Hopefully Anonymous, Alex Tabarrok used the phrase "ideas behind their time" to describe what you're talking about. And kudos on doing some google breakfast research. How about doing it for the numbers you think we are biased towards?
mjgeddes, if you had your own blog I'd ask you to list the 27 irreducible categories there.
The examples I picked were transhumanist/sci-fi related - restrict the investigation to sci-fi literature (books and movies), and there is a clear bias towards 27, dating right back to the 1930s.
For example, in the movie 'Tron: Legacy' that number is embedded in the movie at a number of points, and even explicitly referred to in the script, even though there is no reason for doing this (and in fact it is strikingly incongruent when the main character speaks the number out loud: "27"), you can verify this for yourself by attending the movie.
Indeed, I did claim that imagination/creativity/intelligence is rooted in the ability to categorize. The point here is that several years ago, I conducted a detailed investigation of ontology and tried to strip out all the categories - I found it couldn't be done... there appeared to be exactly 27 irreducible categories.
Conclusion: no one is aesthetically biased much towards n^n numbers. The bias is more in the direction of smaller numbers, and there's no special bias towards the number 27.
I recall this is a hobbyhorse of yours, mgeddes.I initially thought it was parody, but your consistency seems too perfect.My personal evaluation is that you're crazy, at least regards to the notion of a 27-bias. It's the cube of 3, no neuroanatomical predisposition towards that comes to mind, and your examples seem picked through a crazy filter to me. But a quick test would be to compare results for google searching 8, 27, and 64. I predict in advance no huge advantage for the number 27.Aren't you the same guy that said intelligence/genius is rooted in ability to categorize? I think you were more on to something useful there.
"At Less Wrong, various users are announcing the level of their contributions. The user “Rain”, who donated $2700, made a comment at the site about why he donates to SIAI."
"Tron:Legacy" Storyline
"Sam Flynn, the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn, looks into his father's disappearance..."
"The Law Of Nines" (by fantasy author Terry Goodkind)
"On his 27th birthday, Ben gives Alex a packet of papers and explains that it is an inheritance that passes to the oldest member of Alex's bloodline. It would have passed to his mother, but she was committed soon after her 27th birthday and so the inheritance passes to Alex."
I don't know much about forager/farmer -or for that matter near/far mode or inside/outside view- but all three of those frameworks set off my distrust of social models that have categories that fit human biases for certain types of numbers. I think those numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10.1 bias: our bias that there's only one truth.2 bias: Maybe rooted in our two hands, or the presence or absence of light, or both.3 bias: Rooted in our seeing things as having a beginning, a middle, and an end.4 bias: Rooted in our tendency to divide a middle spectrum as closer to one end or another?5 bias: Rooted in our 5 fingers/thumb on one hand.10 bias: rooted in our 10 fingers/thumbs.I think extra skepticism is warranted in categorization theories that have these specific numerical options.
1) The Roman Republic was, IIRC, not very democratic at all; the elites largely ran things (think of the problems of the Gracchi bros, for example).
2) The 1st century BC, as has been mentioned above (and which is known to anybody even casually familiar with Roman history), was the period in which the Republic fell and the Empire was formed. There were several dictators (Marius, Sulla, Julius Caesar) who trashed the place, and slaughtered enemies. There were others (Crassus, Pompey) who had massive power because they had vast wealth and/or private armies.
3) The Roman Empire peaked during the 3rd century, IIRC. What felled it is (again, IIRC) the sheer difficulty of maintaining a sprawling, empire, the ability of provincial commanders/governmors to stage coups, plague, and in the end an abandonment of the Western Empire for the far richer Eastern Empire (this can be seen as cutting off the West, and letting the barbarians have it).
4) The behavior you're describing is pretty much an upper-class behavior, I believe. It's similar to somebody in the year 4000 thinking that American men all spent their days snorting coke, crashing expensive cars, and flying their private jets around to have affairs with hot supermodels, while the women spent their time snorting coke, crashing expensive cars, and flying their private jets around the world to b*tch with other women about the sheer burden of having children (whom they only recognize because their nannies send them videos). Except for those women who run businesses, practice the profession, who spend their time c*str*ting men.
Exactly. The early empire was much more stable than the republic, but the concentration of power in the early portion of empire did not substantially change the liberty or social latitude of the citizens.
So in this early period anyway, the only thing that changed was the soundness of the overall society, but liberty as they knew it did not change.
