The Worst Year Ever?
How bad or good is 2020 by historical comparison? Should we stop moaning and just be glad we weren’t living through 536 AD or 541 AD?
We mull over how to go about determining the overall amount of suffering in a given year and what constitutes the worst year ever. How should it be measured? Is the size of the human race at the time relevant? And are we predisposed to recency bias, where terrible events in the past are largely ignored?
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
- Is 2020 the worst year ever?
- List of natural disasters by death toll
- List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll
- The Toba Catastrophe Theory
- The ‘536 AD’ theory
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer, about Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Tom Spence, Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing the worst year ever. And unusually, because of the lockdown, we're partly recording this remotely, but partly recording this in person. Nick, how's your year going?
Speaker B: net, the internet thinks that: Speaker A: r example, you could say like: Speaker C: pretty bumper year for you in: Speaker A:year where, was there a year out there where pretty much, you know, well, this population now, what, 7 billion or so, 8 billion, I don't know around the planet? Can we find a year where
Speaker B:pretty much everyone had a bad year? Yeah. I mean, so we have, there's two, right from the start, there's the question of, are we interested in like the total number of badness, which is going to be an absolute number, the number, total badness times number of people, or are we interested in the average badness per person? And I think they answer two different questions. Yeah. The first one is, is very much about in which year was the maximum amount, the most unhappiness experienced, the most badness. The other question, which is, you know, badness per capita is answering the question, which year was it most bad to be alive? So if you were, or if you were one of the people around at the time, in which year would it have been the worst year to be one of those people? So, you know, in other words, in a year where there was, you know, the population was only 1 billion, it's something that affected half a billion people. Well, it would have a 50% chance of affecting you. But today, same thing affecting 1 billion people would cause more badness, but have less of a chance of affecting. And I think to sort of
Speaker C: th, you know, between sort of: Speaker A:point Nick was making there. It's a thorny issue. Tom, how have you come at this? Yeah, well, I
Speaker D:think one of the things we need to take account of here is that there's a clear kind of recency bias when we're looking at worst years ever. Because the more recent you get, the more recorded bad events are, you know, there are going to be years way back in history, what might have been really, really terrible that we just don't know much about. And, you know, obviously, there's been a lot of work with ice cores and so on, trying to look at climatic conditions in the past, seeing when there were major droughts, volcanic eruptions and things. But beyond that, we don't have nearly as much information. And I think that ties into what Chris was saying about how also, you know, in more recent bad years, they've affected more people. So there's kind of two factors. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker A:that asteroid or whatever it was that wiped out all those dinosaurs, that was a pretty bad year.
Speaker B:Yeah, but if there were zero humans, then there's no denominator for the, you know, misery per human. And I mean, if we're going to go with the percentage of humans alive at the time as a sort of, you know, reasonable measure, then you've got to ask yourself, well, what about, you know, when there was a tiny band of 25 humans or the dawn of humankind? You know, if one of them died, that's going to compare with the Spanish flu. It's going to be, you know, as terrible. This one person, you know, who tripped over a rock and died. Terrible year. Yeah, well, but of course, as Tom says, you know, we can't delve that far back. But we can only imagine that things like that would have happened. And I think I've got a few things which might be worth mentioning later
Speaker C:on. And we know that we kind of, we intuit this because, you know, that's why it's okay to sort of make jokes about Genghis Khan, but not so much about Hitler. You know, this recency bias is a clear factor. And the question is, is that true? So, you know, is lots of suffering a long time ago, diminished in some way to us now? And does that count? Good question. So look, in terms of
Speaker A:which direction we go in, do we want to, because you've talked about sort of... Well, I've attempted
Speaker B:to actually answer this question. Yeah, exactly. Have you picked out some years? Have you picked out some stuff? Oh, yeah. I've done the math. Go for it. Okay, well, I mean, Tom, I don't know,
