Tyrannies are inefficient economically, which causes a lot of death to occur which would not otherwise occur. It causes needless deaths.
Using this aspect of tyranny, you can develop a critical threshold level of crude death rates compared to the world, in order to detect whether or not you live under a tyranny, rather than merely living under a republic with a leader who only appears to be ominous.
Recent tyrannies include China in 1961, Cambodia in 1977, Soviet Russia in 1990, and they can be used as a benchmark. When their crude deaths get compared to the world death rate, a common feature is that they surpass the world rate by at least 25%.
Cambodia, the nation which was small enough and poor enough when adopting Communism so as to get it the absolute most-fully implemented of all nations — even including Russia and China — had the absolute worst-ever death rate (in 1977) which has ever been recorded:
Because the USA met this crude standard for tyranny in 2020 (having a death rate at least 25% higher than the world average), it was added to the graph above. The crude death rate for the world in 2020 was 7.7 deaths per 1000 population.
But the crude death rate for the USA in 2020 was 10.3 deaths per 1000 population:
Some countries have a much older age structure, so that the percentage of the population which is elderly may even exceed 20%. This is the case for Sweden. But even with a greater share of their population who is elderly, crude death in Sweden in 2020 didn’t exceed 9.5 deaths per 1000 population.
This means that Sweden didn’t make it to the critical threshold of having a crude death rate at least 25% higher than the world average death rate, though if it had made it, adjusting for an excess share of people who are elderly may have been in order.
Evidence suggests that the United States has become a tyranny now, and that precautions will be needed going forward, in order to attempt to reverse the accelerating centralization of profit and power in the USA.
The crude relative excess death in the USA in 2020 (34% higher than the world rate) has now surpassed that of Communist China in 1961 (28% higher than world rate) and even that of Soviet Russia in 1990 (30% higher than the world rate).
Let’s hope that continued centralization of profit and power in the USA do not make our crude death rate exceed that of Communist nations any more than it already has.