Is the Era of Great Famines Over?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If anyone is reading this and wants to help with the crisis situation there, please donate to The Denan Project[1] which is basically the only aid group on the ground. All the majors (Oxfam, ICRC, etc) have been awol during this year's extreme drought (worst in more than 30 years). 100% of donations go to directly supporting people with food and water aid, medical aid (we built the only clinic for hundreds of miles) and other direct support. All overhead costs are already covered by the very generous, selfless folks behind The Denan Project.
Dick Young, founder of The Denan Project wrote a letter to the editor response to this same article by Alex de Waal in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/ethiopia-and-the-e...
The world is as it has always been; some things are getting better in some places, other things getting worse elsewhere, and in many places the status quo is largely continued. Making such sweeping declarations like the article does merely serves to turn extremely nuanced and interconnected systems into black and white judgement calls. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to why that is, and why it's being printed in the NYT.
https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment/#ref-...
I think it is important to acknowledge successes so that we don't falsely believe we are failing and as a result, reject systems that are working.
1. Many large nations already heavily subsidise food for food security as it stands. We need to avoid butter mountains and milk lakes because it's wasteful.
2. Many first world countries already feed their population to high school level anyway.
2. A national plan for good, healthy, free food will prompt people to eat properly, on average it would encourage responsible eating (you can only get so big eating potatoes, broccoli and meat, it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous).
3. Job Automation is going to change our work situations anyway, within 5 years alone we'll have taxi drivers and hauliers without jobs. Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.
4. If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves maybe we could concentrate on what's more important, like getting to mars or something.
I'm going to continue objecting to this idea. Maybe by 2050, but I'd bet $10,000 that this will not happen in 5 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification
I don't think anyone says level 5 autonomy in bad weather is close.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/04/nvidia-and-audi-aim-to-bri...
That's just the first few stories, and autonomous driving is already in the works - don't expect these companies are starting from zero.
You don't need to replace 100 percent of the cars. You only need to replace 5 percent of them.
> it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous
It's this kind of ignorance that makes me not want some bureaucrat deciding what everyone eats and making me pay for it.
As an aside, did you see the article posted here yesterday about how the FDA just redacted their long-standing advice about cholesterol? The government is operating almost as ascientifically as the general public, making laws and declarations based on extremely weak predictions.
> Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.
We'll also remove one of the biggest cost centers in food production, so feeding unemployed people will be, remarkably, even easier and we still won't need a state-controlled feeding apparatus.
> If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves
No one in the first world needs to struggle to eat. Eating healthy is dirt cheap; many people just don't know how to do it. Instead of bringing back soviet bread lines, we could just teach people practical stuff like how to eat healthily and affordably.
No kidding. I remember the "old" Food Pyramid. For decades, you saw that everywhere - in school, doctors' offices, wherever. "8-10 servings a day of bread, pasta, rice, corn, cereal. Carbs carbs carbs! Fats are the enemy!"
And now, it's "oh, maybe that wasn't such good advice for everybody, hm, okay....but you can totally trust our New Food Pyramid! Yay!"
No thanks.
The fallacies around dietary guidelines have been known to the scientific community for over 15 years at least. I read that article when it was in the original issue and I was dumbfounded by the slapdash way nutrition guidelines are established with minimal proof.
Half of all food in the US is thrown away. We don't have a food production problem, we have a resource allocation problem. Humans are notoriously bad at resource allocation.
I remember working in a produce warehouse, and due to some clever particularities of our non-profit status, we were allowed to give away surplus produce to employees with no liability. I don't think we ever threw out anything except old bananas; it all got taken home.
This is a terrible idea in my opinion, because you are going to end up subsidizing population growth in areas that aren't naturally capable of supporting that number of people. Thus you'll create a never-ending dependency on free food, which will result in even more human suffering when the free food inevitably goes away for some reason.
Ethically, this is a really frightening argument. Same argument with different words: We have to have people hungering to death to provide a disincentive for population growth.
Besides, food availability doesn't really affect population growth (upwards of a certain lower bound, of course). The most effective way to lower birthrates is readily available female education.
