Decade Death Toll
And what I really want to know is: are things getting better, or are they getting worse? Can we start all over again? Stop. Pause. We’re in record.
My friend Daniel recently updated his Facebook status to say he “suspects that the world sucks less than YahooNews would like him to think it does…” His brother replied:
No, I’d say its worse, main stream media has nothing on what’s really going on with the deteriorating nature of the underlying structures that our civilisation is based upon…
Yes, I think it all—politics, art, science, business, primary industry, etc—is worse than it once was. Yet this is only an internally relative measure. The percentage of good is smaller, but the entities are larger. So more good is produced by each of these things than ever before. Things are getting better. The question everywhere today is whether the driver of growth (name it: capitalism) is sustainable? I think we all suspect not.
My resolution for this year: to always remember that things are getting better.
Perspective. Memory.
- 26 January 2001, India. Earthquake killed 20,000.
- 09 September 2001, US. Terrorists killed 3000.
- 27 September 2002, Atlantic Ocean. Ferry sinking killed 1800.
- 21 May 2003, Algeria Earthquake killed 2000.
- August 2003, Europe. Heatwave killed 40,000.
- 26 December 2003, Iran. Earthquake killed 26,000.
- 22 April 2004, North Korea. Train crash killed 3000.
- 17 September 2004, Haiti. Cyclone killed 3000.
- 26 December 2004, Indian Ocean. Tsunami killed 230,000.
- 29 August 2005, US. Cyclone killed 1800.
- 08 October 2005, Pakistan. Earthquake killed 80,000.
- 27 May 2006, Indonesia. Earthquake killed 6000.
- 02 May 2008, Burma. Cyclone killed 150,000.
- 12 May 2008, China. Earthquake killed 70,000.
- 30 September 2009, Indonesia. Earthquake killed 1300.
(When you remember that earthquakes cause tsunamis, you’ll see that what we need is a War, not on Terror, but on Earthquakes.)
I’ve taken these figures from a wide variety of sources, using the World Disasters Timeline as a starting point. There may well be major disasters that I’ve missed.
The booby prize for disasters that have been reported hysterically but which have killed few go to three diseases: bird flu has killed less than 300, SARS has killed less than 1000, and swine flu has killed less than 13,000. That last figure may sound big, but remember that seasonal flu kills about 350,000 people each year.
- The war in Afghanistan has killed 70,000.
- The war in Iraq has killed 650,000.
- The war in Pakistan has killed 20,000.
- The war in Sri Lanka has killed 22,000 dead.
- The war in Sudan has killed 500,000.
(Over 4000 US citizens have died in Iraq, showing that George W Bush is better at killing Americans than Osama bin Laden.)
It’s hard to know the numbers for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Mexico.
The booby prize here goes to the war in Israel, which has only killed 6000 (mostly Palestinians).
So it goes.
Everyone from 2010 will be dead in the year 3030.
By sabik, 11 hours, 41 minutes after the fact
One of the best things I’ve seen for overall optimism in recent years was one of the TED talks about Gapminder. Pretty coloured bubbles on an animated graph, each of them a nation, moving generally toward a better, healthier, longer life.
Pretty much everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa is now at first-world status. Even fifty years ago, that was not so.
By sabik, 12 hours, 32 minutes after the fact
PS: that original video was this one. His other videos are good too (and updated with newer data and whole new datasets).
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/ted-talks/hans-rosling-ted-2006-debunking-myths-about-the-third-world/
By David Golding, 1 day, 2 hours after the fact
That’s an excellent video, thank you! I appreciate how it problematises our view of the world, calls for freedom of information and embraces complexity.
In that vein, you’ve got to be careful with a term like “first world status”, as it produces images of modernity. From the video we can see that neither child survival nor GDP per capita of the rest of the world has yet caught up with where the OECD countries were in 1960 (and also that there is no essential nexus between these two indicators).
It’s worth playing with the presentation he used, especially the interactive last segment of the Development Directions topic (7.18) where you can select and see the progress of countries. Things are getting better for most, but not all. It’s particularly striking to see countries backslide.
By sabik, 1 day, 8 hours after the fact
It might be worth remembering, though, that most of the hysteria was at the beginning, when a clear picture was not available, and most of it was around the fear was that the strain was similar to the 1918 strain — which killed 50-100 million people. An 8-digit death-toll.
That’s the problem with comparing current news and history; the patterns of availability of information are quite different. Which, I guess, is the point of your post.
By David Golding, 1 day, 9 hours after the fact
All the booby prizes are awarded to the media for engaging in self-serving exaggeration rather than rational reporting. In the cases of disease, not one life was saved by uninformed speculation.