Blame the Gerbils | Hacker News Reader

Blame the Gerbils

lrb.co.uk

45 pointsVigier15 comments

>England did not return to its pre-plague population until about 1625, 280 years after the first strike. During most of that period Western Europe had about half the population it had in 1345. And yet 1400-1500 ‘is the very century in which Western Europe’s global expansion began’, the period of what has been called ‘the Great Divergence’ between Europe and the rest of the world. ‘The Black Death and the Rise of Europe’, as Belich’s subtitle has it, do seem to be linked in time, and it may not be a coincidence.

This period also coincided with the renaissance and the European wars of religion. Europe was a busy place.

https://archive.is/4YwT6

After reading this, "Celebrating the Gerbils" may be a more apt title. He is "blaming" them for the rise of Europe via the after effects of the transmission of a terrible disease. It is a sort of justification for the policy positions of a recent Marvel villain.

  Gamora : I was a child when you took me.
  Thanos : I saved you.
  Gamora : No. We were happy on my home planet.
  Thanos : You were going to bed hungry, scrounging for scraps. Your planet was on the brink of collapse. I'm the one who stopped that. You know what's happened since then? The children born have known nothing but full bellies and clear skies. It's a paradise.
  Gamora : Because you murdered half the planet.
  Thanos : A small price to pay for salvation.

Unrelated, but surely thanos would need to murder half the universe every few years to keep the charade running

Yeah, he divided a geometric curve by 2

Yes, this always extremely bothered me.

He's known as the Mad Titan, not the Smart Titan.

it wouldn't help either as the overpopulation ,war, recovery cycle is evolutionary engraved in every living beeing. We whorship those instinct cycles abd adaptions as god ob this planet. And we only temporarily escaped that combustion chamber of a situation with science and a planet to burn. We cant even plan properly for this situation because as soon aa we reach a cycle valley its all "never again", comically villifying the past, believing in insane ideas like infinite growth , that is necessary to keep the exponential from slamming into the linear. Every creature on earth goes through this,all the time. we are loop deformed .

Thanos had a horrible policy. In many cases it wouldn't help (either it would cause societal collapse or things would go back to being a problem), and even when it does it would usually not be worth it.

If he has to get rid of 50% of the people, shouldn't he at least put them into some sort of computer system, so the remaining people could at least talk to them after?

Then put a guardian system in orbit around every planet to protect the uploads and prevent any recurrences of problems.

Bro its a movie.

I didn't watch it (I read a plot summery) but I did watch what I think was Captain America or Captain America: The Winter Soldier and they had a guy uploaded into a computer. That's earlier in the timeline, right? So it's proven doable in the universe they set up with the films.

Yeah but that doesn't sell movie tickets

I don't exactly know how you drew your conclusion from the text, but the justification that you've identified with the aid of that movie dialogue makes sense to me. Although I don't read the justification itself from the book review, the example you're giving seems to indicate to the inherent bias that I would expect from a book that covers European expansion.

So are you interpreting that the book is framing European expansion post-plague as Europe "saving" territories that didn't experience the advantages that they did?

If so, good catch and a cautionary tale.

> It is a sort of justification for the policy positions of a recent Marvel villain.

Just because it goes against someone's taste doesn't mean it isn't true. Historical analysis obviously shouldn't depend on whether it jibes with the sentiments of people who write Marvel characters.

We do have a real world example of this effect that's much more recent than the plague, China's one child policy. And one outcome is exactly what's observed in the article, higher household saving and educational spending per child and as a consequence accelerated capital accumulation in one generation. By creating a smaller cohort and funneling all resources into that cohort they leapfrogged over the high population growth low per capita investment Malthusian trap that the article talks about.

https://personal.lse.ac.uk/jink/pdf/onechildpolicy_ccj.pdf

There was talk of gerbils !!!

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