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...
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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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 …
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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
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End of conversation
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Fascinating... low specialization could explain Brazilian society's tolerance of death and low attributed value of life; which explains not only its tolerance of coronavirus, but also its high criminality and traffic deaths.
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