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I have a minor problem with these types of announcements (they seem to be popular just now). Do they reflect current political or academic agendas? (whatever they may be? - I hesitate to even speculate on the current politics in Catholic Universities in the Northeastern US). How can they have statistically significant data on diet or life expectancy in the 4th or 5th century? how many graves? How do they date them? how do they know how old the people were or what they ate? Can the Britons really have had a longer life expectancy and higher standard of living when being ruled by dozens of petty warlords engaged in endemic warfare? Do people normally live longer in rural environments without urban centers? How do they know what tax rates were under the Romans and Saxons, did Saxons even collect taxes or just steal whatever they wanted? If things were so swell under the Germanic invaders why did the Welsh and Cornish resist and the Bretons emigrate? In the 60's and 70s there was a revisionist trend that claimed that the Germanic invaders were not such bad guys (proto-hippies?) relative to the authoritarian Romans (the "establishment"), Is this a resurgence?

Keep this under your hat. There are a number of political parties that would peddle this as scientific proof that ordinary citizens thrive in a low tax economy, conveniently ignoring JK Galbraith's slightly more contemporary works.