sources:
https://mastodon.social/@mszll@datasci.social/111974118192304899
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
Image description:
A bar chart titled “Deaths from Wars & Cars” the Leftmost bar is WW2 at 78M, followed by Cars 72M, Mongols 39M, Taiping 25M, Ming Qing 25M, 2nd CN-JP 20M, and finally WW1 19M. A note at the bottom states “Showing estimate midpoints”
I… Don’t think you can compare those. Wars tend to be a lot shorter than the existence of cars, and I’d wager that more people have interacted with a car than people have been part of WW2.
Might want to do one with planes, trains, or really any other kind of transportation. That should paint roughly the same image, just with contextual relevance.
Yeah, the deaths from cars will continue to go up because people still use cars, but WW2 is over so the death toll will stay the same.
If you were to compare with planes or trains it would probably have to be a per capita or deaths per mile traveled comparison to be of any use.
Plane and train deaths are much, much lower than car deaths, even if you start from their inventions to present.
The death rate per 100 million passenger miles for passenger vehicles increased for the second consecutive year, increasing 1.8% to 0.57 in 2021. Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 20 times higher than for buses, 17 times higher than for passenger trains, and 595 times higher than for scheduled airlines. Other comparisons are possible based on passenger trips, vehicle miles, or vehicle trips, but passenger miles is the most commonly used basis for comparing the safety of various modes of travel.
Source: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode
Plus, I think you’d need to look at comparative population densities for the locations and periods measured. Like, sure cars killed more people than Mongols, but have cars ever been responsible for killing 11% of the global population comparative to when the accident count is taken?
The Mongols were objectively more deadly I think.
wars tend to be a lot shorter than the existence of cars
Yeah but depends on how you define wars. For example the mongol conquests is up there and that lasted a good 60 years. You could say thats multiple wars tied up in a single cause or crisis.
These events can be on a spectrum between the thirty years war, to the crisis of the third century and the three kingdoms period, each around 60 years, to the hundred years war. The longer it gets the more it goes from being about discrete battles in a war, to discrete conflicts in a war, to discrete wars in greater war/crisis.
Either way on the ground these crisis look the same for the common people. Armies repeatedly going back and forth over your land, looting, raping, killing and spreading disease and making your life miserable and after a few decades this becomes normalized. In this sense cars could be a good comparison, a persistent normalized threat constantly killing people.
The casualties for cars even in this context look greater. The three kingdoms period, probably the deadliest of these crisis, caused 30 million deaths. Why it doesn’t compare well though is that was half the population of China, whereas 70 million is probably only a couple of percent of the people who live in car centric countries.
Still not a bad metric to consider. The goal with vehicles is transportation and war obviously was subjugation. Deaths being a high metric when that’s not the intended purpose is alarming to say the least.
I do agree though the timeframe should be considered, and we should see the comparisons from different modes of transportation.
Now imagine how many people have died of forks in history.
Quite a bit more than WW2 or cars for that matter.
