Of course we don’t know the long term effects Covid is going to have yet, we’re still in the middle of it.
I doubt people will talk about Covid-19 much at all by the end of the century.
The 1918 flu was much, much worse in total number of deaths, and even worse when you consider how many fewer people existed at that time, and it killed people in the prime of their lives. And by the year 2000 very few people knew about it at all.
In contrast, the 2020 pandemic is presently not sharing the spotlight. Maybe something of comparable impact will happen. Or maybe it'll be forgotten regardless. But I don't know that the 1918 pandemic's status is all that illustrative.
I suspect that COVID-19 will replace the Spanish Flu as the "pandemic everyone talks about when there's a pandemic concern," but this is the sort of mention that requires explanation because it's not really part of the expected repertoire of history the same way the Black Death is.
With this latest surge per-capita deaths from covid19 just passed the low end of the 1968 flu estimates.
It was pretty bad. The flu has all the long term complications for some people that covid does - the lung problems, heart swelling, brain problems, etc.
I talk to people who were alive in 1968. It just wasn't really on anyone's radar. Rarely made headlines in the U.S.
"It began on January 1, 2001, and ends on December 31, 2100"
If you follow the definitions advocated by Wikipedia and its collection of sources, you end up in an absurd state where the decades[0] span multiple centuries. It's absurd and does not reflect popular usage.
What do you mean by not authoriative in this context? This is just how the Gregorian calendar works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_star...
It's natural to align the decades, centuries, an millennia with a decimal radix. You've got the year digit, the decade digit, the century digit, and the millennium digit. Decades are always talked about this way, e.g. "the 80's", and I'd wager that most people think about centuries and millenniums this way. The fact that the year number is defined as the ordinal year since the approximate birth of Christ, beginning with AD 1, doesn't strike me as particularly relevant.
In other words, I'm not "counting from" anything. I'm describing the decimal year number in a manner that's natural for the radix.
I agree about your 80s example (of course I use it in the same way), but that doesn't change the fact that it ultimately doesn't make sense because you'll be off by one when counting backwards. So for colloquial conversations it's fine, for serious date calculations, you cannot just have one "decade" with only 9 years.
And the idea that you could actually do serious date calculations that count backwards all the way to AD 1 while maintaining a precision of 1 year is also ridiculous. There are error bars around the year numbers from that long ago of something like 2-5 years.
I understand the basis for the [1901-2000] definition. However, I really don't think its defense outweighs its huge downsides, especially the split-decade problem.
I'm not sure why he contradicted himself, but the first one would be 24h early, and the second one a whole year.
The pandemic is more immediately disruptive, but I think it's impact will be largely erased within a few years of it "ending", just like previous pandemics.
Did WWI define the 20th century, or was it WWII? I think WWI demarcates the 1st of a series of really big, interrelated events. I suspect Covid-19 could be the 1st of a series of really big, interrelated events.
I'm not going to try to predict what history will look like 80 years from now, or whether 9/11 or covid will be considered more significant by then, but this does raise an interesting question of how people in 1913 perceived the nascent 20th century.
Obviously things happened over those 13 years, but whatever they were, history ultimately decided that they were inconsequential enough for the "20th-century events" Wikipedia article to not even mention anything before WWI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_events
WWII isn't really a single war as much as it is a collection of several wars, be they wars of territorial expansion (e.g., Germany, USSR), ideological civil war (e.g., China), non-ideological civil war (e.g., France), or random local conflicts (e.g., Yugoslav coup) which are all occurring in the context of one another. In many places, it's often a three-way war, with all parties equally at odds with one another, instead of the simple Axis v. Allies it's usually presented as. Start including the full context of these conflicts into the timeframe of WWII, and you push its start date back arguably to 1931, only 8 years after the last cleanup war of WWI (the Russian Civil War).
Viewed from an international relations perspective, combining WWI and WWII into a single period of flux makes sense. WWI makes the death of great power influence, but the attempted resolution afterwards (League of Nations) was impotent and unable to have any major effect on the international crises that arose, unlike the great power conferences preceding WWI. Instead, the end of WWII ushers in the era of superpower relations, where essentially the USA and USSR drive international relations for the rest of the world.
The late great Hans Rosling of TED Talk fame had (has?) a fantastic website with a pretty good interface into such data: https://www.gapminder.org/
The key takeaway for me is that by 2099 Africa is going to get ~3B more people and India ~1B more. And they mostly going to be 'middle class' income earners (not poor anymore). Their consumer preferences are being made as we speak (Coke v Pepsi, Chevy v Ford, etc).
The Indian Ocean is going to be as big a trade hub as the Atlantic was and the Pacific is today. The time is ripe to invest in eastern Africa.
The only alternative to getting most of those technologies is some kind of global crisis that significantly sets back humanity. So we either have crazy powerful technologies that upend status quo way of life or a catastrophe that destroys everything.
Of course, I realize he's talking about defining events that delimit major changes between the previous century and its successor. And more specifically, major changes in what Thiel cares about, like financial markets, start-ups, monopolies, and money in general.
But, really, we're only 20% into the century. Something else could easily eclipse Covid-19 even within the parameters of what matters to Thiel. You know, like climate change, the second coming, asteroid hitting the Earth, quantum computing, "the singularity", etc... Who the F knows? There's no utility in this kind of thinking. Just take it for it is and what it becomes since starting on Jan 1st, 2000.