Not to endorse GP's point, but people move to places with income / food before they start to starve. Like, this scenario plays out a million times a day with old ladies that put a bunch of cat food outside their house, after a couple decades there's 10x as many cats living in a 100 metre radius and the lady dies and then shortly after all the cats die too, of hunger or killed by the municipality. With no old lady to begin with the cats wouldn't have starved, they'd just spread out over a larger area so that they don't have to compete over other sources of food like vermin or trash.
People who have lots of children usually don't know how to have fewer plus they fear that many of their children will die before adulthood. They also rely on their children to be their "retirement fund". All these aspects are changing across the world.
This has been observed again and again in scientific studies.
It seems to me that the prudent thing to do would be to extend this stuff to those areas. These things include better sanitation and medical care to lower mortality rates - especially among children - and making sure comprehensive sex education and contraception is both readily available and used.
This is one potential post-scarcity future: Big corporations sponsor whole villages, just on the off chance that a genius is born to that population who will then work for the corporation.
Unlike the many non-geniuses born over many centuries whose career choices were pre-determined by the social status of the family they grew up in, and the fact neither they nor [later] their parents would have anything to eat if they left the village to seek their fortune elsewhere...
And when the AI can replace those villagers? Isn't it more cost effective to just stop providing food?
That's about as handwavingly ignorant as the government nutritional guidelines. You can get as big as you want eating potatoes, broccoli, and meat if you eat enough of it. Likewise you can remain perfectly thin eating only processed food. Portion control and learning how well your body reacts and processes different foods is the best we can tell so far.
This is how a ketogenic diet works (high fat, moderate protein, low/no carbs). It is ridiculously effective.
Edit: Just as a follow-up I seriously doubt we could feed the entire world if we all adopted a keto diet. Carbs are cheap.
So maybe we need to spend more on agriculture subsidizing healthy foods instead of funding the wrong agriculture subsidies that increase healthcare spending?
And yes, I take every opportunity when its relevant to mention a healthy diet.
Potentially healthy diet. I don't mean to be pedantic here, and as someone who has adopted a keto diet I think it's far better than the standard american diet. Clearly it stops obesity, we know the body doesn't synthesize fat if there aren't any carbs. But the same thing can be accomplished with some exercise and portion control. Still from mine and others experience it seems to help with issues like concentration and constant fatigue.
But at the end of the day we don't completely know the effects of keto long-term, the same as we didn't really know the effects of a high carb diet long-term, especially in terms of overconsumption. Overconsumption of carbs will definitely lead to obesity and health problems, but it's possible that long-term overconsumption of fats/proteins may have their own effects (though not obesity). We also largely don't know what effects a keto diet will have on childhood development, perhaps there are parts of the brain or body that don't develop as well without a moderate amount of carbs in the diet.
We do know people have adopted keto long-term without any apparent issues (those who suffer from certain types of seizures), but it hasn't been adopted on a large enough scale over time to see the effects on a population like we have from the large scale adoption of high carb diets.
I think there's too much going on between genetics, gut biomes, and lifestyle to really say keto is a healthy diet for everyone. Those promoting keto should be cognizant of our deficiencies in knowledge while still promoting the benefits.
tl;dr IMO it's too early to flat out say keto is a healthy diet, especially when extrapolating that statement to the entire population (though I don't think you were).
We see over and over that cash assistance is preferable to providing goods (like food or housing) directly.
It's optimized to produce cheap, addictive food because that's what the people crave. Much like Brawndo.
How do you propose to do better by having the government mandate specific foods?
I don't propose the government mandate anything. I propose the government give out good, healthy food for free. The market can continue to compete for people who wish to participate in it. Food is already subsidized heavily. So what if we give a certain amount of it for free to anyone who wants it.
So the burden is on you to propose a system that would be less-wasteful than our current method of destributing produce. Government-run systems can be more efficient (see: NHS), but the details matter.
