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Comment by jhawk28 | Hacker News Reader

Or is it authoritarianism that causes poverty and parasites?

Why not parasites causing both poverty and authoritarianism? A big part of the reason Bill Gates is so committed to fighting parasite diseases like Malaria is that there's strong evidence that this alleviates poverty. After all, it makes sense when you consider the effects a case of Malaria would have on a family: children unable to go to school, adults unable to work. If the baseline load of Malaria cases is high enough then it's not hard to see how that would continually depress the economy.

The article notes that famine also predicts authoritarianism, which is predominantly caused by things outside human control like weather and plant diseases. Even the Great Chinese Famine was started by much of the agricultural land getting no rain, though the authoritarian government's response was what led to most of the deaths.

This would say that the criseses that impact the poor are what lead to authoritarianism. You need the support of the poor to grab power for yourself, but it's hard to make supporting such a cause appealing unless death is the alternative.

> The article notes that famine also predicts authoritarianism, which is predominantly caused by things outside human control

Amartya Sen's work showed that famine is caused by failures of government, not agriculture. There are plenty of cases of people dying of famine when their countries were producing surplus food.

Frustratingly, i can't find a good accessible writeup of Sen's work online, but here's his original book:

https://www.prismaweb.org/nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Pove...

Wikipedia has some detail about the Ethiopian famine in the '80s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%E2%80%931985_famine_in_Et...

In the modern age of efficient transit, the deaths caused by famine are becoming more and more a result of bad state/world governance. The famines still usually have a nonhuman cause that originally caused that assistance to be necessary.

There are exceptions of course, like Yemen.

Famines can he and were caused by goverment (whether local or occupying) taking away resources (for war or other place) or mishandling storage of resources.

As I said, there is usually a nonhuman cause and exceptions exist.

All the massive famines I recall from history were in the exception category.

Plus, keeping enough supplies is one of government functions - through those prior French revolution the famines I recall were not in this category.

>All the massive famines I recall from history were in the exception category

I'll provide another example. The cause of Ireland's Great Famine was the potato blight, and no one thinks that the British intentionally imported the blight to Ireland. The million deaths were the fault of the British, who chose to export food for more money rather than feed the starving people.

I don't think authoritarianism intrinsically causes either of those things. It could just easily do the opposite -- it depends entirely on what the authoritarian government decides to use its power for.

What came first?

"First" does not equal to "cause" either.

Second rules out cause though. If you have A=>B and B=>A as possibilities, and you can rule one of them out with a very simple question, that's a good way to start.

If computers came after electricity, they didn't cause electricity. That says nothing about the possibility of electricity causing computers, but it brings us forward nonetheless.

First doesn't necessarily cause second, but second almost certainly doesn't cause first.

Disclaimer: I don't know if this article is correct or not. I have no stake in it being correct or not.

But, as the previous posters touched upon, there are some interesting philosophical issues at play here.

First, we have the old correlation vs. causation issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

Then even if there is causation, we need to ask which came first, the parasite prevalence, or the authoritarian government.

Then even if we know the answer to that, we then need to ask if a circular relationship is present, in other words A causes some of B, which in turn causes more of A, which in turn causes more of B.

Basically, if a virtuous or vicious cycle is present (virtuous if more of A and B are desired; vicious if less of A and B are desired; in this case vicious, since presumably less of A and of B are desired...)

It's sort of like you could ask if "breakdowns in society" are responsibile for authoritarian governments -- or if authoritarian governments are responsible for breakdowns in society...

Or, if a little bit of one caused a little bit of the other, which in turn caused more of the first, which in turn caused more of the second, and the cycle became a vicious cycle...

So, the roots of what could be a fascinating philophical discussion in that.

Its sort of like in Star Wars -- we could ask if the breakdown of society caused the early elements of the Empire, which in turn caused the Rebellion, which in turn caused the furher breakdown of society, which caused the further strengthening of the Empire, which in turn caused the further strengthening of the Rebellion (by opposition)...

Vader may have been a key player on one side... but he did not start all of those cycles going...

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