So... I’ve been trying to find supporting arguments for my intuition that even though death rate is far lower than Spanish Flu (2%) and European Black Death (25-30%), the civilizational damage is comparable. I’ve found a pretty good one...

I call it memetic whole-life r/K theory. Civilizations pursue one of 2 strategies:

r-civilizations treat life as cheap and are robust to a lot of death at all life stages and sustain it with high birth rate

K-civilizations great life as expensive and fight hard for every life

The reference is to r/K selection theory. It’s an old but still roughly right portrait of reproduction strategies. You have r species that make lots of offspring and lose a lot (rats) and K species that invest a lot in each of fewer offspring (elephants) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Note r/K theory in its original form has lots of empirical issues. Treat it as a qualitative sketch precursor to the real theory. Read the Wikipedia link above for details. But basic point is, the value of life is not just a moral issue but a strategic one for civilizations.

Our civilization is a K-civilization. Though it may not seem like it, we actually value life at its highest in history from a strategy perspective. We do not generally follow robust, high redundancy designs for our institutions. They cannot tolerate a high death rate.

For eg. during the Black Death, children were basically treated as not even really alive till they made it past 7 or 8. Their mortality rate was too high. Feudalism was quite a flat political structure at the nobility level. Individual nobles dying was rarely a crisis.

In WW1, humans were cheap enough to waste in attrition trench warfare. Industrial production was mostly based on interchangeable humans. Very few humans were single-point failure modes.

Now, in our late industrial mode, with hyperspecialization, the world is not super resistant to high death rates. Which means even small death rates can do a lot of damage. Especially in clustered breakouts which might take out key civilizational widgets.

If everybody is either a farmer or warrior in a 9:1 ratio say, the world can tolerate a lot higher death rate than when there are a few dozen artisan trades. And when you get 10s of 1000s of literate roles doing highly specialized things... even small uptick in death is very bad.

I think this could be computed to allow normalized comparisons across history. Like maybe 1 random extra death today is as damaging as 10 random extra deaths in 1918 and 100 random extra deaths in 1348?

Though sheer larger population could have confounding effects

Note, it’s not death rate itself that causes a problem. It’s death rate and backfill delay. The higher the skill level, the longer it takes to backfill.

Another confounding variable is the residual high-r jobs under the api. And whaddya know, they are the ones risked the most.

But there’s also high K roles under high risk, like specialized doctors.

Sol this hypothesis has a lot of details to be worked out. It’s not a simple, elegant theory. It’s a messy heuristic for mapping system survivability in terms of soecuslization/redundancy/r/backfill

Note that severe labor shortage was one of the effects of the Black Death. Already by them society was specialized enough it couldn’t tolerate the death rate. Society collapsed quite deeply.

Humans can make such distinctions but the system may not have the ability to discriminate like that. So it reacts sharply to any death rate spike. https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1282202538868125698?s=21

Plus system has evolved to work with the constraints that people tend to care about family elders and their own old age. A society that treated life past 60 as worth sharply less for eg would not have a stable incentive structure. Makes for fun sci-fi like Pebble in the Sky tho