EDIT: by details, I mean the specifics of "give people food". If putting it on their doorstep every morning, is it already cooked? Who chooses what is in the packages? How do you know how many people live somewhere? Can I use the unretreived packages to find empty houses to rob?
I strongly disagree with the concept that another person knows better than I do which food I should eat or how I should otherwise live my life.
That said, there should be more education around nutrition. Even free healthy food doesn't help anything if people are too dumb to choose it over junk.
A significant portion of human beings are wired for addiction. It's a fiction to claim that people are all free and are responsible for every choice that they make. We for instance control market on all drugs that have any potential for addiction, food has a potential for addiction for lots of people. If people are so free to choose to stay healthy and eat well, then why are all drugs not freely available to anyone who wants them. Opiates, benzos, etc.
No one is saying that anyone else should tell you what to eat. I am simply saying that free food that is healthy should be freely available. No friction and no excuses to not eat healthy. And economically there is a huge incentive to eat that free food as it's free.
But they are a great example of just how useless it is trying to control people. Heroin is illegal, yet overdoses are at an all time high. A lot of people only end up on heroin because it's so difficult to get less powerful opiate pain killers. Prohibition doesn't work. People are going to do what they want to do anyway.
Some portion of the population are going to make really stupid decisions no matter what. The rest of us need to get over it and stop trying to "help" them if they don't want it.
Nobody makes the absolute best decisions every single time, but in general they certainly make better decisions for themselves than a stranger.
But to the previous commenter's point, free food is exactly how you end up with famines. We are NOT beyond the era of great famines. Food production rose faster than population in the 20th century but there is only so much land, so much sunlight. It will catch up. When there are good times, people multiply. Poverty is inherent to nature -- some bears are born rich (big and strong), while others scrape by their entire lives, and may or may not reproduce. If they all had as much salmon as they wanted, their population would increase until there was poverty again. Same principle, in the long term at least. Only workaround is eugenics, and I would rather have freedom to reproduce and poverty than totalitarianism and the "theoretical promise" of no poverty.
I believe that healthcare is a basic human right.
Equally good healthcare for everyone, independent of their wealth, is a worthwhile goal for society, and all but one of the so-called developed countries have pretty much achieved it.
That's a nice fantasy, but it's also a fantasy. If you think Canada has equal healthcare for all, then please explain why various prime ministers and EU dignitaries come to the US for major operations.
On a tangent, I do think the US has an arguably worse healthcare system than some of these socialist countries, but not because the socialist system is good -- it's because we have such a distorted market. We have Medicare/Medicaid which basically social healthcare, almost any prescription for $5, but it's even worse than social healthcare because it only applies to some of the population, driving prices up for those who don't yet qualify. We have overbearing occupational licensing. It is TOO hard to become a doctor. We have overbearing malpractice regulation -- a huge percentage of a doctor's salary goes to malpractice insurance, making regulators/lawyers richer. We have a stifling FDA, which combined with our over-powered IP system grants monopolies to drug companies and enables price gouging.
We have nothing resembling a free healthcare market, my friend, so don't blame capitalism for America's problems.
Health care requires someone else to do something to provide it. Therefore it isn't a basic human right.
Reminds me I still have my unread copy of Nozick gathering dust.
That is your definition. If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1], the definition they employ is much broader. E.g.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health
and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing,
housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to
security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood,
old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.
All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social
protection.
Humans need a lot more than food to "reproduce". And there's plenty of proof that as people move up the pyramid of needs having a litany of kids becomes a chore few people want.
Yes, the population will increase until 2010 by most estimates, but it will increase at a decreasing rate.
And if as animals driven by evolution we have 1-2 kids per couple we still achieve our evolutionary goal while maintaining balance with nature.
educate me here. but ignoring government healthcare, wouldn't private healthcare companies have higher costs for health conscious members if many of their members are making poor health decisions?
if someone chooses to smoke cigarettes and ends up getting lung cancer, I don't feel great about paying for their lung transplant even with private healthcare.
The money these people spend on insurance could have been better spent elsewhere in the economy.
Must we worship at the altar of the free market a priori?
