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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

They can probably feed themselves. Growing calories is something we're good at, especially Russia.

The hard part is dealing with a scenario where there is plenty of wheat, but people have no money to buy it.

Ireland, in the 1840s suffered a horrific famine. Grain was being exported the while time. Food existed. People couldn't afford it.

During the US' great depression, people were hungry while agricultural products piled up, rotted in or burned to defend a price floor.

I don't think Russia will starve, but economics is hard. There are a lot of ways this can get really bad.

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Keynes said: "Anything we can actually do, we can afford". Money is just a way of divvying up the productive capacity of a country, so not being able to afford a country's own production is either a preference for foreign trade or a distribution problem.

Not that is much comfort to Russian's -- Russia has a massively unequal distribution of wealth.

> Russia has a massively unequal distribution of wealth.

The Netherlands has the highest wealth inequality in the world.[0] No one considers that some backwater country, or its people starving or somehow impoverished.

There's more that's going in Russia than "a massively unequal distribution of wealth."

[0] https://uweb.berkeley.edu/2021/04/11/the-duality-of-the-dutc... It's also the oldest country to implement capitalism. Maybe capitalism plays a role in producing wealth inequality? It's certainly been increasing in the US since the 1980s, when "greed" was embraced as good and we started shipping jobs overseas.

Russia has inequality, poverty and widespread sanctions. Getting rid of just one of those three factors would allow them to afford food.

> Getting rid of just one of those three factors would allow them to afford food.

According to the USDA, 37 million Americans are food insecure.[0]

I'd like Americans to be able to afford food. What factors do you think are preventing that in the US? Is it inequality? Poverty? Something else? (We don't have sanctions as far as I know.)

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/02/magazine/food...

> the top 20% in the Netherlands earns only 4 times the income the bottom 20% do. As a comparison, the U.S’s top 20% earns 16.65 times the amount the bottom 20% do.

> However, this article isn’t meant to push the false narrative that the Netherlands’ citizens are all miserable as a result of this wealth gap because they aren’t. In many metrics of standards of living, the Netherlands is ranked among the highest in the world. In fact, the Netherlands placed 10th on the social progress index and 8th on the Human Development Index.

For some reason, the linked article claims the Netherlands has a Gini coefficient of 0.902 but the linked source claims a Gini coefficient of 0.281, significantly lower.

I can find no other sources claiming a Dutch Gini coefficient higher than 0.3 at any point in recent history. A Gini coefficient of 0.902 is practically unheard of, perhaps the article was written in error? Seems strange to put so much effort into writing an article without checking the source or questioning the number.

By comparison, Russia's Gini coefficient is 0.375 with the noted caveat that it can be very hard to track the true wealth of the most powerful Russians. The United States is 0.414 according to same source.

From How The Dutch Economy Shows We Can't Reduce Wealth Inequality With Taxes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot4qdCs54ZE

> The Netherlands skew falsely high on the GINI coefficient because house loans are insured by the state, causing many families to technically be in large debt, beyond the value of their houses.

That makes it hard to trust the wealth numbers, e.g. things like "the top 10% of the country owns 60% of the wealth" (according to the OCED). The bottom 60% of the country owns "almost no" wealth. It also explains why, if you visit The Netherlands, it doesn't seem like it is struggling with inequality…

Source: https://www.oecd.org/netherlands/OECD2015-In-It-Together-Hig...

Keynes was not a farmer. Nobody can afford to not plant during planting season, not harvest during harvest. There are all sorts of things that a country is capable of doing at time A that will spell their doom come time B.

This is true, but Keynes was just encouraging a macro perspective, in that statement.

An economy, by definition, can afford it's output.

It's still true that what we build, destroy, deplete and such affect the future. All keyenes was trying to spell out was that we can't really save or borrow from the future outside of these kinds of things. Economic output doesn't store like that.

Well, the wheat will be affordable because Russia won't be able to export it.

But then that only means it's not attractive for the farmers either.

They're going to manipulate their currency the same way China does.

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