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”
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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.
But statistic make brain feel good! Car bad!
Woah woah, mind your language! We say “fuck cars” here!
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
Yes, that’s what I wrote, but thank you for finding a source to back it up.
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.
Like salad forks?
Pitch forks
You’ve got me curious of the actual value regarding fork deaths lol
This is what is called inflammatory.
To legitimately compare the two, you’d have to combine all of the war deaths into one bar and use a set time frame, like others have noted.
How far back in time do you think we have to go until war has killed more people than traffic has?
1950 as far as I can tell. Every year since then, traffic has killed more people than wars.
Why? This isn’t making the statement cars cause more deaths than all wars, it’s saying it causes more deaths than specific wars. When people say Spanish flu caused more deaths than WWI or that COVID was killing more people a day than 9/11 you don’t turn that on it’s head and demand you compare the flu to all wars or COVID to all terrorist attacks. It’s just a metric to show the human cost of things, which makes a lot of sense to people who live in a market economy who want to put a price on everything. You can’t compare apples and oranges, you can compare the cost of apples and oranges though.
You have the granularity of individual wars yet the composite of all car/vehicle deaths (worldwide?) compared to each other. The chart just appeals to the abstract and doesn’t really offer much use other than to inflame the reader’s emotions.
Do you think statements like COVID was killing more people per day than 9/11 or that it has killed more people than WWII in the u.s. inflammatory?
If so is that a bad thing? A graph showing the amount of malnourished children in the u.s. would be very inflammatory to progressives, just as a chart showing the amount of immigrants entering the u.s. would be inflammatory to trump supporters. Factual agitprop isn’t objectively bad it’s just subjectively bad depending on what you think people should be angry about.
Subjectively you may disagree that car deaths are something to be angry about but objectively the graph is fine unless it’s false or misleading. Its not stating or implying that cars are more deadly than all wars combined, it’s stating that cars have killed more than some specific wars. Whether that fact makes you angry is up to you.
If it’s per day, it’s per day. That’s a fair equivalency
You would in this case only compare deaths to cars across the same time frame
Ok, then since 1914 cars have killed more people than WWI, that’s the same time frame. We don’t look at deaths from WWI that way though because we view it as a discrete event that took place between 1914 and 1918 and look at that event. No one compares wars by deaths per year, it’s deaths per war. We look at how many people were killed because of this thing, be that war, disease or technologies, that is the human cost of that thing.
If you look at the cost of things that were paid monetarily you don’t look at the cost per year, at least not after the fact. If your comparing the cost of your house that you paid $10,000 a year totalling to $200,000 to a car you bought all at once for $10,000 you don’t say they cost the same or they can’t be compared, the house cost more.
Lol dude. If you want to compare car deaths to ww1 the most broad you could be would be to pick a given 4 year period (the length of WW1).
But 1914 to 1918 were particular years, with particular car usership. So are you trying to compare car deaths between 1914 to 1918? I doubt it.
So, you are really talking about needing a shared denominator. Time is convenient. So we look at ww1 as deaths/war/4(years) thus you have relative deaths/year for the given conflict. Now you can take those figures anywhere, and consider car deaths from any year.
So you can then say things like: “car deaths in (year) were on par with ww1 deaths for a year” which is a consistent, logical, and non bait statement. And also has quite a bit of gravity on its own.
If you don’t constrain for a shared unit of time, then all bets are off. Old age has killed orders on magnitude more people than cars. Heart attacks while shitting has probably killed more people than cars. It’s the timespan that really matters.
What were fundamentally talking about here is cost of human lives. And any cost can be added up for something and compared to the cost of another thing, as long as the units are the same.
Again if you buy a house over 30 years and pay $10,000 a year you can say that house cost you $300,000. You can then compare that to the car you also payed $10,000 a year for but over 4 years and say that the car cost you $40,000. You don’t say well since I only payed for the car for 4 years so I should only compare it to the 4 years I payed for the house, so the house actually only cost $40,000. We understand that we should look at total monetary cost over time for things. If you don’t than you end up in credit card debt because why would you pay off your $100 debt when you can pay $5 minimum payment, you bought a coffee for $5 the other day and that wasn’t that much. Then 5 years down the line you ended up paying $500 in total and are still paying it because you haven’t addressed the problem/principal.
