Kinda interesting that the century of American globalization and the century of Chinese globalization both have a pandemic about 25 years in. I’d date the former to the 1893 Chicago world fair, and the latter to the death of Deng Xiaoping, 1997.
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Recent scholarship suggests the “Spanish” flu started in the US (it’s never been clear where it started though scholars least knew that “Spanish” was an artifact of Spain not censoring its press as a neutral in WW1)https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/ …
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Wild theory: maybe causing a pandemic is sort of a debutante move as a globalization power. The Black Death appears to have started in Central Asia, around the time arguably Mongols/Turks created the first wave of globalization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#Predominant_modern_theory …
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Kinda makes sense. Globalization means you drive a wave of improved communication and transportation infrastructure. So diseases ride the pipes too. The Black Death also appears to have had a climate change component. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Late_Middle_Ages#Climate_change_and_plague_epidemic_correlation …pic.twitter.com/3Z3NQRNq7P
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Our time also has climate change, and we’ve already had one climate-related pandemic. It just wasn’t among humans. It was among Saiga deer. Adjacent possible warning. Covid19 has no climate angle that I can see, but the risk of climate change and pandemic risk combing is there.
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“In November 2015 Dr. Richard A. Kock...reported that his colleagues and he had narrowed down the possible culprits. Climate change and stormy spring weather, they said, may have transformed harmless bacteria, carried by the saigas, into lethal pathogens.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saiga_antelope#2015–2016_epizootic …
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Matthew Pirkowski
Don’t want to overstate/over fit the US origin of Spanish Flu theory. It’s not critical to the pattern. The bigger part is that the waxing global power supplies the new transportation network the disease rides, whatever the origin. https://twitter.com/mattpirkowski/status/1247745705881395202?s=21 …https://twitter.com/MattPirkowski/status/1247745705881395202 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
Matthew Pirkowski @MattPirkowskiReplying to @vgrThis is just one narrative amidst the research, and one that tends to be selected not b/c people want truth, but b/c they want a memetically potent take. After looking at the diff studies, my $ is on those that point to China, though it’s unlikely we’ll ever know definitively.1 reply 0 retweets 8 likesShow this thread -
In fact there’s a strong possibility all 3 big pandemivs (Black Death, Spanish Flu, Covid19) might have originated in China. But this is the first one where China *also* controls half the transportation pathways. Direct airline connectivity to China was the big dispersal factor.
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Counterfactual: if the virus had originated elsewhere, I bet the early dispersal hub would still likely have been China.
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Replying to @vgr
Even if it originated in America or France or Singapore?
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Possibly. So many big traffic routes transit through China now. Lots of American agricultural exports go to China too.
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