That article does not demonstrate the world is 100 times safer than 100 years ago. For a start, it only considers natural disasters. You argument succeeds in showing that people today are far less likely to die in floods, earthquakes or famines than they were a century ago. But that is not the same as proving that the world is "safer". The article narrows the definition of safety until only one type of risk remains. Yes, modern societies are better at predicting storms, treating disease and rebuilding after disasters. But safety is about more than avoiding death from natural hazards. It also means asking whether we live under the shadow of nuclear weapons, cyberwarfare, terrorism, authoritarianism, economic shocks and other threats that barely existed, or existed on a far smaller scale, in 1926. To point to falling disaster deaths and declare the world safer overall is rather like noting that a ship has better lifeboats while ignoring that it is now carrying explosives in the hold. The argument also assumes that progress simply removes dangers, when in reality it often replaces old dangers with new ones. Wealthier societies can withstand many natural disasters better than ever before, but they are also more dependent on fragile global supply chains, digital infrastructure and complex technologies whose failure can have worldwide consequences. Events since 2020 demonstrate that; we ran out of face masks, then we ran out of computer chips, then we ran out of silicates, all of which had various effects on our safety. 100 years ago, we weren't dependent on urea and helium from Qatar to fertilise our crops and to enable our life saving MRI scanners. Global averages further obscure the fact that many poorer countries remain highly vulnerable to conflict, displacement and environmental shocks. The real question is not whether humanity has become better at managing traditional hazards—it plainly has—but whether we should congratulate ourselves for becoming experts at surviving yesterday's threats while creating entirely new risks that previous generations never had to contemplate. You will find that is harder claim to prove, and you need more than a rather superficial analysis from a couple of Cato Fellows. Its interesting to pick the year of 1924 as the starting point for when the world got "safer". In 1922, Alexander Fleming presented his research on lysozymes; he said that people at the time didn't recognise the importance of his discovery, the first anti-microbial proteins. That interest in anti-microbials lead him to recognising penicillin for what it was. In 1924, you could say the world had entered the period of scientific anti-microbials. Those antibiotics improved our survival from previous killer infections. They made it possible for us to survive surgeries that, biologically, we have no right in surviving. Imagine returning to a world where you can longer survive heart surgery, a colorectal sectioning. Forget about transplant surgery. And that knee replacement you were looking forward to? Tough, get used to a walking stick like your grandad. And that research into anti-microbials also kickstarted research into biological warfare. Ken Alibek was a scientist-colonel in the Soviet programme. He says he was tricked, as a medical doctor, into signing up, as he was told it was all about developing new cures for the plague. When actually it was about developing antibiotic weaponised strains of Yersinia pestis. Antibiotics have also enabled livestock yields to increase, and allows us to raise chickens on a mixture of faeces and dead chickens. Does that KFC taste as good in 2026 as your remember it from 1976? The age of antibiotics is under threat. There isn't really a pipeline for replacements, so we might be facing a cliff face. There is a strong case that, despite remarkable improvements in health and disaster preparedness, the world is in some respects less safe than it was a century ago because modern civilisation has created entirely new categories of risk that are global, instantaneous and potentially catastrophic. The clearest example is the advent of nuclear weapons. In 1924, no state possessed the ability to destroy entire cities in minutes, let alone threaten human civilisation itself. Today, thousands of nuclear warheads remain in existence, deployed on high-alert systems capable of being launched within minutes. We've come perilously close to disaster on several occasions, such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 incident in which Petrov correctly identified an apparent missile attack as a false alarm, arguably averting a potential nuclear exchange. A century ago, no comparable risk existed. Arguably, we are now in a post-MAD era, where world leaders are now more petulant; nuclear weapons are no longer something that keeps the bottle marked war closed, they are an enabler of violence (no one will touch me as I attack my neighbour etc, because I have nukes)/ I see that modern societies are also uniquely vulnerable because they depend upon highly complex and interconnected systems. I alluded to supply chain strains that have surfaced in the last 6 years. In 1926, a local power outage, banking failure or communications disruption was largely just that—local. Today, if you have a fault in a major undersea cable, disruption to satellite navigation systems, or a cyberattack on critical infrastructure can have cascading effects across multiple countries and sectors simultaneously. The 2021 blockage of the Suez Canal by the container ship Ever Given demonstrated how a single incident could disrupt global supply chains, delay billions of dollars of trade and affect industries worldwide. Such tightly coupled systems increase efficiency, but they also create vulnerabilities that previous generations simply did not face. It took 2 years for the flu strain that caused the 1918 Pandemic to get to Europe. It took Sars-Cov-2 24 hours to establish a foothold, enabled by the same technology that you think makes us safer. A hundred years ago, humanity lacked the scientific capability to manipulate pathogens at the genetic level. Today, advances in molecular biology and gene-editing techniques offer enormous benefits for medicine, but they also raise the possibility of accidental releases from laboratories or the deliberate creation of more dangerous organisms. Literally you have bozos, locked in their California basements, biohacking themselves and biothreat agents. The experience of the COVID-19 illustrated how quickly a pathogen can overwhelm healthcare systems, disrupt economies and alter daily life worldwide. There is a broader point about the nature of risk itself. Our great grandparents faced many dangers but these threats were generally localised and familiar. Today's world has reduced many traditional risks, yet it has introduced hazards that are transnational, technologically complex and capable of affecting hundreds of millions of people simultaneously. We may be much less likely to die from a flood than our great-grandparents were, but we are also living in a civilisation where a computer error, a laboratory accident, a satellite failure or a misinterpreted military warning could have consequences on a scale that no one in 1926 had reason even to imagine. In that sense, humanity may have become safer from yesterday's dangers while becoming more exposed to risks of its own making. I'll give you an example where being rich made you less safe' Polio. The 40 year US polio epidemic was a disease of the middle classes. Previously, polio was endemic, the entire population was exposed because we drank and bathed in water containing sh*t. If you made it out of early childhood, chances are you had developed innate immunity. In the 1910s-20s, middle class households in the US started getting clean running water. Fantastic, don't have to bathe in <deleted> anymore. An outbreak in the 1920s became an epidemic, and left thousands of mostly middle class kids and young people, like Roosevelt, cripples. Then the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami; thousands of well off Westerners, killed in an instant, because they were wealthy enough to spend their Christmas holidays in a faraway tropical paradise. They could have stayed in northern Europe, which is fairly safe tectonically, doesn't really get extreme "big" weather, is quite benign. 100 years ago, there would have been no Swedes, Dutch, Brits, Australians, sunning themselves on a beach, only to be found as bloated, rotting corpses a few hours later.
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