Famines and Epidemics Trigger Wars | Hacker News Reader

Famines and Epidemics Trigger Wars

insidescience.org

45 pointsNoRagrets56 comments

War causes famines. Ethiopia, for example. Certainly in the 20th century.

I can't read the paper, but the abstract says it's specifically about China in the years 1470-1911. Well, what on Earth could that say about our planet in the 21st century? One would think that studying famines and epidemics and wars of the 20th century would yield more statistics and lessons that would be a lot more relevant to the 21st century than any centuries previous to the 20th.

Given my knowledge of 20th century history, I'm quite ready to say that the title of this submission is simply backwards.

Moreover, the title of the submission does not match TFA's. And TFA's does not match the paper's (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095968361876154...). So I'm calling this click bait, and declaring it jumping to conclusions to the exclusion of general and widespread knowledge of 20th century history.

I think the point is to try to "prove" the opposite. Wars causing epidemics and famines is a well established fact and it's a "natural" part of mass scale conflict - men go to fight, men die, big swathes of land are damaged, foraging, etc. create conditions for famine, and meanwhile improper handling of the many dead coupled with the massive movements of people in closely cramped quarters ( be it armies moving, supplies, sieges, etc.) create conditions for epidemics. There's even cholera now in Ukraine due to the invasion.

So those two are nothing new. But the opposite, that unstable social conditions due to famine/epidemic causing social unrest causing war, is also interesting, has happened many times ( e.g. the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Arab Spring), and could be indicative of the future, as the article says - we're in for a lot of social unrest due to unstable social conditions due to climate change ( famines, epidemics, swathes of land becoming uninhabitable thus forcing migration, etc.).

Famines cause revolutions, for sure. Famines don't cause wars (except for revolutionary wars).

Otherwise the famines in Ukraine (30s), China (50s and 60s), Africa (80s), etc. might have caused wars, but they did not.

And it's been a while since we've seen famines even cause revolutions. Famously, of course, the French Revolution. Governments are very powerful now and can put down revolts before they gain steam. The Arab Spring revolts had external support. The wars in Libya and Syria were not caused by famine but by external powers getting involved in internal power struggles.

But if you insist, famines cause revolutions -> revolutions often fail -> failed revolutions often lead to wider war. Although the main example of this is... the French Revolution, 233 years ago. None of WWI, WWII, the Franco-Prussian war, the U.S. Civil War, the Crimean war, the Triple Alliance War, the Cold War, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the Iraq wars, the wars in Afghanistan, the Ukraine war, etc., were caused by famine. Not one! That's going back to the 1850s (Crimean war). That's a list of rather salient wars. Got any counter-examples?

Ww2 had as one of its causes the hyperinflation, which was a result of the excessive payments for WW1 repairs, as required by mainly France.

While not a full blown famine, the German people had serious economic problems (and hunger as a consequence), and a clear enemy causing them. This caused resentment and a feeding ground for extremists like Hitler.

Not really. The hyperinflation ended well before Hitler's rise. And the German people almost certainly did not want war.

Cf Wikipedia: Hyperinflation was until 1923 and the following invasion of the Ruhr for non payment by France until 1925. This is the same year Hitler famous book was published. He was a well known if infamous politician by then, wikipedia gives him 6.5% of votes in 1924.

Things were better in Germany for a few years and Hitler might have vanished into the background, until 1929, when the US stock market crashed, taking with it core loans the German Weimar republic needed. This crashed the economy again, while they were still recovering from the previous crash.

The NSDAP party started its meteoric rise in this second crash, buth only because the suffering from the hyperinflation and the war before it had laid a solid base.

I think more generally it is a great example of this bias we have of taking high dimension, complex processes and reducing things to one or two variables.

"The stock market went down today because of X"

We can't help ourselves even when we know this is a complete nonsensical over simplification.

I can't imagine any war in the last 2-3k years only has two causal variables in reality.

The title needs to be fixed.