My understanding of the late Roman period is of a move towards abstraction and away from physical arts, not even abstract art. Philosophically, the late Greco-Romans were increasingly concerned with unseen and unknowable Forms and physical modelling was increasingly disdained. I wonder if this fits the farmer/forager model, i.e. people do "what's natural" for the EEA, which was not, as far as we can tell, an environment which involved producing physical art or any real concern for modelling or understanding nature.
On the other hand, http://the10000yearexplosio... describes an axis in which physical art/ornamentation and male violence are positively correlated, are dependent on how much male effort is subsumed into food production and are essentially independent of foraging or farming, as such (poor foragers with low male mate competition and high male parental work seem to have no more than poor farmers with the same conditions).
When empires like Greece and Rome achieved sustained periods of prosperity, their elites reverted to more forager-like ways
Hardly. At the height of Athens’ glory – the 5th century BC - the citizens of the whole of Attica moved inside the “Long Walls”, which the Athenians construced as a fortress so no land army could interrupt access of the Athenians to their key strategic and imperial asset; their Navy.
In an early example of the law of unforeseen consequences, Athens’ close ally against Persia – Sparta – used the Wall’s construction as Casus bellum. Thus during Athens’ glory, they were fighting war on 2 fronts – Persia and Sparta – while all [estimated] 250,000 residents – men, women, and children - slaves, foreign workers, squeezed into about 20 square kilometers, with all the attendant famine [when the Spartans trashed their crops], disease, and so on.
Yet, it was precisely in this completely agriculture-focused and dependent polity that western civilization’s greatest works of poetry – tragedy was actually invented - historiography, music, mathematics, science, oratory, philosophy, and most importantly law flourished. And it was in this same environment that the truisms of democratic politics were born and mastered.
They had more drinking and art, more egalitarian politics, fertility fell, and [non-slave] mating became more egalitarian and about feelings.
While this was the case, it had nothing to do with a transition from farming to foraging. In fact, both [classical] Greece and Rome’s wealth were overwhelmingly agriculture based plus war booty. Even our modern word “economics” comes from the mid 4th century BC dialog Oeconomicus by Xenophon. However, far from foraging it was a treatise on how most efficiently to manage a household and agriculture. Now, like today, the soil in the Aegean was far from bountiful, so the Greeks have always had to rely on substantial imports of even food. Why do you think an otherwise insignificant economic power in modern times, nevertheless still has a substantial shipping industry?
And Athenian democracy formed when she was a marginal civilizational also ran; third fiddle to humanity's most artless and culture-free power - the Spartans.
It had nothing to do with wealth, or at least not in the way posited. It was a story entirely based on property rights. After the collapse of the Bronze Age, followed by the Greek Dark Age, population had declined so much, that the former landless classes appropriated all the land. 6th century Attica saw humanity’s first democracy, because these small private land owners, provided the backbone to the Athenian fighting machine – the hoplite phalanx. They used their property holdings to blackmail the ruling aristocracy into extended political, civil, and most importantly COMMERCIAL rights to them, or they would not fight. Deal done.
The Romans travelled to Athens to try and learn the ways of democracy, but they botched it completely.
While the correlation between wine and monogamy is clever – somewhat precocious perhaps – the reality was much more banal. For starters, the Greeks had been boozing ever since the Neolithic, and were expert international exporters by the middle of the Bronze Age; long before monogamy. Olives were about the only thing that flourished in the forbidding Greek soil. And they had to have something to trade for all that oriental and Egyptian spice, silk, metals, wood, and most vitally, grain. Wine was exported right across the Mediterannean and beyond to Egypt, the Black Sea, Spain, Scythia, Gaul, Italy – which, of course is how the Romans learnt – and on to modern day Near East.
By the time the Romans started coming down from the trees, the Greeks has spent centuries passing laws to do with commerce, especially maritime trading, and especially wine. By the time they taught the Romans, Greek banking and maritime financing law was highly evolved, and prolific, including standard-form written contracts. A style of court room rhetoric had naturally also involved focusing on maritime and banking law.
Farmers, in contrast, don’t share much, and are far more unequal in the resources they control, by which they can more directly “buy” wives… In economic terms if the urban fraction of the population rose a lot, that was likely due to an increase in regional wealth.
