You know, now I've really got myself wondering.
As I noted, because Schindler saved 1100 Jews, the result was 6000 Jews who would never have lived if it weren't for his efforts.
So if 50,000 young men and women died in Vietnam, how many people does that mean, roughly, were never born over the course of the subsequent four decades?
PAD
Posted by Peter David at February 4, 2005 11:24 PM | TrackBack | Other blogs commentingWell, the current US birthrate is slightly below replacement level (I recall reading that immigration is why our population is still growing), so that'd give us an initial estimate of around 100,000 who'd now range in age from early 40s to 20s for the most part, so some of them would be having kids...call it around 150K.
But then you have to figure that some of those 50K had already had all the kids they would have; it's not like all the deaths were 18 year olds. And I don't recall any particular shortage of available males over that period; unlike with the Holocaust, the US deaths in Vietnam were overwhelmingly male. So a fair number of women who might have had kids with a Vietnam casuality had them with someone else instead.
I'd probably go with around 75-100K possible kids and grandkids, but suspect it might be a bit on the high side.
It's fairly easy with the Shindler Jews to see the cause and effect, since they didn't die. It's much harder to make any realistic assumptions about what people who did die would have done. All 50,000 could have died a year later than they did, in 50,000 separate car accidents. Admittedly, this would be what mathematicians call "highly unlikely".
As Tom points out, the fact that it was mostly American males who died will have a dampening effect on the totals (the effect on the Vietnamese population will be considerably larger since at least as many female as male civilians were presumably killed).
And then you get into the whole Sound Of Thunder scenarios...it's hard to think of teh Vietnam war as much more than a tremendous tragedy but take it out of history and who the hell knows what takes its place---nuclear war, apes taking over, whatever. I'm sure there must be some sci fi stories where a time traveler goes back in time to kill Hitler and the result is that someone else takes his place, someone with as great a desire for world conquest but without Hitler's ultimately fatal stupidity. So who knows?
All that said, I'd guess that Tom's estimate is a reasonable one. I'd aim for the lower 75,000 estimate, The number would, of course, grow considerably over time.
Hmmm, the more I think on this the trickier it gets. I mean, if you've ever done a family tree you end up with some far flung ancestor--let's say Erasmus Mulligan and he married Mary Magillicuddy and they have 5 kids and we are off and running. A bunch of generations later and you have gobs and gobs of people and it would be reasonable to assume that had old Erasmus been run over by a stagecoach it would have taken over 100 people out of the current population. But in reality, Mary, who was quite a looker in her day, would have hitched up with Jebediah Lynch and the result may have been about the same (but you might have to subtract any of the descendants that Jebediah might have had if he hadn't married Mary and had married someone else).
So, in conclusion, I'm going to bed now.
I'll approach this from the strictly statistical side (with some assumptions)...
Regardless of gender, which will be discussed in a second, according to some admittedly brief research, the number of persons between the age of 17-30 (prime child development years) was approximately 43,000. We'll take this number up to 44,000 to allow for late bloomers.
According to a friend who was there, about 1/4 of his unit already had children. This figure probably goes up among officers but we'll go with that. That means 33,000 of target age grp did not. We'll move this figure up to 35,000 to allow for additional children that might have been added.
To touch on gender, the fact that the casualties were mostly male is not as relevant, as even tho other men may have 'taken up the slack', this left the females they would have mated with without mates...
So, we have approximately 35,000 individuals of child producing ages as of 1973. Again a big assumption, lets assume 75% of those would have found mates (to allow for homosexuality, asexuality, lack of opportunity and the fact that some mates would have come from the same pool of military persons). That gives us 27,000 potential couples.
Assuming each had the standard 2.12 children (per US census) within the next 7 years, we would have approximately 57,000 potential decendants by 1980.
Total lost at this point, 82,000.
2002 would be the next Generational Point. Again using our 75% assumuption, approximately 42,000 of those descendants would be of child producing age and prepared to do so.. The statistical family size is now 2.04 so we have approximately, 84,000 potential 'lost' children.
Total lost at this point, 166,000.
The general math would have the numbers slightly more than doubling every 22 years. There would be some statistical smoothing necessary to allow for natural deaths of descendants, etc. but thats beyond me.
So the estimate of 75K holds up, at least until the very recent past....
Jeff
I think it would be an exponential progression. Assume only 10,000 potential offspring-producing relationships, each producing 2 children on a 10-year generational cycle, and over 40 years (using 1965 as the median year for the war) that might yield far far more potential offspring than previously noted.
I think the overwhelming maleness of the American casualities is very relevant. 50K is a drop in the bucket of available American males, and there wasn't a shortage of such relative to women at the time. I'd guess a substantial number of the women who would've had kids with them had kids with someone else without affecting the overall US population.
Ehh, there are too many variables. The overwhelming majority of Vietnam casualties were young men, who may or may not have had a family by that point. Note the disturing number of stories that are coming of Iraq vet children who will never meet thier dads because they were conceived pre deployment. Presuming that is a trend...
Also, I suspect most of the descendants of Schindler's List come from a small subsection of the population of the List, probably the children under the age 18. Seem logical, but if that is the case, the List could have been a quarter of the size and have had no meaningful effect on the number of descendants.
