Of course I didn’t rtfa, because I was hoping Mr. Doctorow would translate it into English for me, but from what I understand they are correlating light (as an indicator of economic success) to ancient roads. Blurbing that the public good, the roads, caused this light is problematic. The Romans didn’t choose their routes randomly. They were following very logical traces in the landscape that were in many cases used for a long time by the Gauls et al. This is very similar to the Snopes rebuke to the idea that Roman engineers somehow determined US rail specifications.
Here, I’ll translate: orbital and aerial photography show the presence of continuing human activity along the ancient Roman roadways of the Old World. Since these roads remain, at least in foundation, as usable throughways or else have been replaced with modern transportation infrastructure traveling the same general paths, this shows that public infrastructure can remain in use - with all the demonstrated positive effects that roads, at least, are well proven to supply - even after thousands of years, and even if near-total rebuilding is required by world wars, landscape subsidence, &etc…
This in turn means that public infrastructure is a proven lasting social good, which tends to refute the US neolibertarians (dirty-energy Texas Republicans and high-tech Californian Randites leading that pack) who claim that only private ownership is beneficial to the human race, quoting the Tragedy of the Commons like a holy writ and cheerleading for private transportation, private prisons, and private highways.
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They do not give details in their reference, but I suggest they may work as follows…
There are places where there is a good source of water and a defensible site that would be a good place for a town, or some local source of lead or silver. There are good ports on the coast. These are likely places for the end of a road, and they are probably strong points of light. I would mask out strong points in the lighting map, as these are places where the decision to settle may not have been determined by the road system. This will also mask out towns that have grown up on the intersection of routes, but I think we can live with that.
We can also mask out places that have no modern roads at all. I imagine there are places where the road has to go - the only place to cross the river, or the only pass through the mountains. We would not want to compare the lighting map of (say) Chamonix with the dark of the surrounding mountains, and say that Chamonix is more prosperous then Mt Blanc because of a Roman Road.
The remaining map will probably have lines of light where the roads go, surrounded by less bright regions where a road could have gone, but did not. You might further confine your search to the particularly straight bits of the Roman network where the original road was taking the shortest route and not being influenced by anything local.
It seems one can argue a correlation between Roman roads and modern development based on sampling like that. You then have to try it somewhere else to see whether the results are repeatable. Do you see the same thing with the British Empire railway network in central India, where there are flat plains and straight lines? This study will not settle the argument by itself, but if a few more follow and reach similar conclusions, then we have a useful tool for historians.
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I think I see where you’re going wrong… 
Seriously, take most of what’s on BoingBoing as people who are interested in cool stuff telling you about some cool stuff they found so you can decide whether to look into that stuff yourself and you’ll get a lot more out of it than if you think BB is here to translate or summarise the cool stuff™ so you don’t have to.
In this case Medievalist’s translation is part of what the article is saying.
But (as I pointed out earlier) they also say that they tried to factor in your point in various ways, one of which is by comparing areas where the roads were maintained more or less continually with an area were the roads were not maintained for a long period and checked whether the same patterns of economic development applied.
TL:DR - they don’t.
In the areas where the roads weren’t maintained, economic development happened differently; when roads were again used, they got built in different places, the economic activity grew up in different places.
Whereas where the roads are maintained well, economic activity still persists in the same places to a signficant degree even where those places no longer benefit from their original geographic benefit.
I think that’s the key point, the article isn’t trying to explain why economic activity starts somewhere in the first place and it doesn’t claim that just building a major road to a nowhere little hamlet will turn it into a major economic centre.
It does say that if you have economic centres connected by a network of used and maintained roads, the chances are that the same places will still be economic centres in several hundred years and that if you don’t maintain the roads, they are less likely to be.
As you and several other commentators have pointed out the first point is sort of obvious, it’s the second that is less immediately obvious and it’s the one the article actually spends most of its time seeking to show is the case.
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Wow, I hope they (bus viewers, not Robert Moses and Co. in Classical Roman Hell;) get a viewing of ‘Tag’ in now for sure. That thing was pretty amazing.
Lead pipes. Lead wine ‘of the saracen.’ 3 fryer oil tiers for C plates…Ɣ plates. Too much augury (and tuna, fish of emperors…who are watching their statin intake.) Meetings variously from hell. Literal uh, low post jobs. Aqueduct cleanout weeks (months.) Coin reminting. Literal s.hit.coin.
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Yeah, the ol’ Doctorow translation pipeline. A frequent sidecar on a BoingBoing service that runs on vervet, moss, hardcopy from various paper vendors and the AbramovicSelectBox (no relation to selectbox{}.)
They had 400V rails in the heyday of Analog (the tube amp electonics hobby,) why not 40’ rails? Everything’s a mobile launch platform! In fairness, I did like the notion of…however many Mammoths that George Church mentioned (After On Podcast) were needed in the tundras to knock out overtreed tundra. 8200 females? Tick-proofed?
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I think that they did try to do something like that, as someone else pointed out, but I remain suspicious. (Not that public infrastructure is a lasting good, but that the paper proved this case of it.) I’ve been reading some of Judea Pearl’s works on causal inference and it’s left me thinking that one should be providing a model where we can explore the counterfactual. i.e. They should show us what they think the light map would look like if the roads were never built.
Plus, that’s almost 2K years; there has been lots of time for other effects to dominate. Some of these roads were even “lost”:
Also: sometimes the Romans just paved existing roads.
That would make it rather hard to do a paper on the persisting economic benefit of the roads built by the Romans though, wouldn’t it?
If you compare the areas where Romans built roads with areas where they didn’t, you’re either comparing it with an area where someone else built roads - say the Persians or the Chinese (in which case you still have the issue that roads go where it makes sense to build roads so you’re still just comparing like with like) or with an area where no one built roads (in which case you have no ground for comparison for the persistent effect of roads on economic development).
In both cases you still have the problem that either roads weren’t built there because it’s an economically nonviable area or that one area is part of the Roman empire and the other isn’t so the difference might be because of something unique to the Roman empire - maybe they built better roads or taxed differently or were better at unifying their empire culturally so trade held up better when the empire crumbled, etc. etc.
That’s why they went for an area where roads were built and maintained by one polity (the Roman Empire) and compared it to an area within the same polity where roads were built and then not maintained.
That is the “counterfactual”. Were the roads maintained or not.
Not were they built in the first place.
Whether the Romans chose the location of the roads or just built over existing roads and tracks is also irrelevant, it just happens that we have good records of the Roman road network and convenient areas where the network was (mostly) maintained and were it wasn’t.
You’re requiring them to have undertaken an investigation into disproving something they weren’t seeking to show.
I would like to have more detail of how they went about controlling for various factors they say they controlled for -
Second, based on the literature on Roman road construction and our own formal tests thereof, we control extensively for potential geographic confounders throughout the entire analysis.
What does that mean? I have no idea. That’s a pretty sweeping statement to dispose of in one sentence and never come back to.
I’m guessing that might be covered in more detail in their actual paper here:
DP12745 Roman Roads to Prosperity: Persistence and Non-Persistence of Public Goods Provision | CEPR
but that’s not accessible without a subscription.
Hmm, looking again looks like one can purchase a copy for £5.00
I might do that.
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Public baths.
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