EmpiricalRequires evidence

Famine killed through disease rather than through starvation, and the signature is a one-year lag. Kelly and Grada: before twentieth-century advances in public health, starvation-induced mortality was not an individual fate, because after bad harvests the poor migrated in search of work or charity, spreading disease and social disorder. Noble and commoner mortality correlate closely during famine, with noble deaths lagging commoner deaths by about a year, because bad harvests produced vagrancy, which multiplied disease vectors in a population already weakened by malnutrition. The poorest died immediately; everyone else died a year later of the epidemic.

Risk landscape