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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Or, the automobile, the industrial revolution, and a booming population through agriculture and medical improvements led to economic prosperity, despite a deadly plague.

It's a pretty hard case to make that a disease which disproportionately killed health 20-30 year-olds led to mass prosperity.

Given all the advancements which were happening in the early 20th century, I'm inclined to say that prosperity happened in SPITE of WWI and the Spanish Flu. Who knows where we would be, had we avoided two huge human catastrophes.

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> It's a pretty hard case to make that a disease which disproportionately killed health 20-30 year-olds led to mass prosperity.

That's exactly what happened during the black plague. It lead to the end of feudalism. A shortage of labor will absolutely boost the value of labor.

In modern terms - it might have caused a drop in total GDP - but it achieved growth in GDP per capita.

Not sure that's worth the cost of course.

Which is not what's happening with covid, if anything the opposite, with locked up and made all those young healthy people unemployed causing an increase in available labour

I think this is questionable logic, the last statement I mean. The Black Death killed nearly half the total population of Europe across all age groups (in some regions and whole cities, it even wiped out 70% or more of their inhabitants. That level of life destruction creates an immense, definitive shortage of labor for the urgent needs of a devastated society. The 1918 pandemic killed tens of millions, but proportionally, this was a comparatively miniscule fraction of the world population and of the working population in the industrialized world of 1919 onward. Certainly not enough to heavily affect labor supply or cause massive changes in how working populations relate to their employers

I understand there's a pretty solid consensus that it did. In some places, serfdom effectively ended. But we don't have to guess. We can just look it up and find that people who know a lot more about it than us have come to those conclusions.

I think you misunderstood my previous comment. I don't at all question that the Black Death ended serfdom, or at least weakened it severely after so many dead. As I stated, I was questioning the application of this same chain of events and logic to the 1918 pandemic, for the population proportion reasons I already mentioned above.

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