto policy which is inherent in monetary and industrial policy."

The growth of debt results primarily from our policies because policymakers spent decades creating policy based on the idea that using more credit is always good for growth; and because we have no policies designed to accelerate the repayment of debt and thus no way to offset the unnatural increase in debt resulting from the policies that encourage credit use.

Simkhovitch makes a convincing argument that in ancient times, exhaustion of the soil was responsible for the fall of Rome. In our time it should be obvious that bad economic policy is the source of our troubles. First on the list, in chronological order, are policies based on the idea that using credit is always good for growth.

Certainly, when we have too little debt, using more credit helps to improve the economy. But when we have too much debt, using less credit helps to improve the economy. There is a happy medium that has been overlooked: There is an optimum level for debt, a narrow range that best promotes economic growth and employment, and minimizes inflation.

How much debt is best? I can't calculate the number. But my limited abilities are not the problem. The problem is that few economists are looking for the optimum level, and none of them think in terms of an optimum level of debt. Many of them still think using more credit is always good.

The parroting of old, overused ideas cannot solve the problem. Civilization, it has been said, demands an artist.

I have suggested as a way to reduce the growth of debt, that we need credit to grow more slowly than money. This could be achieved, perhaps, by means of permanently high interest rates. But permanently high interest rates are a property of the dark age, so this solution seems inappropriate. High rates, in addition, are not conducive to economic growth. (Existing policy uses high rates to slow economic growth when fighting inflation.) And high rates increase financial cost. Permanently high rates are not a good solution.

Consider this alternative: We should have tax credits that encourage debtors to make extra payments on their debt; the encouragement is that the tax bill is reduced commensurately.

Economic policy encourages borrowing. Our policy causes unnaturally rapid growth of debt. This is how we came to have so much debt in our economy. It is why our debt continues to grow, even now.

If we insist on having policy encourage the use of credit, then we must also have policy that accelerates repayment of debt. By this method we can reduce the growth of debt to a more natural level. 

We should aim to reduce debt to the level that best promotes economic growth.

 

I propose using fiscal policy to accelerate the repayment of debt. Fiscal policy is tax policy. But let me say clearly that I am talking about new incentives and disincentives that induce us to make extra payments on our debt, by reducing our taxes when we do so. I am not talking about changing the level of government revenue. I do not take a position on changing the level of government revenue. I do not take a position on it because the root of the problem lies elsewhere. It lies in the mix of cash and credit that we use for money. The more credit there is in the mix, the more costly it is to use money. The less credit there is in the mix, the less costly it is to use money.

There was ten times more credit in use (per dollar of money) in 2007 than there was in 1947:

Figure 1: Dollars of Credit-in-use per Dollar of M1 Money

The graph shows almost continuous increase in the cost of using money. If interest rates never changed, interest cost per dollar in 2007 would have been 10 times what it was in 1947.

Maybe that's good for bankers and creditors. It is not good for most people today, just as it was not good for most people in ancient Rome.

The 1947-2007 increase is due almost entirely to bad policy and to the wrong-headed thinking that says increasing our use of credit is always good for the economy. We did not recognize the error in this thinking in the 15 years before 1947. And we have not recognized it in the 15 years since 2007. But it is not yet too late to learn from our mistakes.

The recommended objectives of the policy I propose are these:

• The volume of credit-in-use (or "debt") should grow more slowly than the quantity of money.
  
• Repayment of debt should be accelerated by policy, to counteract the rapid growth of debt which results from policy that encourages the use and provision of credit.
  
• To eliminate the factor most responsible for the concentration of wealth, the business income tax must tax gross receipts rather than net income. Tax rates should be adjusted down so that government revenue is not increased by the change in taxable income.
  

To preserve civilization, it is not the solution simply to have Elon Musk buy Twitter.

Ancient Rome today

Simkhovitch, V. (1916): “Rome's Fall Reconsidered”. Political Science Quarterly Vol. 31, No. 2. Open Access at JSTOR:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2141560?seq=1

PLEASE REFER TO THE REVISED VERSION OF THIS POST

 

When wealth grows faster than it concentrates, wealth spreads. You get the upswing of an economic cycle. When wealth concentrates faster than it grows, you get the downswing.

