
Big data and the Roman census approach (2014) - breck
https://tdan.com/big-data-and-the-roman-census-approach/17244
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acqq
> two people – Mary and Joseph – who had to travel to a small city – Bethlehem
> – for the taking of a Roman census.

And today it is known that the story about anybody having to travel somewhere
else to be counted for census was constructed to “explain” how somebody called
“from Nazareth” could “fulfil the prophecy” that expected of the “messiah” to
be born in Bethlehem. Even in these times it had no sense: people were counted
there where they lived (i.e. “contributed to the economy”).

~~~
thaumasiotes
If you're proposing "hey, I think this would be a good idea", it doesn't
really matter if the example you use is fictional.

Weirdly, the reference to the story of the birth of Jesus undermines the
article's point. It's an example of the people going to the census taker to be
counted, when the entire idea of the rest of the piece is that the census
taker goes to the people instead.

~~~
solidsnack9000
The census taker got closer than Rome, but the method of census taking was
still people walking through a gate to be counted.

~~~
solidsnack9000
That is not correct, it turns out:
[https://history.stackexchange.com/a/23980](https://history.stackexchange.com/a/23980)

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solidsnack9000
Love the historical tie-in. So many people are familiar with this story and I
know that I will never forget about this after realising that I am "very
familiar with the Roman census method and don’t know it":

 _You see there once was a story about two people – Mary and Joseph – who had
to travel to a small city – Bethlehem – for the taking of a Roman census. On
the way there Mary had a little baby boy – named Jesus – in a manger. And the
shepherds flocked to see this baby boy. And Magi came and delivered gifts.
Thus born was the religion many people are familiar with – Christianity. The
Roman census approach is intimately entwined with the birth of Christianity._

~~~
dralley
The Roman Census never required people to travel to their homeland. That would
be quite counterproductive as the practical purpose of census-taking was the
calculation of taxes, which requires an enumeration of property.

The bible's account of Roman census' is seemingly not accurate.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius)

~~~
mamon
Usual explanation is that doing census by place of birth was actually Jewish
idea - because the "12 tribes of Israel" concept is so deeply ingrained in
their culture, so whey Romans requested census Jewish leaders simply tried to
kill two birds with one stone, and Romans didn't really care so they agreed.

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jdnordy
This is crazy; 2000 years later and the Romans are still shaping our society.
I think this goes in the face of modern intellectual elitism that says we're
the smartest generation to have ever lived. NO, we're just have the most tech
to work with because of the all the genius that came before us. We're just
iterating. I really tilts when people would rather say aliens built the
pyramids than to accept the Egyptians were as intelligent, if not more so than
our generation.

Sorry for that rant, but this is pretty cool.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _this goes in the face of modern intellectual elitism that says we 're the
> smartest generation to have ever lived_

We’re the most capable. “Smartest” is ambiguous. But we have more people
working more productively on more problems than the Romans did. And we’re
finding new solutions faster and more broadly.

Roman administration was ahead of its time. It serves as great precedent. But
a single agency of modern bureaucracy outclasses the Roman Republic or Empire
on almost every metric.

~~~
slavik81
The impact of the raw number of people we have now should not be overlooked,
either. Today, there are more people in the United States than there were in
the entire world during Roman times.

We have efficiencies of scale that they could never realize just due to our
population size. Or course, we also have new problems due to that scale. We'd
have a lot less to worry about in terms of wild habitat loss and CO2 emissions
in a world with in a world with 20x fewer people.

~~~
acqq
It is believed that the number of people at previous times was also limited by
the energy available. See how the population graph looks like -- the real
exponential growth starts at earliest around 300 years ago:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_curve.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_curve.svg)

