The Rational Investor #027: Dan Carlin on Human Progress

Happy Saturday to you,

Welcome to the 27th edition of The Rational Investor Newsletter.

If you’re a podcast listener, you’ll be familiar with Dan Carlin. He’s the creator of the incredible podcast Hardcore History. He wrote a book that I’ve been reading titled The End is Always Near, Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses. If you like history, you’ll love this book.

While outside the realm of typical investing quotes (just like last week), maintaining optimism and faith in the future is critical to all investing success. And I believe the best way to cultivate optimism and faith is to read history. Because, I mean, here we are in a world that is better than ever before. If you doubt that, read the quote below…

The only change made to today’s quote is to break up the paragraphs for easier readability.

Onto the main event…

Here’s Dan Carlin on Human Progress[Bold is my emphasis, Italics is that of the author]:

Smallpox is one of the most infamous diseases in history. To give an idea of its virulence, it killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone, but the disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980—meaning half a billion people were killed in just eight decades.

Those who didn’t succumb to the illness were often left blind, and severely disfigured by scarring. Mercifully, we don’t deal with smallpox anymore, but the illness goes back millennia.

When the Egyptian mummy of Pharaoh Ramesses V (r. 1149 - 1145 BCE) was examined, the body revealed smallpox scarring. (He may have died from the disease.) Smallpox killed multiple reigning European monarchs and five Japanese emperors, and it was likely the cause of many early plagues of history, such as the one in ancient Athens in 430 BCE. Smallpox was also one of the main killers of the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australia after first contact, the majority of whom may have died from the disease before the Europeans who first transmitted it across the oceanic disease barrier actually encountered them.

Just as it is difficult for most of us today to imagine the food insecurity that was common in most human populations in most eras, it’s difficult to conceptualize the range of illnesses and diseases against which earlier cultures had no defense.

Pretty much nothing separates us more from human being in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us.

I think there are three quick takeaways from this quote and the book more generally. Let’s start with the broad takeaway from the book.

1. As the title implies, this book outlines many of the apocalyptic moments that humanity has endured. They all share one thing in common: Not a single one was the end of the world. At most, they are now just a memory that we read about. Each one ended, and people moved on. More progress was made until another apocalyptic moment arrived. It ended, and people moved on again. Progress followed every single one. Such is life and human progress. This alone should give you faith that the future is brighter than the present.

2. Morgan Housel has said, “There are lots of overnight tragedies and no overnight miracles.” Despite the fact that smallpox killed half a billion people over eight decades, nobody talks about it anymore. That’s the thing about progress. We get used to people NOT dying and then forget about the progress that had to happen for that to occur. It’s an absolute miracle, and yet, nobody talks about it.

3. And that’s the point. Miracles such as the smallpox vaccine happen all the time; we just never hear about them. Whenever you doubt that progress is happening, don’t. Rest assured, it is happening right before our eyes. It’s just that it seldom makes front-page news.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back again next week with more timeless wisdom from great investors.

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