These are the rules of a game (not a good game): you can choose where you are born. You cannot choose when, or what stratum of society you will occupy. Any date is as likely as any date - you are not more likely to be born recently simply because the world is more populous now. Pick a place.
Basically, unless you are a lunatic, you want to minimise your chances of having an unremittingly grim and brutal life, because your chances of lucking out and being rich are minimal. Western Europe and the USA score pretty highly. They are fertile. Obviously, there are lots of wars, but things are more fine than not and you can grow stuff. Russia tends to be run by maniacs, but there is a good chance you are in some village miles away from the maniacs. But then you might be somewhere where nothing grows and winter is so cold that you have to basically hibernate.
So, you are thinking, peasant life in fertile China might be ok. And indeed it might. But before you make your decision, let me run you through some of most bloody wars in history: Number one is WWII, unsurprisingly. But at number two is the An Shi Rebellion (35m), at number four is the Qing Conquest of the Ming (25m), number five is the Taiping Rebellion (could easily have been 30m) and number eight is the Muslim Rebellion (10m). Four of the top eight are pure Chinese. The An Shi Rebellion killed that many in the middle ages, when if you wanted to kill a lot of people, you had to do it the hard way.
Given that numbers one (WWII - 60m), three (Mongol Conquests - 35m) and maybe even six (Tamberlaine - 16m) didn't miss China, and that the number one human created disaster was Mao's famine (somewhere in the 30ms), it doesn't look great for the Middle Kingdom.
Of course, there are a lot of Chinese and the proportions are what really count. The Congo has been bad. I think that Namibia really suffered under the Germans (being colonised has never been a picnic, but the Germans and Belgians were HORRIBLE). I haven't time to really crunch the stats, but just look at those numbers for China. They are astonishing. And most of them happened a while ago. I think China's population was about 500m at the end of WWII. I don't know what it was before 1877, which is when the last of the non-WWII massacres took place.
3 comments:
550 million at the end of WW2. But I think if one crunches the stats over time, China probably shapes up the same as Europe - you have very long stretches of general peace and prosperity, interspersed with bloody interludes, of which the worst is 1877-1976. The good times are, most of the time, better than the good times in Europe, because you have higher social mobility and general prosperity; the bad times are worse, barring extremes like the 30 Years War, etc. Ukraine is probably worse from 1914-1949, though.(Those An Shi figures are way off; that's the number of people who dropped off the tax rolls, not the number of dead. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people avoid tax in the middle of a vast rebellion.)
If we can pick specific countries, then your best bet is England. (Yay, patriotism!) Relative lack of really vicious civil wars or massacres, solved the food problem earlier than the rest of Europe, politically stable. Otherwise North America is actually a pretty good choice - unless you end up born as a native around, say, 1500-1900, but stats wise you're more likely to end up of European-descent then. Otherwise the pre-Columbian lifestyle probably compares favorably to medieval Europe, judging by how impressed the first Europeans were by the health and grace of the natives.
This game is like John Rawls with teeth.
Switzerland. Neutrality and chocolate.
Is it too smart-alecky to pick some small, fairly recently settled island like Tristan de Cunha? A quick skim of Wikipedia doesn't seem to suggest that anything worse than a fire in a fishing factory has ever happened there.
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