 - Arthurian

Long-term slowing of economic growth is indistinguishable from the decline of civilization.

 - Arthurian

I'm going to quote Simkhovitch again. I'll pick up where I left off on the 18th, this time the first seven sentences from the paragraph. And I will interrupt to talk about the ideas. From pages 217-218:

The entire history of Rome is but a series of illustrations of this story. Steady is the legislation against interest and drastic are the measures against the money lenders, but unchecked is the concentration of landed property even in spite of social resolutions and social wars.

"Steady is the legislation against interest and drastic are the measures against the money lenders," Simkhovitch says, "but unchecked is the concentration of landed property..."  

I don't see that "the concentration of landed property" has much to do with the lending of money. The people who owned the massive properties of ancient Rome probably didn't need to borrow to buy them. The buyers had the money they needed.

The people who had to sell their properties to the massive landowner, I figure those people had been doing some borrowing. But they wouldn't have needed to borrow more just to sell their few acres of land. 

 

I believe policy today should be changed to reduce the incentives that encourage the provision and use of credit, in order to reduce our use of credit. I believe money (money that requires neither interest payment nor repayment of principal) should be increased at the same time, to sustain spending levels.

But I also believe that policy must be changed to encourage the accelerated repayment of debt, to counteract the encouraged borrowing. (And to fight inflation. But we already have policy to fight inflation. What we lack is policy that offsets the unnaturally rapid growth of debt caused by policy.)

Because I know policy can be highly effective, I figure that these changes will reduce the cost of using money and therefore boost the nonfinancial economy. I believe economic policy can be highly effective. But the quote suggests that Simkhovitch would not agree.

The "steady" legislation against interest and the "drastic" measures against lenders in ancient Rome must be considered strong policy. Simkhovitch says it was not effective.

I think the Roman response was incorrectly targeted. It did not stop the concentration of wealth in ancient Rome because punishing lenders is not the way to limit the concentration of wealth.

 

To reduce and reverse the concentration of wealth in our time, I believe the business income tax must be changed. 

In our economy, a business spends its capital to create output, then sells the output to recover its capital plus a profit. But under our existing tax code, only the profit is subject to income tax. Recovered capital is not taxed, because property is held to be sacred. (This is not tax advice. It is a general overview. Do not try to do your taxes based on what I'm saying.) Recovered capital is not taxed, because property is held to be sacred.

The failure to tax capital (the failure, that is, to tax gross business income) creates a tax advantage for business that is not available to consumers. This tax advantage shifts income and wealth from consumers to businesses. Among businesses, the greatest tax advantage goes to the business with the most capital to spend, and the least advantage goes to the business with the least capital to spend. Property-is-sacred policy, therefore, if allowed to continue, will lead to ever-more-extreme concentration of wealth. More extreme, even, than what we have at present. 

The property-is-sacred principle is embedded in our tax code. Our tax code is creating the extreme concentration of wealth. And the concentration of wealth is leading us, as it led Rome, to the fall of civilization.

The property-is-sacred principle is embedded in our thinking. Therefore it appears in the tax code, in our encouragement of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and everywhere economic policy reaches. This, more than anything, is what must change. Our thinking must change. 

It is not property but civilization that is sacred.

Based on what Simkhovitch says, the property-is-sacred principle was not addressed in ancient Rome. Nor was it addressed if we judge by the size of latifundia -- they became "as large as provinces" it says on page 222 in the Rome's Fall Reconsidered essay linked above.

The latifundia are evidence that Rome had a property-is-sacred policy. The rise of such massive concentrations of "landed property" is evidence of it.

The latifundia are evidence also that Rome created no policy that effectively undermined the property-is-sacred principle and the resulting concentration of wealth.

The principle of parallel evolution supports the view that ancient Rome would have had a property-is-sacred policy similar to our own. In our case today, we already have banks that are said to be "too big to fail".

 

Given the reverence people have for the property-is-sacred principle, that principle continues to operate until the government no longer exists, the government that wrote it into the tax code. When that government falls, the latifundia become the new centers of government -- subject, of course, to things being worked out hands-on during the darkest, most militaristic free-for-all phase of the dark age. 

