The rise of the West is often traced back to the Black Death of the mid-1300s, which killed over 40% of Europe’s population. For example, some historians think that the resulting labor scarcity increased the bargaining power of peasants in the West, which led to the end of serfdom and to higher standards of living but failed to bring about institutional change in the East.
Many parallels between COVID-19 and the Black Death have been drawn, but most of them are unhelpful. In a medieval economy, fewer people meant more land per person and a higher income for the average citizen. The opposite is true in today’s knowledge-based economy, since ideas are non-rivalrous and, unlike land, can be used by everyone simultaneously.
In modern economies, the larger, more diverse, and interconnected a population is, the more ideas and wealth it is capable of generating. Large, interconnected societies allow more people to participate in innovation, which adds to collective knowledge and gives others in the society better tools and instruments to make further discoveries. In a world where wealth is derived from ideas rather than land and objects, our greatest resource is our social networks, which act as “collective brains.”