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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Replying to @vgr
seems like mostly retirees dying?
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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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Something that will really shift the perception of >80 y/o life is autonomous vehicles and domestic robots, when they are sufficiently reliable.
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There's a particular right-wing crank I read sometimes, who has a theory that r/K theory underlies political beliefs/affiliations/policies. I don't buy it, but it's interesting. I'll see if I can dig up his website or whatever.
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