Never mind the demographic variations that are the result of geographical location (Top of my head, I suspect List descendents that emigrated to Israel were more fecund than ones that emigrated to the US...)
That's not to say this is an impossible task, just that the populations is like comparing a basket of apples to a basket of mixed fruit. There are apples in the mixed fruit basket, but there is no way to directly compare them. But there has to be some info somewhere on the demographic of the List, right?
First of all, for a few reasons vaguely related to my religion and religous beliefs, I think this is a rather trivial broad notion. I also think that it's kind of silly to try to engage the probability versus the statistics given the many, many variables.
Also, given that you didn't quantify AMERICAN lives, then it's almost impossible to say that waging the Vietnam War didn't save more lives than it lost, overall worldwide, in the larger sense in the longer term.
If we didn't fight in that war, it's possible that the many American lives lost then would not have been lost then and there. Given the political climate at the time, however, it's impossible to say that the same amount of American lives would not have been sacrificed in two other seperate wars, instead of that one war.
There are ideas floating that if that war wasn't fought, Singapore for example, would have fallen to Communism. I can't recall how that works exactly. It didn't sound like a bad or unsound theory as the details, now long-forgotten, were related to me.
Communists killed more people than the NAZIs, and by that track, opposing communism as a trend probably saved lives, too!
So would American lives be preserved by not fighting in Vietnam? I don't believe that a significant amount of lives would have been kept otherwise.... and I don't quite believe that we'd have a significant population difference if that war hadn't been fought with our involvement.
On the other hand, I have this belief in Predestination, that if I interpret it right... those who died then died then and history would not have gone any other way.
This precludes time travel, of course, but until your Flux Capacitor is perfected I'm precluding time travel.
Of course, PAD meant that 50,000 American men and women died in Vietnam. The death toll for the Vietnamese is generally in the 2 million range. And the war destabilized other countries in the region (maybe half a million dead in Cambodia, for example, and another million or so once the Khmer Rouge took over).
Actually, wasn't it 58,000 Americans that died in Vietnam?
And Jeff, thanks for your statistics. That was an interesting read.
How about the flip side of the coin. If the America hadn't been in Vietnam, how many children wouldn't have been born as a result of American-Vietnamise relationship (business & personal), and how many of their offspring wouldn't have been born?
Flip side? True, a lot of Vietnamese-American kids wouldn't have been born, to be raised without fathers in a devastated country. But those women would have given birth to children with Vietnamese fathers, in intact families, in a comparitively intact country. (The exception being, I suppose, women who didn't want children, and only gave birth because they were raped by soldiers.)
With two million dead, it's kind of hard to see an upside of the war for the Vietnamese.
"With two million dead, it's kind of hard to see an upside of the war for the Vietnamese."
True for the majority--an argument could be made for the ones who eventually fled to the USA and other countries--it seems to be hard to find good numbers but half a million may have done so.
Refugees fleeing their homeland is an upside? I'm sure for many of them their standard of living is higher in the US, and their kids may be glad to be born here (aren't we all), but I doubt many refugees saw leaving everything they knew and cared about behind them as an "upside of the war."
An extra factor to toss in is that Vietnam was very much the "poor men sent to fight the rich men's war" situation. Birthrates negatively correlate with wealth, so the dead guys likely would have reproduced at a rate at least slightly higher than the average population.
Of course, it's not like the world NEEDS more people at this point. It's more a matter of "the next Einstein/Ghandi/whatever" never happening because the dad whose genes would have contributed to that person died. And that presumes a fair amount of genetic determinism.
"Refugees fleeing their homeland is an upside? I'm sure for many of them their standard of living is higher in the US, and their kids may be glad to be born here (aren't we all), but I doubt many refugees saw leaving everything they knew and cared about behind them as an "upside of the war."
I wasn't trying to make it out as a happy event, just another tricky factor. I mean, the Irish Potato famine was one of the most horrific events in European history but it ultimately resulted in a good many us (like me) being here. It certainly had a positive result on our country (think of all the cops from Bugs Bunny cartoons who never would have been born).
Another mind-bending factor to throw in the mix. A total of about 4 million served in the Vietnam and surrounding countries, meaning they were overseas for 1-2 years. How many births did not take place because of those prolonged absences?
Of course, it can be assumed that many made up for lost time later on. But still, the extent to which the deck was reshuffled by foriegn policy is incalculable...
Wrap your heads around this then.
How about those(me) who think when the Yanks left that was a terrible mistake leaving Viet Nam to early, Thus leaving the area unprotected. 1+2-5=the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians.
How many births did not take place because of those prolonged absences?
For that matter, how many did? My cousin Myung-Hui Murphy (nee Bradshaw), for instance... :-)
Well, since I am a mathematician - and a math teacher to boot - I feel compelled to reply.
Rather than get caught up in the "What If?" game - fun in a closed fictional universe, but futile with a data set of one - let's turn to the numbers:
Current Population:
295404967
(Population clock at www.census.gov. Our national birth rate is still above the death rate, but nearly half our growth is from immigration.)
