Half of the stores that were manned by one person will be abandoned. 3/4 of stores with two employees will still be running, and 7/8s of ones with three will - though half of those will be severely undermanned, though the drop in clientele would help compensate.
I don’t believe anybody will be in a hurry to force anyone to move for a while after this happens.
As for the infrastructure, the maintenance on everything would probably get a lot worse, but the wear on it should drop dramatically as well, so things should be able to carry on for at least a while. There’s a pretty good chance that as the months and years pass consolidation will occur naturally, as people move into free space in the less-rotted/looted/burned neighborhoods.
… half the income (many households currently require two wage earners), half the parenting (or none!)…
Hell, in my case, I don’t even know where my wife keeps half the stuff I need. I’d suddenly have a lot of bills I’d need to track down. Now, imagine that multiplied by… a heck of a lot of families.
Then you’d have all those creditors, suddenly not being paid…
And all the people they employ, suddenly not being paid…
I don’t think it’d be as simple as “Hey, look how much emptier the roads are!”
50% of the incompetents in all fields would also disappear.
50% of the cops.
50% of the crooks.
50% of the doctors.
50% of the patients.
There would be short-term problems, but we would adjust. A quick google gives me three different sources indicating that the world’s population in 1960 was a little over 3 billion, and civilization worked fine back then.
Serious issues with clinical depression, from the deaths of loved one.
Panic attack issues, for fears it would happenj again.
Trauma in children, from the deaths of parents.
Lots of psych cases.
I think this is unreasonably pessimistic. Not that large a percentage of the population is driving at any given time. Yes, there’d be a lot of crashed cars, but people could pretty easily clear the roads with the wreckers that are still here. Food stockpiles in warehouse, government facilities, etc. are still there. Communications would still be online with 1/2 the workers, so efforts could be coordinated. We’re not talking “The Stand” here, just 50% mortality. Disposing of the corpses would be the hard thing, if they die and aren’t dusted, as in the Avengers movie.
There would be a huge inventory of unused goods, productive capacity and infrastructure. Some of these would resolve themselves. But building trades, lots of industries that do not depend on human labor, all would be heavily impacted. Like, there would be unoccupied housing in the world for three billiion people, and staggering vacancy rates in skyscrapers.
There is actually a practical, workable way in which the OP’s scenario could be brought about. Just declare open season on people for 48 hours, but with a fairly restrictive bag limit to prevent mass killings of random crowds. Half the people in the world would kill the other half, with a selection rate that would probably turn out to be pretty favorable.
No, not at all. If it really was totally random then you could get any sort of weird distribution when we are talking about 7+ billion people. It’s like flipping a coin…you could get hundreds of heads or tails in a row. Eventually it will balance out, but the distribution could be pretty weird at times. So, a large number of chemists would be gone for some odd reason, while some other field is relatively untouched.
Or, perhaps it will only be the elect who are transported off this rock in which case…well, we could probably do without all of the fundamentalist Christian types, to be honest.
I’m going to go with my answer to the OP being…it depends on the distribution. But yeah, it would probably be bad to have a random half of the population just vanish. That’s about the level where it’s generally predicted civilization starts to come apart in a major epidemic, though in this case the survivors wouldn’t have to deal with burying or getting rid of the bodies of the other half. Not sure how this would affect people psychologically though…on the one hand, seeing your loved ones die would be bad. On the other hand, not knowing could be even worse, so it’s not like the survivors would uniformly just get back to work making civilization run.
This isn’t as hypothetical as all that. The Black Death killed near enough half the population of Europe. Granted, not all just at once, but the results suggest significant societal upheaval but nothing like a complete collapse. Of course, medieval European society was very different from our own.
Honestly, it’d be survivable. Even if we posit plane crashes and similar, we’re still probably looking at a level of survivors around 3+ billion people. We’d pick ourselves up and get back to building and banging. In 30 years we’d be back at 7+ billion.
That’s really where you-know-whos plan falls down. To achieve the stated goal - reduce population to a level where resources won’t be depleted - he needs to go for a kill rate of 90% or more. 50% just buys some small amount of time.
Knowing the top people in my reasonably small field, I don’t think it would be an issue. There are tons of people who, if not the top, know pretty much everything required. Things would slow down if the drivers of a field disappeared, but not as much as they would from the disruption of losing half of project teams. Not to mention all those who would have to stay home to get things sorted out.
The huge inventory would be good, since there would clearly be disruption in production and transportation as things sorted themselves out.
The amount of money in the world would not decrease, especially of the top 1% got randomly hit hard. So there might be inflation, and the remaining Fed would have to do something. A fair number of wills would have no remaining heirs, so the government might have a windfall.
The life insurance companies will be screwed. Lloyds of London won’t be loaded when they go.
And there would be a lot of work as people who know an area would train new people to pick up the slack.
During the AT&T Trivestiture in 1996, the payment for quitting was so generous that 1/3 of my center left all at once. (Including me.) My old group had a lot more funding than people, so they were planning to retrain chemists into EEs and Computer Scientists. Not sure how well it worked, but it seems a similar problem.