And you did have identity records. If you were rich enough to have checks, you’d appear in a city directory and banks would rate your creditworthiness. If you travelled, you’d have to have silver or gold in hand, as your Boston banknote was worthless in Virginia.
> No matter what degree of culpability should be assigned to Britain, the consequences of the famine to Ireland are indisputable: it broke the nation in half. At a million or more fatalities, it was one of the deadliest famines in history, in terms of percentage of population lost. A similar famine in the United States today would kill almost forty million people. Only the famine of 1918-22 in the Soviet Union may have been worse.
> Within a decade of the blight another two million fled Ireland. Many more followed in subsequent decades, inexorably driving its population down. The nation never regained its footing. As late as the 1960s its population was half what it had been in 1840.
> Today Ireland has the melancholy distinction of being the only nation in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than 150 years ago.
-- Transcribed from the book "1493" by Charles C. Mann.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IrelandEuropePopulat...
That accounts to 20-25% of the population, including emigration [0]
I found out the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon under Ottoman rule during 1915-1918 was much worse : 50% of the population (of 400 000) died. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon
When few noticed, Adolf Hitler seems to have taken it heart[0]:
> "Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter -- with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me."
> "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
I've been quite aware of the history but to read how he takes inspiration of cruelty makes it even more disgusting.
(Oh, and yes I'm fully aware a number of others like the French terror reign, Pol Pot, Rwanda, China, former Yugoslavia, Japan/China, India/minorities, a number of colonies of Western countries, natives of south and north America but for some reason the Armenians seems to go unnoticed. Thanks for reminding.)
If I don't get an answer, I'll try to find some demographics numbers and figure it out tomorrow.
I would say that post-war, consumer credit drove American economic success, and that the SSN became a key part of that system. Had it not existed, something else would have served that function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_Abuse_Prevention_an...
Google BAPCPA for more because the bill Bush signed sucks. EDIT: Nevermind, the wiki link in the post before yours is great.
The idea of an identity, especially a permanent one that travels with you throughout your life, is a relative recent one. 200 years ago, you could escape your past sins, so long as you didn't have an identifiable face and could speak the language at your destination. (If you couldn't you ran the very real risk of becoming a slave, which is caused by removing a person from their context; e.g. family, language and community).
There is a deeper question of "What is an identity?" and we also have to realize that the digital identities have never existed throughout history. Not in the way they do today. It's hard for us to imagine a world before passports, before real borders and before permanent numbers and documents that follow citizens throughout their lives.
And the principal reason we have digital identities today? Debt. It is solely to trace debt. It has nothing to do with proving you went to x university or worked at y job. There are other ways to track that, which are terribly inaccurate when you really start to look at them. The principal reason for your SSN, your digital identity, is to track credit and debt. I highly recommend the book _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_. It really goes into depth on this concept.