11.12 — The Accounting

The twentieth century killed more people by political violence than any century before it, and it also produced the largest improvement in human welfare in history.

Both statements are true and most accounts of the century pick one. This chapter does the arithmetic on both.

The deaths

Every figure here is an estimate with a genuine range, and the ranges are given rather than a single number, because a chapter about honest accounting cannot use false precision.

Event	Estimated deaths
First World War	15–22 million (military and civilian)
Influenza pandemic 1918–20	50–100 million
Second World War	70–85 million
Soviet famines and repression	10–20 million
Chinese Great Leap famine	15–45 million
Chinese civil war and Cultural Revolution	several million
Colonial-era and post-colonial famines	tens of millions
Genocides outside the world wars	several million
Post-1945 wars, civil wars and insurgencies	tens of millions

Total political and war deaths for the century are commonly estimated between 150 and 200 million.

And two observations about the table.

The influenza pandemic killed more than either world war and is remembered by almost nobody, which says something about how memory selects.

And most of the deaths were caused by governments to their own populations rather than in war between states. R. J. Rummel's work on what he called democide put the total of government killing of civilians above the total of battle deaths, and while his specific figures are contested, the ordering is not.

The other column

Over the same hundred years.

Life expectancy. Global average life expectancy at birth rose from around 32 years in 1900 to around 72 today. It more than doubled. India's rose from about 32 at independence to over 70 (Chapter 6.28).

Child mortality. In 1900, around a third of children died before their fifth birthday in most of the world. The global figure is now under 4 percent. This is the largest single change and it is invisible because it consists of things not happening.

Extreme poverty. The share of the world's population living in extreme poverty fell from around 75 percent in 1900 to under 10 percent by the late 2010s, on the World Bank's measure and its predecessors. In absolute numbers this happened while the population quadrupled.

Literacy. From around 20 percent globally to around 87 percent.

Smallpox eradicated in 1980 — the only human disease ever deliberately eliminated. It had killed an estimated 300 million people in the twentieth century alone before the campaign.

Famine. Deaths from famine per capita have fallen dramatically, and famines in the last few decades have been overwhelmingly caused by war and blockade rather than by crop failure — which, by Chapter 6.17's argument, means they are political and therefore preventable.

Democracy. A handful of countries had universal adult suffrage in 1900 — New Zealand being the first to give women the vote in 1893. Most countries now hold elections, though the quality varies enormously and the trend of the last fifteen years has been negative on most measures.

And formal empire ended (Chapter 10.9), slavery was outlawed everywhere in law, and legal equality regardless of race and sex became the near-universal formal standard, whatever the practice.

Reconciling the two columns

Three observations, and they are not comforting.

The same capacities produced both. Industrial organisation built railways that carried grain to famine areas and railways that carried people to Treblinka. Chemistry produced the Haber-Bosch process, which fixes atmospheric nitrogen into fertiliser and which is estimated to sustain a substantial share of the world's current population — and Fritz Haber, who developed it, also directed Germany's chemical weapons programme in the First World War. The state capacity that delivers vaccination campaigns is the state capacity that compiles deportation lists.

Scale is the variable. Pre-modern societies were violent, frequently more violent per capita — Chapter 3.3 gave forager violent-death rates that exceed the twentieth century's. What changed is that a modern state can organise killing at a scale a chiefdom cannot, and can also organise vaccination at a scale a chiefdom cannot.

And the improvements were concentrated in the second half. The century divides sharply around 1945. The first half contains both world wars, the Depression, the Soviet and Chinese famines, and the Holocaust. The second half contains most of the gains in life expectancy, poverty reduction and literacy — and also the Great Leap famine, the Cultural Revolution, Cambodia, Rwanda and the proxy wars of Chapter 12.4.

What the survivors built

The institutions created in 1944–48 were designed by people who had lived through the first half and were explicitly trying to prevent its repetition.

The United Nations, 1945 — with great power membership guaranteed by permanent Security Council seats, which was the fix for the League's central weakness (Chapter 11.4).

The Bretton Woods institutions, 1944 (Chapter 9.10), designed against the competitive devaluations and trade wars of the 1930s.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 — drafted by a commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt and including the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik, the Chinese diplomat P. C. Chang and the Indian delegate Hansa Mehta, who is credited with changing "all men are born free and equal" to "all human beings".

The Genocide Convention, 1948.

The Geneva Conventions of 1949, extending protection to civilians.

The Refugee Convention, 1951.

The European Coal and Steel Community, 1951, which made the industries of war jointly administered and which became the European Union.

And decolonization (Chapter 10.9).

Their record is mixed and it is not nothing. There has been no war between great powers since 1945 — the longest such period in the modern era. The conventions are violated regularly and they are invoked, litigated and occasionally enforced, which is more than could be said before they existed.

Is the world getting better

The honest answer requires distinguishing three questions.

Are the measurable indicators of human welfare improving? Yes, substantially and almost universally, over any timescale longer than a few years. The data on life expectancy, child mortality, poverty, literacy, violence and disease are not close.

Does that mean things will continue to improve? No, and this is where the optimistic accounts overreach. The trend is a description of the past, not a law. Chapter 14 covers a risk that is rising rather than falling, and Chapter 11.10 covers one that has not gone away.

And does the improvement excuse anything? No. A century that halved child mortality and killed 150 million people is not net positive or net negative; those are different accounts and both are owed.

Two failure modes to avoid.

Declinism — the belief that things are getting worse, which is the default of every generation and which is contradicted by nearly every measurable series. Its cost is fatalism and the political attractiveness of anyone promising to restore an imagined past.

And complacent progressivism — the belief that improvement is automatic. Its cost is that the institutions that produced the improvement are not maintained, and Chapter 16.2 shows what happens to institutions that are not maintained.

Where this shows up in your life

You are alive at a moment when a child born anywhere has a better chance of reaching five than at any previous time, when you can read this, and when the diseases that killed most of your ancestors are preventable.

And the century that produced that also produced the Holocaust, the Great Leap famine and the nuclear arsenal, and none of the mechanisms that produced those has been abolished.

The one practical conclusion this Part supports is the one Chapter 11.6 and 11.11 both arrived at independently: the catastrophes were made by ordinary institutions staffed by ordinary people, and were stopped, where they were stopped, by ordinary people refusing at some specific point to do their part. That is not an inspiring conclusion. It is an operational one.

What Part 11 established

An imperial world partitioned Africa in thirty years using quinine, steamships and the machine gun. An alliance system and a set of railway timetables converted an assassination into a general war in five weeks. Four years of trenches because defensive technology had matured and offensive technology had not. A peace harsh enough to enrage and too weak to disable, built on a lie about how the war had ended. A revolution that dissolved its own constituent assembly and built a superpower on famine and terror. A movement that took total power in six months using legal instruments, appointed by conservatives who thought they could use it. A war whose decisive theatre was in the east and whose memory is in the west. An industrial murder programme administered by railway clerks and accountants. Two bombs, and eighty years of a taboo that has held. And an accounting that shows both the worst century and the best one, from the same capacities.

What the next Part covers

Part 12 is the world we live in. The order built in 1945 and the two blocs that divided it. How the Cold War actually worked as a system, and how close it came to ending. China from Mao to Deng. Korea, Vietnam and the proxy wars. The Middle East — oil, borders, and the conflicts that follow from both. The Soviet collapse, which almost nobody predicted. Globalisation and the crash of 2008. The two decades since 2001. And the map as it stands now, with the arguments that are currently running on it.