Speaker D:have you had a look at any stats? Yeah, well, I have a candidate year from what I've looked at. Well, my kind of year is 536 AD, because I've gone for kind of a proportional suffering approach. So when suffering has impacted the largest percentage of the world's population, because in 536, you had a generally a pretty bad year. For most of the year, you know, a lot of years back were quite bad, there were famines, there were wars, and so on. But then it got compounded a little bit by something, scientists aren't entirely sure what, but current theories are a volcanic eruption, either in, I think, El Salvador or Iceland, that essentially... Close together. Yeah, one or the other. That sort of blanketed out the sun for 18 months. So crops failed worldwide. You know, in the Irish annals, there are records of bread failures. Snow fell in August in China, destroying the crops there. Apparently, there was a kind of a mysterious fog that covered the whole of Europe and the Middle East for, yeah, about a year and a half. So I think that was a pretty
Speaker A:terrible year. Do we have any idea? I mean, it must be very difficult to say, but how many people died
Speaker D:must be very difficult. So yeah, it's a tricky one in terms of absolute numbers, because their records weren't fantastic. And we actually have much better records from a few years later, because as if that wasn't bad enough, in 41, there was another volcanic eruption that sort of stunted the recovery from 536. And then the Plague of Justinian hit the Byzantine Empire. So pretty bad decade, but I'd go for 36 itself. I think that's a nice sort of a nice starter.
Speaker B: s up there. And then you have: Speaker A:It's going to be like 100.
Speaker B: n. The Ashgabat earthquake of: Speaker C: mother was born in Austria in: Speaker B: Yeah. So it's like: Speaker C:Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker A:I think that's a good point. And so that means, as I think you're saying then, Nick, as we get more recent, it does get worse. Because exactly as you say, we're used to having a nice life.
Speaker B: ou would just look less risky: Speaker C:through that, that the the this, you know, this is the sort of the potential kind of dead end of negative utilitarianism, this idea that, you know, it is your, it's our, you know, our rights to our aim is to reduce suffering, and, you know, across across humanity, and that the sort of the extreme extension of that argument is that it's incumbent on humanity to commit suicide to prevent any future suffering in in, you know, downstream. And clearly, we've got this balance between you know, dying, dying is not is not really, you know, at the point at which you die suffering, suffering ends, it's the people who are left who, who engage in the suffering, right? So, so number of deaths is is obviously bad, but in terms of how bad it is for everyone remaining, you know, that's, that's what we're really sort of trying to trying to focus on and the distress in the run up to the to the dying as well.
Speaker A:Yeah, exactly. And actually, there's a point maybe adjacent to that, maybe it's the same thing that I want to, I know, you've got something you want to talk about, Nick, but, but let's say that you are in the Byzantine Empire, and you're having a lovely time around 530 odd. And you're a farmer, you're out every day, it's nice and sunny, you're in your early 30s. And then you get this horrible plague and you die. Okay, you had a pretty nice life, though. But imagine that you've just come through the First World War in the trenches and all your mates die and get blown to bits everywhere. And you horrible, depressing time, your shell shocked, you come home, think, thank God I made it alive. And then your girlfriend dies. And then your mum dies, and everyone dies of the Spanish flu. And, yeah, isn't, isn't that worse? Isn't that worse? I don't know. So I don't know if we're speaking to the same thing there or not, Chris. I mean, that's just if the Spanish flu is just real kicking the teeth once you're down kind of thing. Yeah, anyway, Nick.
Speaker B:No, I think actually, I think Tom was going to say something. Tom, go for it.
Speaker D:Oh, yeah, I think I agree with Chris here, really, that using kind of fatalities as our almost default metric for suffering is tricky, because, you know, really, if we're looking at suffering, we should be looking at hardship, right? It might be that there's a year when everyone is starving, but not that many people end up dying. There's still an awful lot of suffering in that year. But it might not register if we're just looking at death rates. And that, that I think is why it's easy to consider wars and diseases and things. But there's definitely more than those kind of headline events that causes suffering.
Speaker A:We're all saying the same thing, right?
Speaker B: and, and not any since since: Speaker A:So sorry, is that?
