Although I’ve had difficulty keeping up the momentum of this long series on the medieval plague’s effect, I’m going to wrap it up with a short series on why I believe that we have lived in the plague’s world for 600 years, and why it’s ending. When I say “we,” I definitely mean industrialized, European-descent societies: the literal descendants of plague survivors, in most cases.
I believe that we all have an approximate sense of the ratio between “resources” and individual lives; economics may have a mathematical way to express it, I don’t know. But we can roughly “calculate” it based on our experiences. It comes from our experience of how much of everything there is to go around, and we use it to predict how likely we are to get a share. People who grow up in demographic “boom” generations learn to eat fast before the food is all gone, apply early to get the jump on other job seekers, and blend in. People in demographic “bust” generations don’t need to do those things. They can take risks and are more likely to still fall on their feet. They can walk into good-paying jobs and rent nice apartments at cut rates.
The pre-plague world was like a Boom generation. Most people never had quite enough to eat; competition for work was tight; houses couldn’t be built fast enough so they often lived in squalid overcrowded city tenements. The climate was generally warming, so for the few centuries before the plague they were consistently moving northward and upward in altitude, settling closer to tree lines. The post-plague world was more like a Bust generation. The world was growing colder and settlements were moving south and downward, but at the same time, fewer people were pressing into these new settlements. Empty buildings and low prices characterized the new economy.
People’s minds are calibrated by their sense of scarcity or plenty; this happens at a non-verbal level. It’s analogous to an individual’s “set point” of mood or weight; people as a group create “set points” of values based on their expectations of life. Boom people take fewer risks and make sure they’ve secured their share; bust people can be careless about security. Boom people feel like there may not be quite enough; bust people don’t worry. Boom people may feel, like the Mad Hatter, that there’s “no room” at the table. Bust people wave you over to the empty plates.
At a larger level, we’ve been seeing boom and bust values across the centuries. Next: what I mean by that.