Great Houses

In Episode 34 of the Great Houses Forum, Gregory Treat revisits his case for the Roman cursus honorum as an alternative to modern credentialing, correcting the prior episode's impression that nation-state scale is required by arguing that just six to ten neighboring households, comparable to the Jewish minyan, can run the system effectively. He walks through each rung of the Roman sequence, tribune, quaestor, aedile, senator, praetor, consul, and censor, showing how each office forced leaders to prove competence through real-world tests judged by the people whose lives were affected, with particular attention to the censors' power to investigate private household management as a proxy for public fitness and its connection to Paul's pastoral epistles on elders. He draws economic parallels between ancient metal-based wealth thresholds and modern equivalents, showing that a first-class Roman fortune (~$470,000 in copper) feeds 80 men in the field for a year just as it did in antiquity, and that this same sum buys an 8-GPU AI compute machine today, making a cursus honorum viable for a mid-sized church or investment firm. He introduces the "44 ounces of gold" fertility metric, demonstrating that whenever American workers' average pay fell below that threshold in gold terms, the country dropped below replacement birth rates, a ratio that still holds at roughly three times median income. 

Read more of Mr. Treat's thoughts on AI at his Substack: https://avaloncircle.substack.com/