What I’m really trying to ask is, would a certain unusually large number of unexpected deaths be good for the economy? Presumably there’d be many more job openings. And there’d be the same amount of wealth in fewer hands, so in theory the survivors would be richer. OTOH, real estate values might take another hit.
But as the number of deaths grow, maintaining a functioning society becomes more difficult. And if too many consumers die, well, there does the whole consumer product/retail industry.
So, is there a right number of people who should drop dead for the benefit of all? It’s not fair to just kill off all those sponging retirees, though. The epidemic (or murderous rampage, if you prefer) would kill the young just as it would the old.
The only two major events like what you’re talking about are 9/11 and Katrina, both of which caused a lot of major economic problems. Hell, you could argue that 9/11 was a good part of what ultimately led to the state we’re in now.
Or are you looking for disasters just shy of a Roland Emmerich flick?
No, I’m thinking more along the lines of the flu pandemic of 1918. People just drop dead without widespread, or any, destruction.
In fact, I’ve never seen or read anything about the economic impact of the flu pandemic. I do recall that in some places there were so many deaths that it became a problem to collect and bury the bodies, which come to think about it, was the same thing I recall reading about the Black Plague.
Think about it. Lowered birth rates are generally considered economically problematic over the long term (outside of places where the population density is such that further births are a detriment). Fewer people means fewer workers means less production and less consumption. Mass deaths mean huge short-term disruption to the economy; until more workers are hired production is vastly affected. Some of the survivors who may have been out of work or underemployed benefit, but with less people overall, it obviously means economic contraction. Fewer people buying stuff at the local Arby’s or Banana Republic. And fewer people producing stuff as well.
If you had an engineered flu that killed off the unemployed, that’d be a benefit. Short of that, not really.
The long-term economic effects of the Black Death were, in retrospect and arguably, somewhat positive. It caused the cost of peasant labor to skyrocket, which in many regions of Europe essentially broke the feudal system, since peasants were in enough demand that they could “shop around” for a landlord. If you believe Marx, this was one of the key conditions necessary for the emergence of capitalism and liberalism and all that modernity stuff. It also forced landowners to either look at agricultural techniques that were less-labor intensive and more productive, while also leading them to look at diversifying into other industries. So, for example, a lot of the British textile industry really got going when landowners could no longer make a profit farming with post-plague labor rates, and so started running sheep on their land instead.
I don’t know how applicable that would be to a modern depopulating event, but I tend to believe that in the long run, high labor prices put more pressure on everyone to make the economy more efficient and more productive, which leads to innovation that tend to be beneficial even after (or perhaps only after) the crisis that’s inflating labor costs passes.
Look at the World Wars. France lost 1.5 million men. These were men who would have otherwise played a major role in the economy in the two decades between 1918 and 1939, decades when France was stagnant. In the aftermath of WW2 all the major (and soon to be former) colonial powers had to begin major importation of labour from their erstwhile colonies leading to massive social change. These importations were due to labour shortages caused by the war and the deaths of so many military age men. Its hardly theoretical and even a cursory search on google scholar could have assisted you
This has little or nothing to do about a lower birth rate, except that many women would be too dead to give birth. It’s possible the birth rate of survivors would skyrocket – I dunno. Maybe there would be something like a post-WWII Baby Boom.
Come to think of it, what if the Pill had been effective and easily available 50 years earlier? Would there have been a Baby Boom? Maybe not – but if not there wouldn’t be people freaking out about the Baby Boomers reaching retirement en masse and the system not being able to sustain them all.
Speaking as a late Baby Boomer myself, I’m happy to be a burden on today’s youth and tomorrow’s adult.
But it’s hard to do a comparison with either war because there was so much destruction. There wouldn’t have to be any reconstruction. There wouldn’t have to be such an enormous amount of resources going to war material.
OTOH, a war economy without a war’s destruction made the US into the superpower it is today. And our war casualties were probably the lightest among the big players.
While we are at it I would say a million excess deaths across the board while certainly not something you can shrug off, are perhaps manageable. A million deaths concentrated in the 18-35 male demographic would lead to all sorts of problems. A million deaths on the 18-36 female demographic… I don’t even want to think about it.
Another way you can see how the loss of population would effect the economy is in the recent US humanitarian mission in Iraq; hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced… that was a leading reason of why Iraq has still not settled especially as most of the refugees (who by leaving Iraq are as good as dead as far as the local economy is concerned) were persons with skills needed to run an economy.
You seem to have no idea what you’re talking about. There was massive property destruction in WWI, thought not as widespread as the next one. Whole cities were virtually destroyed in France and Belgium. Whole fleets of ships were lost. I don’t know much about the eastern front, but there was vast destruction in the areas where the Germans fought the Russians.
As to casualties, America’s were indeed the lightest of the major powers in both WW I and II.
WW I Casualties, civilian and military, Wiki estimates
Russia - 3.5 million
Germany - 2.5 million
France - 1.7 million
Austria/Hungary - 1.5 million
Italy - 1.2 million
England - 1 million
USA - 117,000
WW II Casualties, civilian and military (Wiki estimates)
USSR - 23 million
China - 15 million
Germany - 6.5 million
Japan - 2.5 million
France - 567,000
England - 451,000 (if you throw in colonies like India, the number goes over 2 million)
Italy - 457,000
USA - 419,000
The other thing about a 4-year war … for four years, the efforts of a large percentage of the young employable male (and some female) population have been devoted to killing each other, rather than to useful productive efforts. And likewise, a large amount of the manufacturing industry is given over to making things whose purpose is to be destroyed (bombs, ammunition) or which are of limited use after the war is over (guns, tanks). So for all sorts of reasons, a protracted war is bound to be far more damaging than a bunch of people suddenly dropping dead for no reason.
From a purely cold-blooded point of view, the sudden death of, say, a half of your population ought to be good for the wealth of the other half. The assets of the dead half are transferred (via inheritance) to the liivng half, and suddenly everybody has twice as much goods. As far as ongoing employment and manufacture are concerned, half the market to buy your goods, but half the competition for that market - should be a wash.
In real life, though, the disruptive events of a mass death big enough to be noticed (anything over, say .1% of your population) in terms of the personal grief of the survivors, combined with the reorganisation of workplaces and organisations to replace the dead folks, and the extreme likelihood that a huge amount of resources would be immediately tied up in an effort to find out WTF just happened and how can we stop it happening again, would certainly balance out any positive effects on the survivors’ net wealth.
What you seem to be talking about here is a variation of the “broken window fallacy” in economics. Basically, is breaking a window is not good for the economy, even though it provides the glasier business from which he can use the income to purchase other stuff. The reason is that there is a net opportunity cost. The economic activity that was generated is cancelled out by the destruction of the window. The economy would have been better off if that activity was spent on building something new.
As a real world example of the effects of massive depopulation, one need only look at Detroit, MI. Detroit is a city that has lost nearly a quarter of it’s population over ten years. Now much of that loss is due to economic problems and not the cause of them. However, the loss of the population creates a vicious cycle. A population of 750,000 people has to provide a tax base for an urban infrastructure built to support over a million. Many parts of the city have deteriorated and fallen into disuse, however, they still require police and fire coverage and are still part of water, electric and road networks that need to be maintained.
I’ve always thought pretty much every problem in the world stems directly from overpopulation. Might be good overall if the population was knocked back to, oh, say 3 billion or so.
I was talking about your comment of the US economy being jumpstarted by the war. Looking back at my post, I could have been clearer but I stand by that.