Quite, which is why it is was not the case in Rome that “in economic terms if the urban fraction of the population rose a lot, that was likely due to an increase in regional wealth”. In fact, the opposite was the case. The land that was acquired as part of military spoils was - during the Republican days of representative government - supposed to be public (ager publicus). But the landed gentry appropriated it, and then leased it back to the smaller citizen-soldier land-owners (“veterans).
So while yes, the large rise in the urban faction was related to increases in regional wealth, but quite the opposite of that wealth being shared around (trickling down) to a large and expanding urban population, most of the rise was from former – smaller-holding – veteran Roman citizen-farmers lose their land due to not being able to tend it after the 2nd Punic war. Losing the land, and associated income, meant the veterans no longer satisfied the census tests to be a Roman soldier; anyway, they could no longer afford the swords, shields and kit, which Roman soldiers had to pay for themselves. Basically, they were disenfranchised.
The large land-holding aristocracy was able to grab even more land as the ordinary citizen-farmer-soldier lost his holdings. Cicero reports the tribune Lucius Philippus that at the turn of the 1st century BC
“there were not in the state two thousand people who owned any property”.
So much for our property-owning proto bourgeoisie!
Quite astonishing when we remember there were 450,000 citizens in Rome in Cicero’s day, without counting slaves, foreigners, freedmen. This rot however had well set in by even 140 BC.
These huge land estates “(latifundia) were not used for industry, but for agriculture and pastoralism. These disenfranchised and impoverished “veterans” had to make their way to the city, where they became a great civil threat. If it wasn’t the large land-owners, it was the landowners' cousins the tax-farmers (publicani), generally from Cicero's class; the equites. The publicani, and other Roman financiers - the Greeks taught the Romans had to write commercial contracts, and calculate loan interest rates - acted like the mafia loan sharks.
They would lend money to the smaller land-owners, so the small land-owners could pay their taxes, often charging more than annualized equivalent of 60% interest. So while this class of money men and landed gentry retired to the country estates to get fat, drunk, and laid, the Republic's middle-class backbone was evicted to the city, where he once again met his friendly financier, from whom he was forced to once more borrow to pay the rent on his squalid bedsit, before inevitably spending his days panhandling on skid row. Often, he was invited to stay on his property as a tenant farmer (colonus) – the beginnings of serfdom.
Now, the REAL economic lesson here was that the latifundia acted as a cartel charging the city exorbitant prices for grain. The tribunes were thus forced to accept grain as tax payments from the Latifundia, which was then distributed to the “veterans” thus keeping a lid on social unrest. At least 2 tribunes tried to pass laws to force the landed gentry to redistribute the stolen ager publicus among the veterans. 2 of those tribunes (the brothers Gracchus) were assassinated for their effort, while the third Lucius Philippius was later excoriated by Cicero
The man in an administrative office, however, must make it his first care that everyone shall have what belongs to him and that private citizens suffer no invasion of their property rights by act of the state. It was a ruinous policy that Philippus proposed when in his tribuneship he introduced his agrarian bill.
Before Cicero’s time, the powerful general Marius came up with the ingenious idea to relax the property-owning requirement for military service. But Marius' real revolutionary reform was to provide the soldiers with sword, shield, sandals, and kit. Equally revolutionary, Marius offered them full-time ongoing gigs as part of a voluntary, professional, full-time professional army. The poor and disenfranchised could not join up quickly enough. And boy, were these re-enfranchized dudes loyal to their paymaster general!
Rather than any proto-industrial revolution, it was more proto fascist with looting the vanquished the main source of Rome’s wealth, and any economic growth that might have taken place [which in reality, of course it didn’t – the Malthusian trap and all], was swallowed up by increased fertility.
To this extent, Rome became nothing like industrial Europe, but remarkably similar to the ante-bellum Confederacy. Just as the plantation owners replaced former white/European indentured workers with African slaves, so to the Roman landed classes, kicked the old owner’s family out, and replaced them with slaves captured from wars, which, tragically were won by the very citizen-soldier-farmer he was now evicting.
I just added to this post.
I've already hinted at the 27 universal categories enough times before TGGP, I'm not elaborating any further at the moment.
Another interesting short sci-fi story:http://yudkowsky.net/other/...
“I’ve only had the Super-Neural Bypass for sixteen seconds, and already I’ve learned twenty-seven languages and figured out how to play the piano.”
It seems that subconscious awareness filtered through even to this fellow ;)
Clear victory.I searched "n types", n= 4 ... 14
For n = 4, 5, 10, hits = approx. 4 million each.For n = 6 ... 9, 11 ... 14, hits = approx 500,000 to 1.5 million each.
