“The Bubonic Plague swept through Europe with no remorse. Because Europeans liked compact housing and streets filled with sewage, they basically asked for some disease in their life. The filth meant rats carrying billions of fleas. Those fleas spread the plague like wildfire.”
The Seven Worst Plagues in History
Yeah, the HIV/AIDS plague is preventable. Yet, the deaths are still increasing and show no signs of slowing down.
Deaths are NOT increasing, but in fact have been decreasing for over a decade.
Maybe just me, but very annoying that the writer didn’t know that Yersinia is a bacterium, not a virus.
I think it’s disputed that the Black Death killed as much as 60% of the population. One other factor that made it worse though was superstition especially that cats were blamed, as the cats killed the rats that carried the fleas. This is a good example of correlation not being the same as causation.
From an economics perspective the irony was the Black Death caused the largest increase in per capita wealth in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire if not ever. This was because capital (I use the term here in the accounting sense: property, plant and equipment) was largely fixed, so the smaller population got to use the largely fixed amount of capital.
In classical economics this led to the false notion that there was a fixed amount of capital, a view that lasted well into the 19th Century even after The Industrial Revolution showed that productivity gains increased capital. This is reflected in Charles Dickens in a Christmas Carol using the phrase ‘surplus population.’ The four great Classical Economists, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Malthus (the dismal economist) and even David Ricardo (who showed the benefits of free trade and the gains from trade) all were proponents of ‘The Iron Law of Wages’ that raising wages for some people would result in either lower wages for others or greater unemployment.
This was why they opposed relief for the poor (as also expressed by Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Dickens was well versed on economics and Scrooge was meant to be a mouthpiece of Classical Economists.) The full theory of The Iron Law of Wages’ is that relief for the poor would encourage them to have more children which would result in a larger population sharing the fixed amount of capital which would mean ultimately everybody would be poorer.
For the likes of Ricardo who recognized at least somewhat the reality of economic growth, there was a lack of appreciation of compound growth, that even (real) growth (net of inflation) of 2% a year results in a (real) doubling of the economy in just 36 years. (The rule of 72 with compounding.)