Ada Palmer: prediction

Transcript context

…Why was living in the Renaissance worse than living during the Middle Ages? This is now Western and Central Europe. And also Southern Europe. The one-word answer is “progress,” counterintuitively, because as Europe’s economy regenerated after the Black Death and merchants started traveling farther, people started circulating from town to town more. That meant that diseases circulated more quickly, and so the number of deadly diseases that people were exposed to, especially between the ages of 2 and about 12, skyrocketed. So, the death rate for kids between 2 and 12 went way [up]. Similarly, there were advances in military technology and in the sizes of cities. There wasn’t quite industrialization, but there was a concentration around things like the wool industry. Increased population in cities and more advanced military tech means you can have larger, deadlier wars, in which larger populations of people are concentrated in one place and get struck by an army at the same time, while the army is more effective at breaking in through the outside of the city. There’d also been a long and slow process throughout the Middle Ages of what we could call the slow centralization of power. This wasn’t yet the absolutist centralized monarchies of the 18th century and Louis XIV, but they were much better at extracting taxes from their periphery than before. Richer kings can afford larger armies and fight more and larger wars. So, I like to describe it as, “The Renaissance is just the Middle Ages, only slightly bigger and more so.” So, all of the same causes of violence and all of the same causes of death that were happening in the Middle Ages were able to happen on a larger scale once we hit 1400. But isn’t living in the countryside really boring? And urbanization was occurring because people preferred, or many people preferred, a Renaissance kind of lifestyle with all its risks to a more medieval kind of existence that they could have had if they had stayed in the countryside?…

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