"5 bias: Rooted in our 5 fingers/thumb on one hand.10 bias: rooted in our 10 fingers/thumbs."
I should have used "digits" instead of the clunkier "fingers/thumbs".
Hopefully Anonymous, Alex Tabarrok used the phrase "ideas behind their time" to describe what you're talking about. And kudos on doing some google breakfast research. How about doing it for the numbers you think we are biased towards?
mjgeddes, if you had your own blog I'd ask you to list the 27 irreducible categories there.
The examples I picked were transhumanist/sci-fi related - restrict the investigation to sci-fi literature (books and movies), and there is a clear bias towards 27, dating right back to the 1930s.
For example, in the movie 'Tron: Legacy' that number is embedded in the movie at a number of points, and even explicitly referred to in the script, even though there is no reason for doing this (and in fact it is strikingly incongruent when the main character speaks the number out loud: "27"), you can verify this for yourself by attending the movie.
Indeed, I did claim that imagination/creativity/intelligence is rooted in the ability to categorize. The point here is that several years ago, I conducted a detailed investigation of ontology and tried to strip out all the categories - I found it couldn't be done... there appeared to be exactly 27 irreducible categories.
Update:
8>27>64 with regard to google hits
26=27=28 with regard to google hits.
Conclusion: no one is aesthetically biased much towards n^n numbers. The bias is more in the direction of smaller numbers, and there's no special bias towards the number 27.
I recall this is a hobbyhorse of yours, mgeddes.I initially thought it was parody, but your consistency seems too perfect.My personal evaluation is that you're crazy, at least regards to the notion of a 27-bias. It's the cube of 3, no neuroanatomical predisposition towards that comes to mind, and your examples seem picked through a crazy filter to me. But a quick test would be to compare results for google searching 8, 27, and 64. I predict in advance no huge advantage for the number 27.Aren't you the same guy that said intelligence/genius is rooted in ability to categorize? I think you were more on to something useful there.
How do you explain 27-bias?
Look:
"At Less Wrong, various users are announcing the level of their contributions. The user “Rain”, who donated $2700, made a comment at the site about why he donates to SIAI."
"Tron:Legacy" Storyline
"Sam Flynn, the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn, looks into his father's disappearance..."
"The Law Of Nines" (by fantasy author Terry Goodkind)
"On his 27th birthday, Ben gives Alex a packet of papers and explains that it is an inheritance that passes to the oldest member of Alex's bloodline. It would have passed to his mother, but she was committed soon after her 27th birthday and so the inheritance passes to Alex."
I don't know much about forager/farmer -or for that matter near/far mode or inside/outside view- but all three of those frameworks set off my distrust of social models that have categories that fit human biases for certain types of numbers. I think those numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10.1 bias: our bias that there's only one truth.2 bias: Maybe rooted in our two hands, or the presence or absence of light, or both.3 bias: Rooted in our seeing things as having a beginning, a middle, and an end.4 bias: Rooted in our tendency to divide a middle spectrum as closer to one end or another?5 bias: Rooted in our 5 fingers/thumb on one hand.10 bias: rooted in our 10 fingers/thumbs.I think extra skepticism is warranted in categorization theories that have these specific numerical options.
A few comments:
1) The Roman Republic was, IIRC, not very democratic at all; the elites largely ran things (think of the problems of the Gracchi bros, for example).
2) The 1st century BC, as has been mentioned above (and which is known to anybody even casually familiar with Roman history), was the period in which the Republic fell and the Empire was formed. There were several dictators (Marius, Sulla, Julius Caesar) who trashed the place, and slaughtered enemies. There were others (Crassus, Pompey) who had massive power because they had vast wealth and/or private armies.
3) The Roman Empire peaked during the 3rd century, IIRC. What felled it is (again, IIRC) the sheer difficulty of maintaining a sprawling, empire, the ability of provincial commanders/governmors to stage coups, plague, and in the end an abandonment of the Western Empire for the far richer Eastern Empire (this can be seen as cutting off the West, and letting the barbarians have it).
4) The behavior you're describing is pretty much an upper-class behavior, I believe. It's similar to somebody in the year 4000 thinking that American men all spent their days snorting coke, crashing expensive cars, and flying their private jets around to have affairs with hot supermodels, while the women spent their time snorting coke, crashing expensive cars, and flying their private jets around the world to b*tch with other women about the sheer burden of having children (whom they only recognize because their nannies send them videos). Except for those women who run businesses, practice the profession, who spend their time c*str*ting men.
