Hacker News Reader

> social capital is simply more reliable than material capital.

See also Amartya Sen's eye-opening Nobel-winning work on famines in the modern era; he explains these mostly in terms of social capital. They don't tend to happen in situations where the country as a whole is short of food, but in situations where a particular sector of the society is unable to make a claim (economic/political) on it.

View on HN

Except a materialist would simply say that those people lack the social capital because they lack the material capital. Lack of Social Capital stopped them getting the access to the food, but those people without social capital seemingly always just _happen_ to be poor, almost as if social capital is simply a path _to_ material capital that you need to cash out into capital to actually have any power.

There is a californian saying that water flows uphill towards money. I wouldn't be surprised if the irish had an equivalent for food.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com