Found this in a different book by German author Thorsten Schulte and it sounds eerily familiar to what is happening to the US. There's many parallels to contemporary history to be found when analyzing the collapse of the Roman Empire. https://pic8.co/sh/YGvKXA.png https://archive.org/details/collapseofcomple0000tain Page 196 (slightly reformatted), search for "accumulated surpluses" >The establishment of the Roman Empire produced an extraordinary return on investment, as the accumulated surpluses of the Mediterranean and adjacent lands were appropriated by the conquerors. > Yet as the booty of new conquests ceased, Rome had to undertake administrative and garrisoning costs that lasted centuries. As the marginal return on investment in empire declined, major stress surges appeared that could scarcely be contained with yearly Imperial budgets. The Roman Empire made itself attractive to barbarian incursions merely by the fact of its existence. > Dealing with stress surges required taxation and economic malfeasance so heavy that the productive capacity of the support population deteriorated. Weakening of the support base gave rise to further barbarian successes, so that very high investments in complexity yielded few benefits superior to collapse. In the later Empire the marginal return on investment in complexity was so low that the barbarian kingdoms began to seem preferable. > In an economic sense they were, for the Germanic kingdoms that followed Roman rule dealt successfully with stress surges of the kind that the late Empire had found overwhelming, and did so at lower cost.