Dr O’Connell concludes, “Are food resources and diets shaped by political ruptures? In the case of Portus, we see that when Rome was rich everybody, from the local elite to the dockworkers, was doing fine nutritionally. Then this big political rupture happens and wheat and other foodstuffs have to come from somewhere else. When Rome is on the decline, the manual labourers, at least, are not doing as well as previously.”
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So “trickle down economics” is a good thing.
Maybe “absence” of trickle down is a really, really bad sign.