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Comment by pmg | Hacker News Reader

Very quick napkin math calculation in the US: Annual U.S. deaths (approx.):

‘’’ • Cigarettes: 480,000 • Alcohol: 140,000 • Drug overdoses: 110,000 • Poor diet/obesity-related (heart disease, diabetes, stroke, etc.): ~650,000

Total: 1,380,000

U.S. population: ~335 million Deaths per 100,000: 412 ‘’’

So combined with the 8 violent deaths per year it washes out to be about the same as the 420:100,000 prehistoric figure. (Using very hand waivey numbers - and excluding things like traffic deaths that have a huge utility tradeoff).

What a wonderful insight!

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It really isn't. Even if we accept the premise that offering/advertising cigarettes is somehow equal to bashing someone's skull with a rock, there's still the problem of attributing all tobacco/alcohol/drug deaths as being perpetuated by others. In other words, it assumes people have no agency and pretends that all such deaths wouldn't happen if it wasn't for tobacco/alcohol/drug companies, which is absurd. Tobacco and alcohol are almost as old as civilization, for instance. Thus your calculations are at best, an upper bound for how much "violence" is being inflicted.

There's also the problem that as medicine and sanitation improves, deaths shift from causes that are hard to blame on anyone (eg. pneumonia) to deaths that can plausibly be blamed on society (eg. cancer, heart disease). Cancer deaths have gone up not because the environment has gotten more cancerous, it's because the non-cancer deaths have been eliminated. I doubt anyone would think that's a bad thing, even if you accept those things count as "violence".

That’s a fair point about personal agency, but it sidesteps the meat of the parent's comment: modern systems are engineered to obscure accountability. Many "personal" deaths - addiction, poor health, lack of care - aren't just random or self-inflicted. They emerge from structures built to deflect blame: lobbying, regulatory capture, and alegal negative externalities[1]. The issue isn't agency vs. violence - it's that our bureaucracies are designed to make harm invisible and responsibility untraceable.

Or as Stafford Beer wrote "the purpose of a system is what it does." The system we've built reliably produces death and violence - intentions or agency aside.

[1] https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2022/12/behind-the-scenes-...

Yeah, this is an interesting point! It would be very hard to quantify, but it feels fair to say there is a significant level of what might be called “covert violence” in modern society that would increase the numbers if it could be accurately measured, and wouldn’t have applied to prehistory. I would largely exclude things like alcohol and tobacco, but a lot of other things feel valid to include to me. And if you consider something like Covid-related deaths could be included, which I realise would be debatable, the numbers would rise significantly.

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