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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> despite living in a rich planet people are starving

A overused rhetoric that does not hold much ground when you realize that poverty is decreasing fast everywhere around, and faster than we expected it to.

https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-...

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The way we measure a "decreasing poverty" is extremely laden politically (like most things that are supposedly "neutrally evaluated" are supposed to be, just because they're represented as spreadsheets of numbers).

We consider that a villager living from subsistence farming and therefore having almost no use for money to be part of the very poor, less than 1$/day crowd.

Take this same peasant and send it working for some multinational company harvesting cocoa or sugar cane, under horrible, exploitative conditions for 2$ a day, and bam! poverty has been halved!

Ditto if you send him and his family in some shanty town collecting plastic on a rubbish pile, feeding on refuse : he's now making 3$ a day, poverty decreased again!

What is called "lifting out of poverty" is actually "making them a cog of a worldwide, money-based economy". That's a mixed blessing, to say the least.

If subsistence farming is preferable to being a cog in a market economy, why aren’t people switching in the opposite direction?

Well, for one, that would require you to be able to have land to do so. I would be shocked if many of these people had an actual, freely available choice on the matter.

Assume you live in a "first-world" nation, how do you propose to become a subsistence farmer?

Buy cheap land out in the middle of nowhere and start farming enough to provide food for yourself and some excess to pay expenses. There is a reason people don't do that.

The thing is, being a cog in the capitalist wheel really _is_ preferable to subsistence farming. The reality of subsistence farming is that you're living with no access to healthcare, education, often subject to food insecurity, and often lacking in basic utilities like electricity and clean water. Subsistence farming isn't all hunky dory like the Hobbits in the Shire. There's a reason people choose to escape it when given the chance

I have no idea how to find it again, but I read an article about indigenous peoples being forced off their land and into the city. They went from hunting, gathering and fishing and a life they loved to terrible slum conditions and racially motivated violence against them, up to and including murder.

They weren't actually subsistence farmers, but they did live without money before this was done to them. They were incredibly bitter.

And people forced to become cogs don't automatically gain meaningful access to things like healthcare and education, plus the education of the city people can involve horrible prejudice that is actively harmful to them for various reasons.

I get to see that "rhetoric" live when I travel around the world.

It still exists in extremely large numbers, so it's not 'overused rhetoric'. Please don't dismiss an extremely large issue as 'rhetoric'.

Half of the worlds population lives in poverty, and ~650m live in extreme poverty [1][2].

[1] https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-p...

[2] https://worldpoverty.io/

I was mostly opposing the view that "people are starving". It's well known that mass starvation is pretty much gone from the face of the Earth. Now the only places where people really die from starvation are conflict zones, or places hit by natural disasters. I am willing to admit there is are still "hunger" problems in many places, and malnutrition too, but hunger is not starvation.

That's not true either.

https://www.worldhunger.org/world-child-hunger-facts/

What metric is that measuring? The standard of living? Or the amount of money people have? Because those are 2 very different things. What about access to affordable health care? Access to clean water? Access to nutritious food? Poverty measures so many things. Not just having money and wealth.

https://ourworldindata.org/water-access-resources-sanitation

Yes, poverty is decreasing. That doesn't change the fact that people are starving, even right here in the United States, the richest nation on earth.

No, poverty is not decreasing everywhere. The graph shows absolute poverty decreasing.*

Meanwhile in most developed countries, inequality is grotesque and the consequent poverty is on the rise.

*Absolute poverty would decrease much faster if we exploited and expropriated from developing countries a little less.

Absolute poverty is the important measure. If I'm hungry, I'm hungry, no matter what my neighbours have. But if I have a 50" flat screen TV, and my neighbours have a 100" flat screen TV, that inequality does not make me poor. I can still watch TV.

The big expense right now isn't 50" TVs, it's housing - and the cost of housing is very much affected by how much your neighbours can afford to spend.

Then the solution is to build more housing, so that supply increases the point of making it cheap again. A lot of housing scarcity is caused by zoning regulations.

Wrong. If you do not have have what the average person in your society has, you'll struggle to participate in your society (in an absolute sense) and you'll be treated as an inferior, which does all kinds of harm (in an absolute sense).

If I live aboard a ship, I am not in poverty because I do not own a car, because in my society, you do not need a car. But if I live in a city with no public transport where you need a car to get around, but I can't afford one, I absolutely am.

Poverty apologists always bring up TV as an example, as if poverty is about optional extras rather than basic dignity, respect and participation.

You seem here to be asserting that "not feeling/being inferior to the people around you" is some kind of intrinsic human right?

Technically there are no intrinsic human rights and it's up to us as a society to define them.

I don't think you really want to go down that road... Historically, most societies have "chosen" a set of expansive "rights" for the top and limited rights for the bottom. I say "chosen" because most societies had it chosen for them by whoever conquered them, or at best, the lower classes had it chosen for them by those with power.

Rights are human concepts, they aren't intrinsic.

It's about feeling inferior, it's about being treated inferior, often violently so.

For instance, what happens when you try and retrieve groceries from a supermarket when you cannot afford to pay for them.

I think you mean absolutely relatively poor.

Many people do think about starving kids when they hear "poverty" though. There would be much less outcry in media if everybody realized it's about kids having smaller TVs rather than truly starving.

There's a running joke in my country that US poverty is our middle class - only two cars and a small house.

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