Exactly. The early empire was much more stable than the republic, but the concentration of power in the early portion of empire did not substantially change the liberty or social latitude of the citizens.
So in this early period anyway, the only thing that changed was the soundness of the overall society, but liberty as they knew it did not change.
My understanding of the late Roman period is of a move towards abstraction and away from physical arts, not even abstract art. Philosophically, the late Greco-Romans were increasingly concerned with unseen and unknowable Forms and physical modelling was increasingly disdained. I wonder if this fits the farmer/forager model, i.e. people do "what's natural" for the EEA, which was not, as far as we can tell, an environment which involved producing physical art or any real concern for modelling or understanding nature.
On the other hand, http://the10000yearexplosio... describes an axis in which physical art/ornamentation and male violence are positively correlated, are dependent on how much male effort is subsumed into food production and are essentially independent of foraging or farming, as such (poor foragers with low male mate competition and high male parental work seem to have no more than poor farmers with the same conditions).
Dan Carlan recently has an interesting podcast on the fall of the roman empire you might find interesting.http://www.dancarlin.com/di...
When empires like Greece and Rome achieved sustained periods of prosperity, their elites reverted to more forager-like ways
Hardly. At the height of Athens’ glory – the 5th century BC - the citizens of the whole of Attica moved inside the “Long Walls”, which the Athenians construced as a fortress so no land army could interrupt access of the Athenians to their key strategic and imperial asset; their Navy.
In an early example of the law of unforeseen consequences, Athens’ close ally against Persia – Sparta – used the Wall’s construction as Casus bellum. Thus during Athens’ glory, they were fighting war on 2 fronts – Persia and Sparta – while all [estimated] 250,000 residents – men, women, and children - slaves, foreign workers, squeezed into about 20 square kilometers, with all the attendant famine [when the Spartans trashed their crops], disease, and so on.
Yet, it was precisely in this completely agriculture-focused and dependent polity that western civilization’s greatest works of poetry – tragedy was actually invented - historiography, music, mathematics, science, oratory, philosophy, and most importantly law flourished. And it was in this same environment that the truisms of democratic politics were born and mastered.
They had more drinking and art, more egalitarian politics, fertility fell, and [non-slave] mating became more egalitarian and about feelings.
While this was the case, it had nothing to do with a transition from farming to foraging. In fact, both [classical] Greece and Rome’s wealth were overwhelmingly agriculture based plus war booty. Even our modern word “economics” comes from the mid 4th century BC dialog Oeconomicus by Xenophon. However, far from foraging it was a treatise on how most efficiently to manage a household and agriculture. Now, like today, the soil in the Aegean was far from bountiful, so the Greeks have always had to rely on substantial imports of even food. Why do you think an otherwise insignificant economic power in modern times, nevertheless still has a substantial shipping industry?
And Athenian democracy formed when she was a marginal civilizational also ran; third fiddle to humanity's most artless and culture-free power - the Spartans.
It had nothing to do with wealth, or at least not in the way posited. It was a story entirely based on property rights. After the collapse of the Bronze Age, followed by the Greek Dark Age, population had declined so much, that the former landless classes appropriated all the land. 6th century Attica saw humanity’s first democracy, because these small private land owners, provided the backbone to the Athenian fighting machine – the hoplite phalanx. They used their property holdings to blackmail the ruling aristocracy into extended political, civil, and most importantly COMMERCIAL rights to them, or they would not fight. Deal done.
The Romans travelled to Athens to try and learn the ways of democracy, but they botched it completely.
While the correlation between wine and monogamy is clever – somewhat precocious perhaps – the reality was much more banal. For starters, the Greeks had been boozing ever since the Neolithic, and were expert international exporters by the middle of the Bronze Age; long before monogamy. Olives were about the only thing that flourished in the forbidding Greek soil. And they had to have something to trade for all that oriental and Egyptian spice, silk, metals, wood, and most vitally, grain. Wine was exported right across the Mediterannean and beyond to Egypt, the Black Sea, Spain, Scythia, Gaul, Italy – which, of course is how the Romans learnt – and on to modern day Near East.
By the time the Romans started coming down from the trees, the Greeks has spent centuries passing laws to do with commerce, especially maritime trading, and especially wine. By the time they taught the Romans, Greek banking and maritime financing law was highly evolved, and prolific, including standard-form written contracts. A style of court room rhetoric had naturally also involved focusing on maritime and banking law.
