alt Hacker NewsI find the article's dismissal of population collapses rather dishonest.
There is no doubt that urban centres basically disappeared after collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and that population density went significantly down. Once the city-based specialists were gone, so was any ability of rural folk to buy anything that could not be produced by primitive methods in their own community. And without an efficient trade network, there was no way to import food if local crops failed. Hence, famines, which the previous empire was mostly able to hold in check by moving food over the sea at big distances.
A major problem of the Early Middle Ages was diminished security - all those Viking, Avar, Hun and Pecheneg raids were absolutely real, and their targets weren't "the 1%". Of course loot from the rich would be taken, but so would poor young women for sex and their children into slavery, and their meagre food reserves for the raiders to eat. That is what happens to settled people without an efficient defense of their borders.
We have had two big imperial collapses right in Europe within living memory - the Nazi Reich (by war) and the Soviet Union (economic). Ask the survivors if they "noticed". They absolutely did. I would even say that the working class "noticed" the most, as they usually had fewest reserves to survive the subsequent chaos.
It wasn't that different in the past.
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I noted the data point of the civil war in Syria: 20 times as many people moved as were killed. That's good news as far as it goes - to run is better than to die - but that doesn't make the Syrian civil war a good time for the people involved. They were running for a reason - the threat of death was too high if they stayed put. So they left. They left their homes, their belongings, their jobs, and ran to a very uncertain future somewhere else.
So I'm not sure that "the death toll wasn't that high" should be casually interpreted as "it wasn't that bad for regular people". Yes, most of them lived. That doesn't make it benign.
(Hmm, I seem to have used a lot of dashes in the first paragraph. No, I'm not an AI.)
It was far worse in the past, for the reasons you mentioned about security in particular. This is when we see the rise of castles and fortresses and the feudal system.
The Nazi Reich was very short lived (12ish years) and after its collapse, Western Germany was in a better place. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a bigger deal, as people had lived a few generations under the communist system and had to adapt rather suddenly to market economics and new governance. No doubt there was a shock period, but by and large people's lives got better. This is largely because of how globalized we are in modern day.
The Dark Ages lasted for hundreds of years and were a regression in quality of life for vast majority of western europe.
they are on point regarding people moving rather than dying, but that kinda proves the point that situations can and do get worse sometimes for a whole generation.
I don't think the people in Latvia, Lithuania Estonia, Finnland, Germany, Hungary, Georgia, Ukraine etc pp et al were particularly sad about not being ruled from Moscow anymore. You could even say they grew happier, healthier, taller and had less dental cavities.