The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown
One of the things about humans is that they die sometimes, and one of the things humans pay a lot of attention to is other people dying. We do a pretty good job of distracting ourselves from the whole "I'm gonna die one day" thing, but the fixation is there, underneath the surface, and one way it shows through is how riveted we are by other people's deaths.
The news is an obvious example—just open up CNN.com and typically, at least half of the headlines are about people dying. Entertainment is another—nothing locks eyes on a screen like the death of a character.
History is a less obvious example, but it's the parts of history that involve a lot of people dying that usually compel us the most. That's why there are so many war movies and so few movies about critical legislation being passed.
But for a crowd so interested in death, humans know surprisingly little about the actual numbers of people that died in key moments throughout history. Most of us know that 3,000 people died on 9/11, but how many Americans know how many Katrina victims there were, or how many people died in the American Revolution. Did the Christian Crusades kill 100 times as many people as the Vietnam War? Or were they identical in their death tolls? Given how much we talk about historical human tragedies, it seems like something we should have a better handle on.
So I thought I'd help. Oh, don't mind me—I just spent like 200 years collecting statistics and painstakingly putting them into an infographic—you just go enjoy now.
Some quick notes:
- All circles are exactly proportional to the numbers they're representing and to the other circles in the graphic. Note the scale, and how it changes as the numbers grow.
- I focused on human tragedies of various kinds, but sprinkled normal death statistics (the gray circles) throughout as comparison points to help put things in perspective.
- I tried to maintain integrity in my research. There are many "sources" citing various death tolls online—so I made sure there was a reasonable consensus for all the numbers below. When there were too many differing opinions (like Howard Zinn saying European Colonialism killed 100 million people, with other sources saying it was 2 million), I left it out. Sometimes, there is genuine uncertainty to the exact death toll in an event, but a consensus about the lower and upper bound that the death toll might be. In those cases, I made the upper bound a big, faded circle, and the lower bound a smaller, brighter circle inside. For example, the total number of lucky people who had their hearts cut out and sacrificed by the Aztecs is unknown. But historians are pretty sure that the number is somewhere between 300,000 and 1,500,000. So I represented that like this, with two circles:
Alright, on with it. The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown:
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This is one of the most interesting infographics I've seen. I was completely surprised by so many of them. The Haiti earthquake killed 316k, more than the tsunamis—probably the most shocking to me. Please do more of these!!
ReplyDeleteA picture paints a thousand words.
ReplyDeleteWhat a shitty thing to say.
DeleteWell played
ReplyDeleteFabulous and fascinating infographic. Krakatoa eruption 1883, 40,000 people- great book by Simon Winchester on the natural disaster.
ReplyDeletei wonder how many death people there are compared to living. I always had the idea there's a lot more people dead than living, but someone brought up that we are now at break even.
ReplyDeleteI read in "The Fault in our Stars" that there are 14 dead people for every person alive today.
DeleteReally good and thought-provoking. However as I reached the black death I couldn't help thinking, that human population size has varied throughout the time. The black death wiped out two thirds of the continents population, which would be equal to 500 million people had it happened today. While at the same time the annual death toll of natural causes and other than the plague at the time would have been considerably lower. It would be interesting to see time-population adjusted version of this!
ReplyDeleteYou also might want to compare todays death causes, as there are quite accurate statistics of those these days. At least in Finland, where I come from (stat.fi).
Any particular reason why you just deleted Edie Nahoy's comments?
ReplyDeleteCould you post source citations? I find this really interesting, but it's tough to cite to this website.
ReplyDeleteExcellent synthesis. I know the numbers are contested, but next time do consider the Russian Civil War (1917-22) ~9million and then (low number) of 8million in the pre-WWII period thanks to Stalin's paranoia and agricultural schemes.
ReplyDeleteNice representation. However, I suggest that the 31K figure on gun deaths includes suicide. Having a suicide bubble next implies that the gun deaths bubble doesn't include them.
ReplyDeleteTime to recheck the figures. Maybe here: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states
That's a good point. If suicide figures are presented separately, it's slightly misleading to also include them with "firearm deaths" even though it's *technically* accurate. But often times suicides are left with "gun deaths" because it makes the "gun violence" picture look more grim than it really is.
DeleteGood point. Clarification added.
DeleteInteresting that deaths by abortion are not listed ...
ReplyDeleteshould
DeleteYou can't kill what has no life.
Deleteyou cant give life to what you kill.
DeleteDid I miss it, or why is there no mention of the millions of Africans killed during Slavery?
ReplyDeleteWhat about non-African slaves? And do we include every person who died a slave or only those that were somehow killed by slavery?
DeleteDeaths by abortion aren't listed because no one dies in an abortion...dickhead troll.