Speaker B: dying, on average, was about: Speaker C: le that was bad in, you know,: Speaker D: choice for worst year ever is: Speaker A:I like this, we've got somewhere, it's a little bit more nuanced than what's worse, what's best, and just measuring it by deaths or not. We're sort of fairly close to want to wrap up. There's a question I want to go on to finish off on. But before we do that, yeah, do we, I mean, despite what we said, those caveats, do we want to label a year? Do we want to give a year to this or not?
Speaker B:Well, there's one more thing to consider, which is the Toba catastrophe.
Speaker A:The what?
Speaker B:It's only a theory that it happened, but it's fairly well backed up by genetics and sort of the geological record. But there's this theory that in the year 75,000 BC, there was some sort of ginormous volcanic eruption, which puts the old sixth century to shame. There was no mysterious fog. It was sort of, it would have been global nuclear winter type thing. And they think that the population of humans may have fallen by some enormous factor. I mean, something like, you know, 80 or 90% of humans or more, you know, could have been killed or could have died at the time. Because there's this sort of genetic bottleneck, they think, you know, sort of a far smaller number of ancestors, basically, than we should have. Yeah. So that's, I thought that'd be worth mentioning. I mean, it speaks to Tom's point from a while back, you know, about just because it was in prehistory doesn't mean it didn't happen. So yes, that's the only other, I mean, you can only imagine that things like that have occurred frequently. But I think it's probably also fair to say that a lot of these kinds of catastrophes have only recently been able to happen on a global scale. You know, volcanoes are one of the few things that can have a global impact. Certainly pandemics can't, not when you don't have a global economy. You can't have, you couldn't have had pandemics until, you know, the last thousand years or so. Certainly not global ones. And, you know, and then obviously wars, you know, have to be quite small scale until your, you know, until the last couple of hundred years. And so I think we're living in a time of unprecedented peace and happiness, but also a time where risks are far
Speaker C:more likely to be global. Well, and therefore their effects are concentrated in terms of time. So, you know, what would have taken decades to spread across the planet might happen in the space of a couple of months now because of travel. So actually, you know, there's a case for saying the risk of something dramatically bad happening on a global scale has gone up.
Speaker A: t we can say probably is that: Speaker B:Definitely. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually a great, great time to be alive.
Speaker C:I mean, it does directly affect me. So, you know, from that point of view, it's one of my worst years. And that's really all I care about, to be honest.
Speaker A:Exactly. And indeed, that's what I want to come on to.
Speaker B:I don't even think it's my worst year. I've actually had a great time.
Speaker A:Yeah. No, me too. Look, that's how I want to finish this off. I want to ask. I think Tom was about to say something. Were you going to say something there, Tom?
Speaker D: do a quick Google search for: Speaker A:Exactly. Yeah. Post-Holocaust and the raiders are still trying to get out to get us. We've got to get that petrol no matter what we do. OK, look, what I want to talk about is you take this as well. I want to talk about either your worst year personally ever or your best year personally ever. You can decide. Are we happy to talk about that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good one. Yeah. And you can do both. You can do one or the other. Who wants to go first?
Speaker C: recollections whether it was: Speaker D: hat up as well, which is that: Speaker C:Well, there you go. Yeah, Electro Pop. What's not to love about Electro Pop? It was the future and it still is.
Speaker B:You're the potential music candidate for worst year. But anyway, Tom, do you just happen to know that? I do. Yeah. Yeah. Great pub tribute.
Speaker C:It's remarkable.
Speaker A:Chris, you were going to say you're worst year.
Speaker C: s,: Speaker A: n terms of best year, I think: Speaker B:He's only about 12.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker B:He's literally, they're going to be the same year.
Speaker D:I don't have as many years to choose from. I'm only 25. So every year, Chris said there is out of scope for me.
Speaker C:We're going back to that whole prehistory thing. They were great, Tom, even without you.
Speaker D: What happened in: Speaker A: eah. Well, just watch out for: Speaker D:Yeah, it's coming for me. Nick?
Speaker B: s culture. But personally,: Speaker A: 've got a few standout years.:
