A while back I was reading post apocalyptic stories and began to wonder.
Assuming disappearances/losses completely random across the populace, what is the maximum percentage loss of people society could suffer without a noticeable loss of amenities? I mean my grocery store would still be full, the paper still gets delivered, movie houses are still open, radicals are still blowing up bus stations, no lines at the gas station. Life pretty much goes on without a blip except for the personal losses and the change in performers and politicians and the like. Along the same vein, what is the minimum percentage needed to keep a functioning society, say at the level of the Korean war? Global transport, trade, and communication are available. This is all assuming the survivors are not battling invading aliens or zombies or blighted areas.
I am again assuming percentage wise an equal loss across caste, profession, religion, location.
If one retains only the best and brightest or most essential (doctors, manufacturers, farmers, engineers, mechanics, plumbers, scientists, technicians,) I suspect up to 95% of the population could be lost and the remaining 5% would still function well.
Edit: never mind. I failed to read your “random/equal loss” part. Maybe 50% loss?
The assumption though is randomly losing people, no cherry picking. If the losses were biological I would presume a disproportionate loss of medical professionals as well as localities. If it were militaristic then military and probably urban as well as local dead zones. If it were the rapture then one religion would be greatly affected while the rest would not be touched. I want something like a transporter malfunction that picks a person here and there across the globe and rematerializes them into another dimension or scattered across the galactic rim. This is the story of the remainder.
EDIT: replied to a post that was later edited. This clarifies my thought process so I’ll leave it.
There are examples of nations that experience a population decline, and thrive economically in spite of or because of it. The Republic of Ireland comes to mind.
There is probably no way to ever test this, even theoretically. You could never be sure the decline was not selective, unless it were a catastrophe that would by itself bring the culture to a reactive crisis.
Ireland is not a good example because they still had the rule of law imposed by England. My WAG is that it might take as little as 10% before the whole structure started to crumble. As soon as the lawless elements allied with all the militant minority groups started to get the upper hand, that would be the beginning of the end.
The Black Death caused massive mortality very quickly in Europe - something half of the population - in some places, allegedly, closer to 75%. There were significant long-term social changes, but aside from the acute terror effects, life more or less kept going as it had - certainly, society did not collapse or come to an end.
Edit: the Black Death is a reasonable example of a very arbitrary killing agent - it famously killed folks both high and low. Note that Italy was allegedly hard-hit, yet this did not prevent the Renaissance.
I assume this means the survivors aren’t psychologically traumatized or worried about the mysterious disappearances, which would cause great panic or fear.
If society just ignores the disappearances as if the people never existed, then I think 50% population shrinkage would be very much something society could handle.
At the time 90% of the population worked as farmers and most people lived and died without traveling more than 20 miles from home. Few people depended on things that had to travel great distances. Now we’re more interconnected and the survivors can’t just gather at the nearest farm and keep going as usual.
I actually read a trailer for a book about a society falling apart, just a couple of days ago. The author talked about how grocery and other stores no longer have much inventory stocked in the back, so there is no buffer against disruptions.
On the other hand, people do tend to come together in a crisis, especially one coming from outside. I think it would depend on how quickly it happened. Someone mentioned population decline. That sounds slow. If it’s happening slowly, so that people can adjust to keep jobs filled and merchandise moving, then you can lose a much higher percentage with less effect.
If everyone dies or disappears at once, even 10% will cause disruptions. They may be temporary, but they’ll be there.
The wholesale disappearance of Stalin’s opponents in the USSR after 1945 is quite amazing when one thinks about it in numbers, but that looking from the outside that life continued on almost as if nothing happened perhaps indicates the I think this would depend on what one defined as “civilized”, but also the ability / resilience of these governments / institutions to continue and to maintain public confidence despite the population losses.
To my mind, the mechanization and relative ease of transport make the modern situation more resiliant against shocks caused by mass mortality, not less. In Medieval/Renaissance times, serious famine was a possibility even in years without war or Black Death.
But the loss is random. The lawless elements and the militant minority groups would lose just as many random members as the rest of society.
If it was cherry-picked, we could easily lose 50% with no loss of function or civilization. Totally random, though, lowers that by quite a bit. I’d say the 20% boundary is a pretty good guess. More than that and we can’t make up the difference by just working harder.
I don’t have a real answer, but here’s something I thought about in response. 50% reduction in entertainment industry personnel–not a big deal. There will still be plenty of TV shows and movies; possibly people will be less choosy about what they watch.
50% reduction in trained nuclear plant personnel–problem. You would guess that the remaining people could between them shut the things down at least, but you’re looking at some disruption to power supply in some regions. But you probably get by with rationing/retraining.
50% reduction in farmers–potential big problem. Very few farm workers now supply lots and lots of food. You can’t temporarily shut a farm down the way you could a nuclear plant. Then again much farming is agribusiness, not small scale or craft farming, perhaps the industrial farm could quickly train new personnel to take up the slack–and of course now you’re feeding 50% less people, that helps too.