ReplyDeletejust the baby
DeleteDepending on country where it's perform, the abortion need to be done before it's cellular division is complete enough for any kind of conscience. Conscience being what segregate a being from carbon assembly. So... not the baby.
DeleteAccording to you, a victim of liberal brainwashing...
DeleteSays the victim of religious indoctrination and non-rational thinking...
Deletecheck this out
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_War_II_Casualties.svg
What about the other 6 million people who were victims of the Holocaust?
ReplyDeleteNot to be that jerk that points out something wrong, but the Haitian Earthquake death toll is thought to be greatly overestimated. USAID came up with a figure under 100,000. Not minimizing what a tragedy it was, just saying.
ReplyDeleteAnother amazing chart. Thank you. Was this ancient Volcano eruption mentioned yet? I know the numbers of deaths aren't large. But it almost caused the extinction of the human race. The bottleneck theory referred to below suggests it caused "relatively low level of genetic variation among present-day humans".
ReplyDeleteFrom Wikipedia: "The Toba eruption has been linked to a genetic bottleneck in human evolution about 50,000 years ago,which may have resulted from a severe reduction in the size of the total human population due to the effects of the eruption on the global climate.
According to the genetic bottleneck theory, between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations sharply decreased to 3,000-10,000 surviving individuals.It is supported by genetic evidence suggesting that today's humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago."
You forgot the Great flood that wiped out the Earth (Noah)...oh yeah and SLAVERY!
ReplyDelete>great flood
DeleteDidn’t happen.
Not to mention all the deaths from the Clone Wars. (Or perhaps it was an editorial decision to just stick with non-fiction?)
DeleteCouple million people DEFINITELY died when Superman tore the shit outta Metropolis...
DeleteI just spent at least 80 minutes reading about the Black Death and related subjects. Wait But Why, you are nothing if not a source of wikipedia binges.
ReplyDeleteThis entire post was the result of like a 250 hour Wikipedia binge on my part, so I don't feel bad about you being brought down with me.
DeleteAlso not included: The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor estimated the number of deaths during the occupation of East Timor by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999 from famine and violence to be between 90,800 and 202,600 including between 17,600 and 19,600 violent deaths or disappearances, out of a 1999 population of approximately 823,386. The truth commission held Indonesian forces responsible for about 70% of the violent killings. Also the 2005 killing of 7 people at Red Lake Senior High School on Red Lake Reservation, Minnesota. Seems like you gave Native Americans short shrift in your presentation.
ReplyDeleteThe author also didn't include the Australian massacre at a theme park that led to all their guns being taken away. I don't think it was the author's goal to list every time someone on Earth died - just to provide an interesting comparison of those that are most forefront in people's minds. How about, instead of grilling the author for every incident you think they should have included, you be cognizant of and grateful for the amount of work that went into what they've got already? (By the way, the author also gave people with purple hair the short straw as I see none of their deaths listed here either.)
DeleteChristopher Columbus killed 3 million in 20 years. Has that been mentioned yet? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kasum/columbus-day-a-bad-idea_b_742708.html
ReplyDeleteThat guy must have been pretty handy with a sword or musket or something.
DeleteHe was handy with Smallpox. He got syphilis in return...
DeleteJonestown. American Indian genocide.
ReplyDeleteSun goes supernova in 7 billion AD - 750 billion deaths. Beat that.
ReplyDeleteI love the basic idea, and I think another 5-10 could be profitably added. Why not make a second edition of this?
ReplyDeleteJust off-hand I noted most of the missing things that other commentators have pointed out (Stalin; Japanese in WWII; slave trade; Rwandan massacres; why not also show the number of Jews and Muslims killed in Jew/Muslim warfare or the Intifadas?). It'd be interesting to see abortions on the chart too; those who don't consider abortion murder could just ignore it, but for people on the fence it might be interesting food for thought and for anti-abortion types it'd be sweet vindication.
One correction I'd offer is that Haitian 2010 earthquake figures may have been grossly inflated; you already have a good mechanism to reflect lower and upper bounds so why not show a lower bound (which in this case is 100k)?
Citations would also be nice. One final idea is to color-code the death rate in the circles? (EG: red for high deathrates, blue for low rates.) I note you have a different color assignment but from the graph titles its already pretty clear.
I wish I knew HTML5 coding, this would be a very cool chart that could be zoomed in and out, rather than having to change the scale periodically.
ReplyDeleteyou could use prezi to do it without knowing html5: http://prezi.com/create-better-presentations-5/?gclid=CIzaupygs7oCFRIPtAoden0A2A
DeleteWhy don't you start a crowd sourced History Commons timeline or a wikipedia page of of mass death events in the world which everyone could contribute to?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timelines.jsp