> Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of people lived in what we'd today call "soul-crushing poverty", and it wasn't uncommon to have bad harv

> Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of people lived in what we'd today call "soul-crushing poverty", and it wasn't uncommon to have bad harvest years where a couple percent of a nation's population starved to death. On a historical level what’s unusual about the Irish Great Famine of 1845-48 isn’t that a quarter of the population died, it’s that that was the last time that happened.