"Famines and Epidemics Trigger Wars" has a very different connotation to "How Famines and Epidemics Trigger Wars", and is already leading to fruitless argument by the people who only read the title.

I think HN auto-removes "how" from titles

Yeah. It’s a good rule for click bait headlines, but there are also plenty of examples in which the modifier provides clarity, such as this case.

Studying this topic is very interesting in a world where climate change threatens to make whole regions essentially uninhabitable. I think the conflicts caused by climate change will be a much bigger threat to humanity than climate change itself.

I don't see these sorts of claims as falsifiable.

History is not a field where it's easy to make falsifiable claims (until we invent time machines). But I don't think that completely prevents us from learning something from the past.

"History is written by historians." Frank Herbert

> History is not a field where it's easy to make falsifiable claims (until we invent time machines). But I don't think that completely prevents us from learning something from the past.

"History is written by historians." Frank Herbert

Question: Is evolution falsifiable?

Of course it is. What has that got to do with anything?

It was a rhetoric to “I don't see these sorts of claims as falsifiable.”

Creationists regularly posit that Evolution is not falsifiable. Popperian falsifiability is being abandoned these days and instead Neumann’s definition of Science and scientific theory is increasingly embraced.

Isn’t that true of almost every field that deals with humans?

Health - coffee/alcohol is good for you this week and bad for you next week

Sociology and Psychology - is anything in these fields truly falsifiable?

History - same

That coffee and alcohol thing only happens in certain tabloids and other trash media. Both have positive and negative effects on your health depending on how much you drink of it. Having a little is fine, drinking it 24/7 is not.

The civil war in Syria started with a famine, which is certainly evidence for the claim. Culture preserves adaptation strategies long after those ideas become maladaptive.

But nature is bad enough. As a climatologist, what keeps me up at night is Bangladesh. A couple meters of sea level rise, and a direct hit from a super typhoon, and we could easily see millions of refugees. And as India continues its tilt towards a Hindu state, conflict could also happen there.

We apply a different standard here, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

The concept is equivalent to "Bring a coat, it might rain" not "It's going to rain"

It'll be as falsifiable as many other questions that historians grapple with (e.g. did famine X lead to conflict/instability Y?), but only once the warming has happened and we're looking retrospectively. The best we can do now is an educated guess that large amounts warming will lead to migration away from hotter countries which will lead to some instability.

Environmental stressors also make it far easier for an unscrupulous party to create a casus belli, and you should absolutely expect to see that happen in the next few years.

The US DoD has already said similar.

It makes intuitive sense to me. When there is pandemic there is social isolation which leads to distrust between people. And there is shortage of things which causes looting and crime. And what is war but social unrest on a large scale?

That would make sense if the claim was that epidemic cause civil wars, but it doesn't quite explain, say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- which is also the only currently ongoing 'hot' war directly between two nation-states.

Pandemic causes also isolation between nations. And they say Putin has been isolated for a long time. When you are isolated you started distrusting other people, including those of other nations.

I have no data on this just saying it makes intuitive sense to me. When people interact they realize it is good to interact. When they don't it is easy to be afraid.

I can believe it. And I don't think it's just trust. Having positive interactions with other people goes beyond that. If you have a fun time in another country this will stick in your mind. You will remember all the friendly people and you will want good things to happen to them. (If you have a bad time I could totally see the opposite happening).

The four horsemen of the apocalypse are Epidemic, Famine, War, and Death. I presume the people who first came up with this list already recognized the relationship between them from personal experience.

famine is the least of America's concerns, so I guess this is good news

Because America is the only country that matters?

Huh. Because famine and war wouldn't cause disruption to any of our supply chains?

Nor would it results in millions of people walking north, which of course wouldn't be a problem, we'd welcome them with open arms, right?

who is going to attack america, the Ocean?

And when you reason, how many steps of consequences do you consider?

Consider as a primary example the creations of famines to create emigration waves supposed to put pressure on intended recipient countries.

Yeah, people know this for a long time, since the Book of Revelation.

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