Child Mortality

Child Mortality

From Let's Know Things by Colin Wright

May 5, 2026 · 15 min

About this episode

This episode discusses the impact of industrialization and antibiotics on child mortality rates, along with themes of corruption and societal progress.

This week we talk about industrialization, antibiotics, and child mortality rates. We also discuss corruption, instability, and progress. Recommended Book: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio Transcript Demographic transition is a social sciences theory that posits, based on all sorts of modern historical data, that societies tend to change, demographically, as they transition from a largely agrarian, low-industrial society, to that of a less-agrarian, high-industrial society. Most modern, post-hunter-gatherer societies have started out plowing the vast majority of their labor into bare subsistence, human beings spending their days, throughout their whole lives, working the land in order to produce enough food to live. All sorts of social and economic systems arose around this base-level fact, including those that tied laborers to the land, allowing for the rise of a leadership or ruling class, regional militaries, and other sorts of specialists. But until relatively recent history, the majority of people in a given society labored to produce raw essentials, and that was just the shape of things. This began to change with the dawn of the industrial revolution, and in some…

People in this episode

Host: Colin Wright

Topics covered

  • child mortality
  • industrialization
  • antibiotics
  • corruption
  • instability
  • progress

Keywords

  • child mortality
  • industrialization
  • antibiotics
  • corruption
  • demographic transition

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Empire of Silence

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