@samuelszuchan: In 300 AD, a Roman emperor solved a problem that Goldman Sachs is still trying to solve today. This statue is carved into a wall in Venice. Four men, identical faces, identical swords. It's propaganda for Diocletian's tetrarchy, a system where four emperors ruled Rome at once. The message: it doesn't matter which one is in charge. Before Diocletian, the Roman Empire had a pretender problem. Between 235 and 284 AD, roughly fifty different men claimed the throne. Most were murdered within a year or two. An able general wins a battle, his troops proclaim him emperor, he marches on Rome. Kill him, the system just produces another one. Diocletian's solution wasn't to fight the supply. It was to absorb it. He split fifty provinces into over a hundred. Created twelve new dioceses, each needing a vicarius. The civil service roughly doubled, from around 15,000 to 30,000 salaried officials. Every ambitious man who might have raised a legion now had a desk instead. In December 2021, Goldman Sachs promoted 2,200 people to vice president on a single day. Roughly one in three Goldman employees carries the VP title. It's a mid-level position, three rungs below partner. The title gives high-ambition workers a salary and a status that makes the marginal year at the firm worth more than the marginal year building something that competes with it. The historian Peter Turchin calls this elite overproduction: when a society produces more credentialed, ambitious people than it has elite slots for. Diocletian manufactured slots. Goldman manufactures titles. Both convert people who could be rivals into people who are payroll. The mechanism is 1,700 years old. And it works, until the productive base can no longer fund the seats.

Sam Szuchan

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Friday 12 June 2026 14:00:00 GMT