Long after the dark age, the ultimate form of property-is-sacred emerges: the divine right of kings.

I want to put a stop to the concentration of wealth by eliminating property-is-sacred from our tax code.

 

The seven-sentence Simkhovitch quote continues:

... social wars. Because of this peculiar character of credit in certain historical periods ...

Note: "certain historical periods" should be interpreted to mean "in certain stages of the cycle of civilization": Because of this peculiar character of credit in certain stages of the cycle...  Again:

Because of this peculiar character of credit in certain historical periods, money lending was not a savory occupation. The gentleman, therefore, who in our industrial and mercantile life is a pillar of society and a respectable financier, is known by a different name under agricultural conditions. His name is Usurer.

Simkhovitch's words here seem quite strongly to refer to stages in the cycle of civilization. There are stages when money lending is "savory" and stages when it is not. Specifically, he says money lending is not savory in the "agricultural" stage, an early part of the cycle.^[1] But with the rise of "mercantile life" and then an industrial age, money-lending and borrowing at interest are more widely accepted, at least among people who hope to make money by those activities.

... Usurer. Not that his profits from money-lending are any larger, but that he is lending money for purposes of consumption to a man as a rule already economically doomed, while the "banker" is lending money for productive purposes and as a rule to the advantage of the borrower. Hence the different attitude towards the "financier" now and in ages past.

Simkhovitch focuses on two different categories for the use of borrowed money: "productive purposes" and "purposes of consumption". He is hinting at the obvious here: productive purposes increase output. Purposes of consumption do not. Productive purposes, by increasing output, increase the producer's income. This increased income can be used to pay down the debt without leaving other things unpaid.

Purposes of consumption do not increase output. They increase spending without increasing the borrowers' income. Repayment of debt can come only by delaying some other payment. Simkhovitch says exhaustion of the soil made farming unproductive and income stagnant.

It is interesting to see how Simkhovitch determines the purpose of the debt in ancient Rome. On page 220 he writes:

By improving land we add to our capital, while by robbing land we add immediately to our income; in doing so, however, we diminish out of all proportion our capital...

By definition, for Simkhovitch, growing indebtedness is evidence that the debtor is borrowing for purposes of consumption. Because if you were borrowing for productive purposes, with the extra income you'd have paid off that debt. Simkhovitch (page 217) concludes:

The wholesale indebtedness of the Roman farmer class obviously suggests indebtedness for purposes of consumption.

It is easier to distinguish the two types of debt in our day: Borrowing by businesses is for productive purposes. Borrowing by consumers is not. Easier to distinguish, but I don't know if the logic is any better.

But the most significant expression of the forces at work comes shortly after the page 217 quote above: "The increasing weight of accumulated interest on the loan and the decreasing productivity of the land seal the fate of the landowner." 

In other words, the fall of Rome was caused by exhaustion of the soil, growth of debt, and the inability or refusal to resolve these problems. Exhaustion of the soil caused a general decline of income, because most of the people were farmers. The rising cost of accumulating debt made the decline of income worse. No happy ending was possible.

In our time, exhaustion of the soil is not responsible for the decline of income. Rather, policymakers believe that inflation results primarily from excessive wage increases. The relative decline of income is largely a result of anti-inflation policy.

In our time, the relative decline of income is not responsible for our growing debt. Rather, policymakers believe that using credit is good for growth. The growth of debt results primarily from policies that promote the use of credit and, jointly, from the absence of policies designed to offset our increased use of credit by accelerating the repayment of debt.

Simkhovitch makes a convincing argument that in ancient times, exhaustion of the soil was responsible for the fall of Rome. In our time it should be obvious that bad economic policy is the source of the problem. First on the list, chronologically, are policies based on the idea that using credit is always good for growth.

When we have too little debt, using more credit helps to improve the economy. When we have too much debt, using less credit helps to improve the economy. There is a happy medium. There is an optimum level for debt, a narrow range that best promotes economic growth and employment and minimizes inflation.

How much debt is best? I cannot calculate that for you. But my limited abilities are not the problem. The problem is that few economists are looking for the optimum level, and none think in terms of an optimum level. Many of them still think using more credit is always good.