The "free market" in the case of food has had disastrous health consequences by optimizing for profits over health. The entire incentive structure is to manufacture foods with an addictive quality out of the cheapest possible ingredients, because the negative health outcomes are too distant and dilute to be factored in in any meaningful way. There is a marketing advantage to claiming some processed food is healthy, and there is ample science available that can be distilled down into an unending cycle of specious claims that fall apart on the mildest inspection, but who really has the time to evaluate those claims anyway?
That's not to say government regulation is a silver bullet, but the government does ostensibly represent the people, and what other organization has the clout to balance out the fundamentally broken incentive structures within the food industry?
The parent commenter is right, the free market optimizes for cheap and addictive because it's what sells and what will continue producing sales for many years. There's absolutely no incentive for companies to produce even cheap healthy food because the addictive qualities are a much more secure bet that your customer will come back to your food in the future.
Easily debatable.
Not that we should be providing government healthcare anyway.
Also debatable, and if single-payer healthcare does exist it implicitly means that obesity has an effect on others. It's silly to take liberalism to an extreme.
there is only so much land, so much sunlight
Land used for agriculture has actually stayed the same or slightly declined since 1990.
When there are good times, people multiply
Evidence suggests that in developed economies, people do precisely the opposite.
there are good times, people multiply. Poverty is inherent to nature -- some bears are born rich (big and strong), while others scrape by their entire lives, and may or may not reproduce. If they all had as much salmon as they wanted, their population would increase until there was poverty again.
Humans are not bears. A large number of people have essentially unlimited access to food, and yet done reproduce en masse. I expect, though I haven't looked, that birth rates would actually inversely correlated with wealth.
Only workaround is eugenics
You have failed to demonstrate a problem to be worked around.
I would rather have freedom to reproduce and poverty than totalitarianism and the "theoretical promise" of no poverty
A preposterous non sequitur, given that it's quite possible to imagine ways to eliminate poverty without reverting to totalitarianism.
You should look, then. Wealth is positively correlated with fertility.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1692/2015...
What's inversely correlated with fertility is education, but fertility declines with rising education only because parents realize it is advantageous to spend more resources per child.
> Evidence suggests that in developed economies, people do precisely the opposite.
That's because you're arguing from a false premise. Perceptively, then, maybe things are not as good as you would think (especially not as good as people in the SV developer bubble think), otherwise people would multiply at a much higher rate. I implore you to do some actual math to see how much one needs to earn to be able to have kids above the replacement rate (so, around 2.2), without receiving any government assistance (thus entering a poverty trap) and where that earning rate resides relative to the median household income in the US right now.
The results may surprise you.
> A preposterous non sequitur, given that it's quite possible to imagine ways to eliminate poverty without reverting to totalitarianism.
One great way to eliminate poverty is to keep redefining the poverty line until there are no longer people in poverty! And it's completely totalitarianism-free.
In this case you should consider: who is hurting whom? The research of Ariely and the experimental results of the marketing industry have made it clear that your choice to buy soda is not simply a transaction between yourself and the grocery store. It involves the government’s need for cheap calories to prevent social unrest, and it involves the sugar industry’s ongoing efforts to keep carbohydrate overloads socially acceptable. Soda is the industry hurting you.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/the-food-industry-is-...
Sure, but "a third party intervening in prices is the antithesis of a price system where the producer sets their own price" is an empty tautology without any argument for why the world is better off for people being able to obtain soda more cheaply and balancing the budget with a non-distortionary poll tax instead.
Similarly,if you're going to make sub-Malthusian arguments that free food is "exactly how you end up with famines" it would help if you could name one example of a famine significantly influenced by prior availability of free food. In the interests of fairness, I'll name three that definitely weren't: the Irish potato famine, the Holodomor and the Bengal famine. Developed countries are a long way ahead of the era where free food is likely to have a statistically significant effect on the birth rate and all the data would suggest causality ran in the opposite direction with birthrates having fallen sharply against a backdrop of increasing access to better nutrition and increasing universal welfare access. It's developing countries, where people have to ensure enough surviving descendants to guarantee they continue to be fed in old age, that are the ones with the higher birthrates and rapidly growing populations...