Again, no foraging, all farming.
Farmers, in contrast, don’t share much, and are far more unequal in the resources they control, by which they can more directly “buy” wives… In economic terms if the urban fraction of the population rose a lot, that was likely due to an increase in regional wealth.
Quite, which is why it is was not the case in Rome that “in economic terms if the urban fraction of the population rose a lot, that was likely due to an increase in regional wealth”. In fact, the opposite was the case. The land that was acquired as part of military spoils was - during the Republican days of representative government - supposed to be public (ager publicus). But the landed gentry appropriated it, and then leased it back to the smaller citizen-soldier land-owners (“veterans).
So while yes, the large rise in the urban faction was related to increases in regional wealth, but quite the opposite of that wealth being shared around (trickling down) to a large and expanding urban population, most of the rise was from former – smaller-holding – veteran Roman citizen-farmers lose their land due to not being able to tend it after the 2nd Punic war. Losing the land, and associated income, meant the veterans no longer satisfied the census tests to be a Roman soldier; anyway, they could no longer afford the swords, shields and kit, which Roman soldiers had to pay for themselves. Basically, they were disenfranchised.
The large land-holding aristocracy was able to grab even more land as the ordinary citizen-farmer-soldier lost his holdings. Cicero reports the tribune Lucius Philippus that at the turn of the 1st century BC
“there were not in the state two thousand people who owned any property”.
So much for our property-owning proto bourgeoisie!
Quite astonishing when we remember there were 450,000 citizens in Rome in Cicero’s day, without counting slaves, foreigners, freedmen. This rot however had well set in by even 140 BC.
These huge land estates “(latifundia) were not used for industry, but for agriculture and pastoralism. These disenfranchised and impoverished “veterans” had to make their way to the city, where they became a great civil threat. If it wasn’t the large land-owners, it was the landowners' cousins the tax-farmers (publicani), generally from Cicero's class; the equites. The publicani, and other Roman financiers - the Greeks taught the Romans had to write commercial contracts, and calculate loan interest rates - acted like the mafia loan sharks.
They would lend money to the smaller land-owners, so the small land-owners could pay their taxes, often charging more than annualized equivalent of 60% interest. So while this class of money men and landed gentry retired to the country estates to get fat, drunk, and laid, the Republic's middle-class backbone was evicted to the city, where he once again met his friendly financier, from whom he was forced to once more borrow to pay the rent on his squalid bedsit, before inevitably spending his days panhandling on skid row. Often, he was invited to stay on his property as a tenant farmer (colonus) – the beginnings of serfdom.
Now, the REAL economic lesson here was that the latifundia acted as a cartel charging the city exorbitant prices for grain. The tribunes were thus forced to accept grain as tax payments from the Latifundia, which was then distributed to the “veterans” thus keeping a lid on social unrest. At least 2 tribunes tried to pass laws to force the landed gentry to redistribute the stolen ager publicus among the veterans. 2 of those tribunes (the brothers Gracchus) were assassinated for their effort, while the third Lucius Philippius was later excoriated by Cicero
The man in an administrative office, however, must make it his first care that everyone shall have what belongs to him and that private citizens suffer no invasion of their property rights by act of the state. It was a ruinous policy that Philippus proposed when in his tribuneship he introduced his agrarian bill.
Before Cicero’s time, the powerful general Marius came up with the ingenious idea to relax the property-owning requirement for military service. But Marius' real revolutionary reform was to provide the soldiers with sword, shield, sandals, and kit. Equally revolutionary, Marius offered them full-time ongoing gigs as part of a voluntary, professional, full-time professional army. The poor and disenfranchised could not join up quickly enough. And boy, were these re-enfranchized dudes loyal to their paymaster general!
Rather than any proto-industrial revolution, it was more proto fascist with looting the vanquished the main source of Rome’s wealth, and any economic growth that might have taken place [which in reality, of course it didn’t – the Malthusian trap and all], was swallowed up by increased fertility.
To this extent, Rome became nothing like industrial Europe, but remarkably similar to the ante-bellum Confederacy. Just as the plantation owners replaced former white/European indentured workers with African slaves, so to the Roman landed classes, kicked the old owner’s family out, and replaced them with slaves captured from wars, which, tragically were won by the very citizen-soldier-farmer he was now evicting.