TL;DR–in what industry or sector does the immediate 50% loss of trained personnel pose a danger of sector collapse? Are there any such endangered sectors that would in turn endanger civilization as a whole?
At 50% if it was completely random it would mean the event would easily wipe out some whole sections. Like this town’s newspaper delivery operation - we only have 3-4 trained night supervisors, which means they could all die. That would disrupt thousands of subscriptions.
Now it’s not very important for life as whole but it shows how easily something like that could wreck the intricate web of jobs we have today. In a nuclear power plant you could lose all of the engineers who are trained to do a certain job and none of the engineers specialized for something else.
A 20% global population reduction knocks the numbers down to roughly 1990 values. A 40% reduction is in the mid-70’s range.
At first I thought 20% for no notice and about 40% for a collapse but seeing the population numbers here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population {consider the source b4 swallowing} a truly random disappearance could take 50-60% knocking levels back to WW2 era numbers. As stated elsewhere, if it happened tomorrow, the shock to the economic system and those left behind would most likely be devastating even at the lower numbers but without a total collapse the survivors could recover and thrive within a decade IMHO.
Well the world population in 1800 was only 1 billion, one seventh of what it is today. And that was a time of growth, expansion and invention. Admittedly some industries would have to stop to regroup / reorganize. But the OP seems to indicate we aren’t all running around Chicken Little style, so I’d say an 85 percent loss would be plenty survivable. If folks aren’t disappearing in Raptur-esque poofs of smoke I expect even the nuclear plants would implement “just in case” shut downs to avoid worse case scenarios. The OP doesn’t specify a time frame for the reduction, and I think that would probably be a larger factor in the after effects than the number itself.
I think that the breaking point isn’t determined by the loss of irreplaceable people, but the point at which people are sufficiently panicked that they stop acting civilized.
For example, a rule of thumb in army infantries is that other than corp with exceptional morale, unit cohesion starts to fall apart at a casualty rate of about 1/3- the point at which soldiers start doubting that the engagement is survivable, and are likely to start retreating without orders. In a plague scenario it would be the point where fear of contagion would cause people to abandon their jobs and other social obligations, and move into personal survival mode. So a lot depends on the type of disaster: whether it sparks an “every man for himself” mentality, or whether on the contrary remaining organized and banded together was seen as indispensable to survival.
Aren’t modern economies built upon perpetual growth? What would government bonds be worth if we all knew there would be 50% fewer taxpayers next year?
Detroit’s population has dropped from about 1.8 million to about 600k in the last several decades, and it is still surviving. There is talk of bulldozing large swaths of land so the city can become more centralized but a city can undergo a large population decline and still function.
Of course that is people moving out. If you had 2/3 of a city die of a disease that is going to cause a lot of psychological issues for everyone that you have to contend with. People may not be willing to run the movie house when their families have died in a mass plague because of existentialism and whatnot.
Also that is just a city, not the entire human race. Detroit’s downfall didn’t affect the electric grid, farming, scientific R&D, oil extraction, etc. as those industries are not native.
I guess the answer depends on what endpoint you are looking for.
My initial understanding is that the question was one of complete collapse of civilization - post-apocalyptic style gangs of thugs and cannibals roaming the land, no law and order, the sort of scenario that survivalists prepare for. Such situations have occurred in the immediate past - and are occuring now, in some places - but have generally been the outcome of either warfare or deliberate government action (such as the complete breakdown experienced in parts of Ukraine caused by the Stalinist famine). Also, it has never happened world-wide, but in patches - there was always civilization going on somewhere, ready to fill in the gaps once the emergency was over.
My understanding is: what amount of damage would be necessary for a serious dark age - something where technology actually regresses and social collapse happens long-term?
Such situations are reasonably rare - there is the European “Dark Age”, which of course is the subject of some controversy as to how “dark” it was, and of course it was not world-wide. There is the Bronze Age “dark age” that affected mediteranian civilizations, but other than barbarian invasions, not much is known about its causes.
Perhaps the best example is the collapse of precolumbian urban civilization in North America - few nowadays are even aware that there was an urban civilization in precolumbian North America. That collapse began for unknown reasons but was made complete by new diseases imported from Europe, that allegedly resulted in 90% mortality over a reasonably short period of time. Of course, the urban civilization which collapsed was considerably more primitive than our own, and so more fragile; it was not such a stretch to go from living in cities to living in farming villages.
I suspect that it would take a disaster at least on the scale of the North American pandemics - only worldwide - to destroy our civilization and produce a lasting “dark age”; our civilization has proven remarkably resiliant to common or garden variety disasters of the self-inflicted kind - after all, look how little time it took Europe and Japan to recover from WW2.
The OP specified that life goes on as normal. I think 10%-15% tops. Unemployment is at 7%, so it definitely isnt lower that that. The unemployed can fill the job vacancies. But more than 15%, and stores will have to start closing down.