The 1755 Lisbon earthquake made two-thirds of a prosperous city uninhabitable. Among European intellectuals, the disaster inspired widespread doubts about the beneficence of the deity and a fear that human effort was vain against the powers of nature. The former issue remains open, but Friday’s earthquake in Japan and tsunami will show that people can indeed limit the damage from what insurers call acts of God.

It is too soon to estimate the loss of life or the cost of reconstruction, but the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, provides a reasonable template. That quake killed about 0.4 per cent of the population. Risk Management Solutions, experts in catastrophe risk, estimates that it took 3 per cent of Japan’s gross domestic product to get Kobe back into shape. Those are sizable numbers, but small fractions of the 15-20 per cent loss of population and the 30-50 per cent of Portuguese GDP needed to rebuild Lisbon two centuries earlier, according to Alvaro Pereira, a professor at Simon Fraser University.

The proportionally lesser damage is a result of two basic resources abundantly available in modern industrial economies. The first is knowledge. Engineers keep learning more about how to make structures earthquake-resistant. The Kobe experience inspired revisions in building and planning practices, so the latest quake will do less damage than it would have done two decades ago.