Soda tax is a way (albeit a somewhat flawed one) for state and local governments to nullify the effects of agricultural grain subsidies, which is something I wholeheartedly support. If rural constituencies have a right to spend urban tax money to support their crops, then urban constituencies have a right to claw that money back with a tax on products made with those crops. Now, if the federal government dropped all grain subsidies tomorrow, I'd drop my support for a soda tax.
> It will catch up.
No it won't--TFRs have been dropping across the world for a few decades now, and soon it will be at or below the replacement rate. People don't have kids for shits and giggle or just because they can--it's just that in the past, for agricultural and pastoral societies children were short-term investments, not long-term ones, and child mortality was high, so having more kids==better. It takes a while to shed traditional wisdom, but it does happen.
> I would rather have freedom to reproduce and poverty than totalitarianism and the "theoretical promise" of no poverty
Speak for yourself. If I had to give up reproductive freedom in exchange for prosperity and all other freedoms, I'd do so in a heartbeat. You don't need to control every aspect of citizens' lives in order for them to have less children.
Maybe you should visit India or the Philippines and let me know how soon you expect that cultural shift to hit them. Something happening in your world does not equal global paradigm shift. The western world is not "the world." I do agree that it's happening in western Europe, though.
I was speaking for myself (in case you missed the use of "I"). You go ahead and believe all the promises that strongmen tell you in exchange for little bits of freedom. The NSA, FDA, etc. will take care of you. Sleep easy champ.
Oh we in the cities would love to get rid of the subsidies, but rural areas are overrepresented under our political systems. Clawing back the subsidies is the second-best option.
> Maybe you should visit India or the Philippines and let me know how soon you expect that cultural shift to hit them.
It's hitting them already. India's TFR is down to 2.4, which is pretty close to replacement, and while the Philippines is still at 3 or so, it's still down from 6-7 a generation ago.
> The NSA, FDA, etc. will take care of you. Sleep easy champ.
I had to live under the Ministry of State Security and the People's Armed Police for the first decade of my life. Compared to those guys, NSA are a bunch of cuddly teddy bears. Hell, they can't even arrest anybody!
The US has a bit over 315 million people.
To pay everyone minimum (barely livable) wage, every person should get $15,000 ( http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-full... ). That's $4.5 trillion per year.
The GDP of the US is 16.77 trillion.
So unless we have close to 100% tax on above-(federal) minimum wage, UBI won't work.
Even if you want full basic income, I'd argue that $15,000 is high. As a (Canadian) student in an expensive city my living expenses (everything but tuition) are easily under $10,000 USD. Using the numbers you linked we're almost certainly talking about less than $8,000/person to keep everyone above the poverty line (the exact number depends on what the average family unit looks like, which I don't know).
(All numbers per year)
You rent a room or have a few room-mates?
New York (which has skyscrapers) average rent is $3000 a month for a one bedroom apartment.
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/map-of-average-rent-by-...
There's a reason minimum wage is so high, and it's not because the government is so generous.
New york is a really expensive place to live, the conclusion is that people who are relying on only basic income shouldn't live there. Likewise living alone is expensive. The conclusion is people living only on basic income shouldn't (especially if they are living somewhere which is already well above average pricing wise). Basic income isn't "everyone lives a luxurious life", it's "everyone can afford food, clothes, and a roof over their heads".
Four years ago Google said they would have a driverless car for sale in 3-5 years. That means we'll see it any day now, right? Probably not. What makes you think the next five years will be any different?
Nuclear fusion is always 20 years away and self driving cars are always 5 years away. I don't see that trend stopping any time soon.
> we'll have taxi drivers and hauliers without jobs. Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.
In the US, truck drivers account for about 1% of the workforce, and there are only ~200,000 taxi drivers in total. Even if the employment rate goes up by several percentage points, it will still be below periods in the past. Serious problem seems a little overdramatic. Worse storms have been weathered.
