[Elrac]

Ah, sorry about muddling that up. I understand that Fallows is a journalist, but he looks to be distilling the ideas of "real" historians including Peter Brown and Walter Scheidel. So to my way of thinking (and arguing), Fallows is just the proxy (facade? I suck at design patterns) for those guys.

[Keysh]

Peter Brown and Walter Scheidel are indeed real historians (Brown of "Late Antiquity" and Scheidel of the Roman Empire). Not everything they're quoted as saying is necessarily that solid, though. For example, if Scheidel is really attributing "the dawn of the university" to the fall of the Western Empire, then he's eliding about seven or eight hundred years. (Fall of Western Empire: 5th Century; dawn of universities: 12th or 13th Century.)