If you agree that loss of life, like a dollar, is all of equal value, whether your rich or poor, from the u.s. or Africa, or born 2 years ago or 200, then this argument holds true.
In this sense you can compare old age to cars and old age probably costs more but there’s less we can do about it. Just like you can say that buying food will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your life but that’s just the price of living, it’s necessary. Meanwhile that extra $500 you spent on your credit card is completely unnecessary and could have been avoided if you had decided to solve the problem instead of letting it fester and slowly drain you.
The best way to get to that person with that problem is to show them what they’ve spent on that problem in total and compare it to something more tangible, eg. you could’ve bought a PlayStation with that money. That person could realize that they need to fix the issue then, or they could continue to ignore it and end up paying thousands over there lifetime, and we could end up ignoring cars and let 70 million people die over the next century.
I dislike car oriented urban design, car oriented laws, car prioritising people, and cars as a symbol of social status…
I don’t hate cars themselves.
Same. I consider them a marvel of engineering and an extremely useful tool. But, like any tool, they can be used incorrectly and cause damage.
I don’t hate cars themselves.
I do
Is that for the same timeframe? Worldwide? Can only see the article abstract, and it says “since their invention”. I mean it is a bit apples and oranges, I get what its meant to say but nowadays we have more car deaths than war deaths (or not?) because there is less war and more cars.
If we’re doing stuff “since their invention”, it should stack the sum of people that died in every war to every car death so far.
But this is just a bad post someone thought would get cheap validation on a niche community.
You know it’s not. 6 years for war and I assume close to 100 years for the car.
It’s a dumb post
This is certainly a take…
A lot of European cities that were built for cars were rebuilt after being destroyed in WWII. The US destroyed cities, leveled cultural artifacts that can never be replaced, and did so to itself. The US feels like it’s been through a war, but it’s just been cars the whole time.
Death from old age kills exponentially more. Let’s focus on that?
There isn’t something like “death from old age”, everyone dies because of something, like a cardiac arrest, organ dysfunction or an undiscovered tumor.
That is at best a hypothesis, though I agree with you. Until we start really caring about death and doing proper autopsies, we can’t be sure. Today, there are still a lot of death certificates where the cause of death is listed as “dude just old”.
Because it doesn’t matter. Wasting time on finding out if grandma had a tumor, cardiac arrest, organ failure, or a seizure ultimately doesn’t matter because if it wasn’t X, it would’ve been Y, or Z. The organs don’t grow back the same quality, and it detotiates every time, so at some point you are frail, and all your organs are failing, and it’s gonna get you sooner or later.
Wasting manpower to find it out for statistics sake is just plain dumb. Also nobody wants doctors to cut their 90 year old gramps just for the sake of statistics.
That data could point to where we need research. Imagine you could have another two years with grandpa, every grandpa, and all it took was more data.
I understand that more time with your relatives is always a plus, but not everyone is enjoying life climbing down a flight of stairs for 15 minutes, taking 5 different meds every day, and fearing everying illness having you go to the hospital. Life is not always enjoyable when old, and keeping grandpa on life support could be viewed as cruel from them. Speaking from experience.
Life has a 100% mortality rate.
*so far
People are working on it. A good start is trying to live as long as you can. I would advise avoiding sugar, processed food.
I found a video interview of someone aged 82 who looked and moved like someone less than half that age. A beef farmer. They seem on the right track. They don’t eat anything they don’t grow or hunt
I wanna see the overlap of deaths by cars during wartime as weapons. Cuz if you think about it, a tank is just a big car with a gun on it.
Why is there no NGO campaigning against Mongols running over children? They’re relentless, it seems
What if Mongols had cars instead of horses…?
They would have lost. They drank mares milk and a primary food source. Their ride was their food basically.
Oh. Yeah. Motor oil and gasoline doesn’t make for a very good diet.
If the Mongols did that much on their own, how much did all motorcycle gangs do combined?