This is a side tangent, but do you have a source for that? I'm only curious because it has seemed to me most makers of autonomous vehicles, and in particular google, were overly cautious with their estimates and have been repeatedly beating them.
This will lead to a situation where once you start giving them food, you won't be able to stop or it will devastate the economy and people will starve.
It's better to give local businesses and farmers the tools and knowledge to grow the food instead. This way, they won't be completely dependent on another nation for survival.
Many of these poor countries have governments that rule with an iron fist and make it nearly impossible for anyone to thrive. This problem needs to be fixed first, or all of our other ideas will only end up hurting them in the long run.
Clear and concise. If you believe in climate change, we really could just be entering a new Great Famine Age. Especially since the US sits at the bottom of the food chain for most of the world (grain exports).
I mean, you have to be truly incompetent to be next door to China for the last thirty years and think "nah, we shouldn't do reforms - wouldn't want to lose our luxuries as members of the political class!"
Or perhaps you are one of those cynical people who think all forms of government are equally bad.
- The poor are getting less poor. Famine is less harsh and UN reports lower poverty levels for the bottom 10%. There are severaly explanation, basically the poorer benefit from the globla growth and global scientific advance. Of course it's limited because of patents and other hindrance, but we should not deny the globlal trend.
- The rich are getting richer, that's exact, but it's also because the population is increasing and the top people today serve bigger economic interests than 50 years ago (whether it be Snapchat for beginner CEOs or Tesla for traditional CEOs).
Hence, maybe the spread between the rich and the poor widens, but that's not what the proverb denounces, and the proverb is wrong. The proverb specifically says the poor are getting poorer, which is widely false. Moreover the variation of gap is not demonstratedly unfair.
I think typically when people say that they mean within their own country, not globally. And in some Western countries if we look at the very recent trend (last 10-20 years) I think they have somewhat of a point. The poor are mostly stagnant while the rich are getting much richer and those in the middle are generally getting poorer. The proverb may be technically incorrect, but the sentiment behind it may not be all that far off.
Why? Because we still have political strife in the world, and political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years.
If anything our political systems are gearing us up for even more devastating famines, as countries turn inward and more oppressive.
And there's no obvious reason why productivity will be going down in most places in the world, nor why transportation should be getting more expensive. I think short-term oscillations in political fortunes are not a very good marker of these things.
We absolutely have not had "enough food to feed the world for centuries", nor the means to transport it. In 1800, worldwide GDP per capita was barely above $1000 USD (current, PPP), and by 1900, just over $2000. The supposed surpluses simply did not exist. Ship transport was still relatively inefficient, and overland transport was extremely expensive in a world where ~80% of people lived in small rural communities with no paved roads between them, and even where roads did exist, they were of poor quality. The food surpluses and easy transport we see today are really quite a recent development, well within the 20th century.
that's more people than were alive globally in 1700 [1]. looks like the last 300 years have been a complete catastrophe with respect to hunger.
[0] https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
[1] https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpo...
No, what I'm saying is, if you're trying to figure out "how well we're doing" at solving some particular problem, then you have to look at proportions. Any group of humans will suffer various things, the point is to decrease the likelihood that they do. If there's a group of ten people, and five are hungry, then they're doing worse on that metric than a group of a hundred people where five are hungry. This doesn't change when the groups you're looking at are "humans in past" and "humans presently".
> In 1987, .... We reached a simple conclusion: When farmers could bring foodstuffs to points of sale — when the roads were clear of army checkpoints, when markets were held at night to reduce the risk of being bombed — the local economy worked efficiently enough. With markets in operation, the production of local crops increased, and food prices fell to levels people could afford.
> Ending famine required ending fighting.
Seems capitalism improved things once the government got around to providing basic security.
Regardless, the paragraph you quoted merely states that once people were once again free to trade their goods for food without being threatened with death more people got fed. Capitalism has literally nothing to do with that, people have been trading goods for foodstuffs for millennia. When they say "markets" they're not talking about the fever dreams of a U Chicago professor, they mean physical locations where goods are bought and sold which are just as much a condition of feudalism as they are capitalism.