TIME is “dark” this week—that is, we’ve got no magazine to put out and not many people in the office. But we still have a Website, so I volunteered to pay attention to this week’s economic releases and post on them when they seemed to merit attention. Well, today we’ve got personal spending up 0.5% and personal income up 0.4% in November, and new home sales down 11.3% (pdf) for the month. That last number looked at first like it might be significant. The decline was certainly bigger than forecasters expected. But it comes with a margin of error of plus or minus 11 percentage points. And yesterday’s existing home sales figure was up by more than expected. I’ll go with the verdict of Ian Shepherdson at High Frequency Economics: “this number tells us nothing at all about the future.”

So my attention drifted to the FT, where Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins makes the point that, while the economic downturn that seems now to be fitfully receding into the past has been really bad, it hasn’t been nearly as bad as the economic downturn that followed the departure of the Romans from Britain in AD 410: