sources:
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/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”
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.