The rate of catastrophes appears roughly constant over time

December 8, 2023 1:42 AM

One argument against using historical base rates is that the present is so different from the past (e.g. due to technology) that base rates are meaningless. While today’s world is indeed different from the past, base rates can help sharpen rather than neglect these differences, by clarifying what’s actually new. For instance, the mere presence of technology cannot move us far above the base rate, because many technologies have been developed throughout history and none has caused a catastrophe in the sense defined above. Instead, we should look for technology that shares properties with the historical drivers of catastrophe: epidemics, famines, wars, political turmoil, climate changes, natural disasters, invasive species, and humans. from Analyzing the Historical Rate of Catastrophes
posted by chavenet (9 comments total)

There were many more catastrophes in the period 1850-1950, although I suspect this is an artifact of reporting bias.

I think it'd at least be worth exploring the fact that most of the disasters in that period were the result of imperial European powers getting their hands on steam engines, railways, battleships, and big guns when the rest of the world didn't have them, and then turning those tools on each other.

Or at least that's the lesson I've taken from books like Late Victorian Holocausts, Coffeeland, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation reports, and pretty much any book about European history at the time. Over a period of centuries, the European elite had developed (and the Japanese copied) an ideology of supremacy and violence that matched anything produced by the Assyrians or the Aztecs. The steel-and-coal based portion of the Industrial Revolution that took off after the 1850s enabled them to unleash that ideology on the world in a orgy of death.

The way that British callousness turned crop failures in Ireland into a major famine in the 1840s prefigured what was to come in the Indian famines, the Holodomor, La Matanza, the Holocaust, two World Wars, and a host of other genocides and intentional famines. When railways allow you to move people and food around at a massive scale, and your ideology tells you that when people are weak and starving you should move troops in and food out, these are the kinds of disasters that result.

We could've produce even bigger disasters after the invention of nukes, but thankfully there was an ideological shift among the industrialized elite.
posted by clawsoon at 4:40 AM on December 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

"could've produce"... damn you, edit window that I missed!
posted by clawsoon at 4:59 AM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes, I think the author has started with the assumption that massive technological change does not cause catastrophes and then tried to show that it doesn't. But, it's not clear that the catastrophes from the mid-19th century onwards are actually independent of the industrial revolution.
posted by plonkee at 5:08 AM on December 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

and your ideology tells you that when people are weak and starving you should move troops in and food out

To expand on this, now that my daughter is on the bus... the story I got from Late Victorian Holocausts is that in the first major Indian crop failure of the 1880s, the British governor worked very hard to prevent famine by moving food around, reducing tax burdens, and reducing exports. It worked! Hardly anybody died of starvation!

...but when he sent his report back to London, they were livid. He was thoroughly rebuked. Imperial revenues were down! A perfect opportunity for culling the weak had been missed! Principles of private property and free markets had been blatantly ignored!

So during the next three or four crop failures, future British governors of India took the rebuke to heart, and millions of people died.

I think that's a good illustration of the fact that it's not just technology which caused those disasters, and it's not just ideology, but instead it's a marriage of the two.
posted by clawsoon at 5:17 AM on December 8, 2023 [19 favorites]

From the Takeaways section:

Climate change is a large-scale natural event. Aside from the direct effects, if it leads to many extinctions of non-human species, or induces political unrest, the follow-on effects could potentially be catastrophic for humans. The loss in biodiversity due to ongoing extinctions could also create bad follow-on effects, though it is happening slowly enough that it is probably not an immediate threat.

So the historical rate of catastrophe has no bearing on the future rate of catastrophe at all, and this is pretty much useless for any sort of prognostication. Probably.
posted by MrVisible at 8:48 AM on December 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think interpolating from essentially two large epidemics that killed 10%+ of the human population roughly 500 and 1500 years ago and a few large wars and smaller epidemics to say that there is a "5% chance of a 10%-death-rate catastrophe in the next 25 years" is a little silly and kind of emblematic of this kind of analysis that we often see from people who know statistics or code, but don't have domain knowledge in the relevant areas.

While our experience of the global response to Covid-19 is disheartening, something like the Black Death is not going to happen again in the same way as it did 500 years ago in a modern context.
posted by ssg at 1:46 PM on December 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

The definition of catastrophe used by the author is one they made up, but which may have been very useful for coming up with a collection of datapoints that fit on a line. I seriously doubt this article would survive peer review - might have been ok for a class assignment in intro to data science or something.
posted by StarkRoads at 2:23 PM on December 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm interested in the subject matter, but I could not get into this article, and it did feel "made up."
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:10 AM on December 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm interested in the subject matter, but I could not get into this article, and it did feel "made up."

You might be interested in the work of Lewis Fry Richardson on war, which is likely an inspiration for this article.
posted by ssg at 1:07 PM on December 9, 2023 [1 favorite]