That's just not good enough.

I have suggested as a way to reduce the growth of debt, that we need credit to grow more slowly than money. This could be achieved, perhaps, by means of permanently high interest rates. But permanently high interest rates are a property of the dark age; this solution seems inappropriate. High rates, in addition, are not conducive to economic growth. (Existing policy uses high rates to slow economic growth when fighting inflation.) And high rates increase financial cost. Permanently high rates are not a good solution.

Consider this alternative: We should have tax credits that encourage debtors to make extra payments on their debt; the encouragement being that the tax bill is reduced commensurately.

We use economic policy to encourage borrowing. Our policy causes unnaturally rapid growth of debt. This is how we came to have so much debt in our economy. It is why our debt continues to grow even now.

If we insist on having policy encourage the use of credit, then we must also have policy that accelerates repayment of debt. By this method we can reduce the growth of debt to a more natural level. 

Preferably, we can reduce debt to the level that best promotes economic growth.

 

I propose using fiscal policy to accelerate the repayment of debt. Fiscal policy is tax policy. But let me say clearly that I am talking about new incentives and disincentives that induce us to make extra payments on our debt, by reducing our taxes when we do. I am not talking about changing the level of government revenue. I do not take a position on changing the level of government revenue. I do not take a position on it because the root of the problem lies elsewhere. It lies in the mix of cash and credit that we use for money. The more credit there is in the mix, the more costly it is to use money. The less credit there is in the mix, the less costly it is to use money.

There was ten times more credit in use (per dollar of money) in 2007 than there was in 1947:

Figure 1: Dollars of Credit-in-use per Dollar of M1 Money

The graph shows almost continuous increase in the cost of using money. If interest rates never changed, interest cost per dollar in 2007 would have been 10 times what it was in 1947.

That's great for bankers and creditors. It is not good for most people today, just as it was not good for most people in ancient Rome.

The recommended objectives of policy I propose are these:

• The volume of credit-in-use (or "debt") should grow more slowly than the quantity of money.
  
  
• Repayment of debt should be accelerated by policy, to counteract the rapid growth of debt resulting from policy that encourages the use and provision of credit.
  
  
• To eliminate the factor most responsible for the concentration of wealth, the business income tax must tax gross income rather than net income. Tax rates should be adjusted down so that government revenue is not increased by the change in taxable income.
  

To preserve civilization, it is not enough just to have Elon Musk buy Twitter.

"The entire history of Rome"

Vladimir Simkhovitch writes:

If the farmer is borrowing to meet the exigencies of a so-called bad year, his distress is temporary, and he is likely to square himself during the next good year; but if his distress is due to the progressive deterioration of his farm, he will be unable to extricate himself. Such indebtedness is hopeless. The increasing weight of accumulated interest on the loan and the decreasing productivity of the land seal the fate of the landowner. He certainly is not in an economic position to increase his land-holdings to a point where the larger product might supply his wants. Because he does not have enough land, what little he has will be taken from him and be given to him that has both land and economic capacity. In this way a farmer will be driven off the land and the holdings of some one else increased. That is the process of concentration of landed property. If this process should appear as a general phenomenon, as it did in Rome as well as in Greece, it is a factor of momentous social significance.

The entire history of Rome is but a series of illustrations of this story.

 

From page 217, or 18 of 44, in Rome's Fall Reconsidered
Read or Download from JSTOR at
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2141560?seq=1

 

I was illustrating that story the other day in The Angst of Rome.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.

Google Translate: Happy is he who was able to ascertain the causes of things.

The effects one can always see; of the effects one constantly hears: but the cause one must find.

- Vladimir Simkhovitch

From page 208, page 9 of 44 in Rome's Fall Reconsidered
Read or Download from JSTOR at
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2141560?seq=1

 

 

Simkhovitch comes back to this topic on page 224:

But we are told that Italy's depopulation was due to the civil strife and wars, to the ever-increasing marsh areas, and growing unhealthiness, and to a thousand and one other cherished explanations-all of them to a large extent based on contemporary documents and to a greater or lesser extent true, but all of them, at best, important symptoms or minor effects rather than fundamental causes.