If the shifts cost a few billion dollars, that likely would hard to measure. So I guess the question is what rises to “real” ill effects, and what is “ludicrously massive”. I think most people would consider the shift in population from Africa to America during the seventeenth and eighteenth century to have involved significant real ill effect, and that involved only a small fraction of the global population.
The ill effect had very little to do with the shipping, and a whole lot to do with what was done with the people who were shipped. If the sugar plantations had been in Sierra Leone, it wouldn’t have been any more humane.
Population shifts in the last century have been ludicrously massive, with no real ill effect. If there’s climatological reason, we can do so again.
If the shifts cost a few billion dollars, that likely would hard to measure. So I guess the question is what rises to “real” ill effects, and what is “ludicrously massive”. I think most people would consider the shift in population from Africa to America during the seventeenth and eighteenth century to have involved significant real ill effect, and that involved only a small fraction of the global population.
The ill effect had very little to do with the shipping, and a whole lot to do with what was done with the people who were shipped. If the sugar plantations had been in Sierra Leone, it wouldn’t have been any more humane.