Population at End of Vietnam War:
215973199
(Also from www.census.gov. Technically it is an estimate of the population of the US on July 1, 1975.)
This gives us an exponential growth rate of:
k = ln(P2/P1)/t = 2.89645E-05 (per day)
US Caualties in Vietnam:
58235
(From http://thewall-usa.com/stats/, and including the 67 additional names. Note these are military casualties only. But we aren't playing the "What if the grandson of an 'Economic Advisor' would have been the one to cure cancer?" game.)
Putting all those lives back into circulation in 1975 (yes, some would have died anyway, but someone else would have died from the car that hit them when they weren't there to be hit - no What If) gives a modified base population of:
216031434
For a new 2005 population of:
P2' = P1'exp(kt) = 295484620
Or an overall increase of ~79653 individuals.
But since we are playing with cold (mostly) hard numbers here, I am also compelled to point out that The total casualties in Vietnam comprised on 0.027% of the 1975 population. And the theoretical increase is basically the same percentage of the real 2005 population. Even giving Vietnam the same time as the Holocaust - sixty years since 1945 - the increase is only 109204, and the same percentage. (The Schindler Jews, assuming those numbers are accurate for 2005, have a growth rate of more than twice the post-Vietnam America.)
6000 new lives is a lot when you have just lost 6000000. But the real effects of Vietnam should be measured in social change, not population numbers.
David, I admire your intelligence. Great stuff. I have only one question--when you use the USA population at the end of the war and compare it to the current population to get the exponential growth rate, is it important to distinguish between growth due to birth rate vs death rate and growth due to immigration? My understanding is that the largest part of our growth rate is due to people entering the country.
This whole thing has been fascinating. I don't know if PAD started it to research a plot point, satisfy a curiosity or make a political point but I'm glad he did.
Okay, Peter, one more thought about this. The U.S. lost 300,000 in World War II, yet had a record baby boom that followed over the next two decades. In this case, war resulted in more US births than what would have otherwise occurred (beyond simple "pent-up demand"). Was this the case with Vietnam? I don't know, but significant events in history such as wars can have unpredictable and paradoxical outcomes years in the future.
You also have the conflicting factors of new permissiveness on sex and single parentage vs greater availability of birth control. One could argue that the former was at least in part a social change fostered by the war...
Imagine if we could peer into other dimensions, universes where, as some have surmised, infinite other possibilities exist, a universe for every path that could be taken. How amazing would it be to see all the consequences of events good and bad...of course, any civilization that discovered such an ability would itself be relegated to irrelevance; everyone would be so busy watching events on other worlds that they would end up having none of their own...
"but I doubt many refugees saw leaving everything they knew and cared about behind them as an 'upside of the war.'"
Why do you assume that (apparently the majority of) those whom were leaving Vietnam after the war were leaving behind everything they knew and cared about?
Maybe they're leaving because what they knew was getting trampled and what they cared about was dead.
On the other hand maybe they left because they knew what was happening and cared that it didn't happen to their children.
I don't assume that the majority of refugees are expatriates desiring to go back.
"Of course, it's not like the world NEEDS more people at this point."
Ah, so you're saying that the world truly is more in danger of overpopulation than underpopulation.
How's the birthrate doing now now compared to... say... thirty years ago? Forty?
We're probably not suffering much from underpopulation HERE but I doubt that we'd have too much trouble getting the food for a few hundred million more Americans.
China, actually, IS suffering from underpopulation. ooooo. ironic.
If I knew anything about math I wouldn't have pissed away thousands on a liberal arts education in college, but one thing I DO know is that Jerry Seinfeld made out with a chick during "Schindler's List," and that's just plain WRONG!
P.S. PAD--Finally got a chance to read your last 6 issues of "Supergirl" in its compilation format and, I must say, I now understand that all the praise heaped upon this story arc was much deserved. Of course, speaking of "just plain wrong," seeing Linda and Supes giving each other tongues sure took me aback for a moment but, as soon as the context was explained, I felt much less icky.
""Of course, it's not like the world NEEDS more people at this point."
Ah, so you're saying that the world truly is more in danger of overpopulation than underpopulation."
No, not a problem form a resource point of a view, but HUGE over-population from a society point of view.
Not enough resources in a world of "Everyman for himself" and "He who dies with most toys wins" like we live in now...
""Of course, it's not like the world NEEDS more people at this point."
Ah, so you're saying that the world truly is more in danger of overpopulation than underpopulation."
No, not a problem form a resource point of a view, but HUGE over-population from a society point of view.
Not enough resources in a world of "Everyman for himself" and "He who dies with most toys wins" like we live in now...
This is seriously off topic, but someone asked.
I'm sure there must be some sci fi stories where a time traveler goes back in time to kill Hitler and the result is that someone else takes his place, someone with as great a desire for world conquest but without Hitler's ultimately fatal stupidity. So who knows?
Try Making History by Stephen Fry (yes, Melchett from Blackadder Seasons 2-4). It's actually an interesting novel on several levels, because Fry makes the assumption that his altered timeline is worse than history as it happened, and it's not clear that he's right.