Out of curiosity, are there any other theories you'd advance, outside of the "decline of virtue" theory?
In any case, your point is a good one, although what keeps it from being completely locked in is that this is correlation, not causation. Did "bread and circuses" truly bring down Rome, or was it a symptom of the collapse of Rome?
What does the counterfactual look like? Let's say everything else stays the same, but the Aediles are incorruptible, leaving a large, mass of hungry Romans with nothing to do. Isn't this the recipe for insurrection and civil war? Wouldn't the Senate decide that the best solution to this would be ... bread and circuses?
It still seems to me that the situation that had developed in Rome produced only two outcomes: either the inhabitants of Rome keep voting themselves bread and circuses, or they rise up in rebellion until someone gives them bread and circuses.
Basically, I don't see a "third way" that solves this problem. Absent that, it seems like the origins of Roman collapse need to be traced back farther. Bringing this back to the point of universal income, if universal income creates a culture of dependency like the one described, the analogy implies that this is a symptom of the conditions that created a need for universal income.
tl;dr: if this is true, society had already collapsed. Bread and circuses only prolonged the patient's suffering.
Out of curiosity, are there any other theories you'd advance, outside of the "decline of virtue" theory?
In any case, your point is a good one, although what keeps it from being completely locked in is that this is correlation, not causation. Did "bread and circuses" truly bring down Rome, or was it a symptom of the collapse of Rome?
What does the counterfactual look like? Let's say everything else stays the same, but the Aediles are incorruptible, leaving a large, mass of hungry Romans with nothing to do. Isn't this the recipe for insurrection and civil war? Wouldn't the Senate decide that the best solution to this would be ... bread and circuses?
It still seems to me that the situation that had developed in Rome produced only two outcomes: either the inhabitants of Rome keep voting themselves bread and circuses, or they rise up in rebellion until someone gives them bread and circuses.
Basically, I don't see a "third way" that solves this problem. Absent that, it seems like the origins of Roman collapse need to be traced back farther. Bringing this back to the point of universal income, if universal income creates a culture of dependency like the one described, the analogy implies that this is a symptom of the conditions that created a need for universal income.
tl;dr: if this is true, society had already collapsed. Bread and circuses only prolonged the patient's suffering.