『Child Mortality』のカバーアート

Child Mortality

Child Mortality

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2026年5月12日まで。4か月目以降は月額1,500円で自動更新します。

概要

 This week we talk about industrialization, antibiotics, and child mortality rates.We also discuss corruption, instability, and progress.Recommended Book: Empire of Silence by Christopher RuocchioTranscriptDemographic transition is a social sciences theory that posits, based on all sorts of modern historical data, that societies tend to change, demographically, as they transition from a largely agrarian, low-industrial society, to that of a less-agrarian, high-industrial society.Most modern, post-hunter-gatherer societies have started out plowing the vast majority of their labor into bare subsistence, human beings spending their days, throughout their whole lives, working the land in order to produce enough food to live. All sorts of social and economic systems arose around this base-level fact, including those that tied laborers to the land, allowing for the rise of a leadership or ruling class, regional militaries, and other sorts of specialists. But until relatively recent history, the majority of people in a given society labored to produce raw essentials, and that was just the shape of things.This began to change with the dawn of the industrial revolution, and in some areas a bit before that, as precursor technologies allowed societies to produce more food and other essentials with less manual labor and using fewer foundational resources, like land. These technologies, as they became more widely distributed, more effective and efficient, and cheaper to deploy and operate, allowed more people to do more sorts of things, leading to a ballooning of industry and commerce in industrializing regions, and that allowed said regions to invest in other things, including medical knowledge, education, and so on.Life wasn’t exactly a cakewalk in these industrializing areas, and all sorts of new abuses and issues, including long hours at factories and problems related to pollution, arose and became common. But because these sorts of societies required professionals with new types of knowledge and know-how, and because they were able to sustain an increasing number of specialities beyond working the land to generate food and other bare necessities, keeping people alive, longer, and ensuring more people had the specialized knowledge required to do all those things, became more of a priority, and one that could actually be addressed because of the concomitant ability to feed and clothe and house and address more of the needs of more people.There were gobs of other spiraling forces in the mix, of course, including religion, politics, and so on, but that general tendency to shift away from raw subsistence into more complex and diverse economic systems was a driving factor behind a lot of what happened from around 1800 until, well, now.What I’d like to talk about today is a specific data point, or collection of data points, that arguably, more than any other such data points, show the benefits of the industrialized, modern society we’re living in, today, despite all the accompanying downsides.—So most societies, at this point, have undergone significant changes as a result of our widespread application of technologies that allow human beings to get more done with the same amount of effort.We’re able to generate more value, of all kinds, than our ancestors, and though it’s possible to criticize the change in priorities and focus on all the negative knock-on effects of these changes—and there are many such negative knock-on effects, like large-scale military conflicts and rampant pollution and climate change—it would be difficult to argue that there haven’t been some fairly significant upsides for humanity, as well.One key upside is related to that demographic transition I mentioned. As societies shift and it becomes better for everyone if more people know how to do more things, and it thus becomes a priority for more people to live long enough to use the knowledge and know-how they acquire, it has increasingly made more sense for governments to invest in our overall longevity and survivability.We can’t just say, I’d like everyone to live longer, and then snap our fingers and make that happen. But we can, and have, invested in technologies and systems that make longer lives more likely, and from 1800 onward that’s generally been the trend, with a huge upswing arriving in the mid-20th century, when a bunch of new tools and technologies, including things like modern antiseptics and early antibiotics, first arrived on the scene, dramatically reducing the mortality rate associated with all kinds of medical procedures.Arguably the most significant social gain during this period, though, has been the bogglingly large reduction in child mortality rates.Child mortality refers to the death of children under the age of five, and this figure is, today, usually expressed as the likelihood of a child under five dying, per 1000 children in an area. So you might say in India, the child death rate is 92 in 1000,...
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