The Benefits of World Hunger | Hacker News Reader

The Benefits of World Hunger

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28 pointsluispa22 comments

The author of this article authored a book entitled "Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food." This article is satire.

This was the original one, they delete it after posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32001305

So this is the web.archive version.

Why did you post it twice?

The original was taken down after it was posted to HN.

The powers that be profit from the way things are. Make the status quo unprofitable, and change will follow.

This is a common response to critiques of capitalism: "well, why don't you tweak some of the parameters of capitalism so it results in the system you want instead" forgetting that maybe capitalism is incapable of producing something better according to the critics, and they are convinced we need to get rid of it entirely!

I'd also be interested as to what parameters could possibly be tweaked such that capitalism would find it unprofitable to commodify food or at the very least more profitable to distribute it to those who can't afford it. Massive state and international intervention might be able to do it but this isn't the kind of thing we could fix with minor tax incentives and penalties.

it's also pretty common for naïve developers, when faced with maintaining an antiquated codebase, to advocate for tearing the whole thing out and replacing it with something new and unproven. how often is this the correct decision? well, take that logic and scale it to something the size of the economy of the United States—still think it's a good idea?

I think it was Boeing who actually worked this out at some point in the '70s or '80s: when you need to make changes to more than X % of the software, you're better off rewriting it from scratch. I don't remember what the X was, and I can't find the reference right now, but I want to think it was somewhere in the span of 30–60 %.

So, there really is a Ripley Threshold, a point at which it's better to just take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?

> The powers that be profit from the way things are.

I mean... do they? Linking to Our World In Data articles about falling extreme poverty is almost a cliché at this point, but the facts remain.

If the super-rich are trying to keep the world population poor for some nebulous profit, they're doing a poor job of it.

(That's aside from things like Bill Gates putting all his money into fighting against malaria, and the fact that impoverished countries with high food insecurity are also those with the lowest economic output in the world. Most of the world's coal comes from Australia, not Mozambique.)

Great, sad piece, and quite telling to see it having been removed from the website.

> Who would build any sort of factory if they did not know that many people would be available to take the jobs at low-pay rates?

> Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive. That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.

This is literally how capitalism started and maintains itself: remove all other options for subsistence besides wage-work (e.g. taking away previous rights via enclosure), and then hunger becomes your overseer that compels people to labor for you.

Reads as an "A Modest Proposal" type of critique piece. Not the right tone for the UN but it's not actually arguing for what it's stating.

The author of this piece has a book, "Freedom from want: the human right to adequate food". The publisher's summary quotes Richard Pierre Claude, founding editor of Human Rights Quarterly and professor emeritus, University of Maryland:

"As a legal claim, the 'human right to adequate food' may seem thin gruel, but George Kent enriches the concept with data-based policy analysis, compelling ethical arguments, and a full review of concerned international, national, and nongovernmental organizations. He persuasively makes the case for accountability where the face of famine, malnutrition, and starvation confront the hands of those who hold political power at every level in our new global economy."

Most of the major long-term famines in living memory were caused by politics and armed conflict, not really from a lack of food. For example the 1983-85 Ethiopian famine happened in the middle of a war where opposing factions used hunger as a weapon and stole food from civilians. The leaders didn't give a shit about "human rights".

Satire can be useful and persuasive (assuming it's satire) but it's not right for a mainstream institution to be publishing something like that with apparently no disclaimer at least on the bottom that the piece is meant to be thought-provoking in some way rather than a serious piece.

Let's ban the UN for misinformation I guess. Isn't that the thing to do?

Hey Monster, what you write isn't too logical.

For 'banning the UN for misinformation' there logically needs to be misinformation.

While you might not like the tone of the article, I couldn't find any claim that is demonstrably untrue.

Facebook and Twitter have banned a lot of "misinformation" that was actually true (or at least not demonstrably untrue).

Perhaps it was a performative example of how satire works.

Or maybe it was just meant to be a humorous comment. Why. So. Serious?

I'm not gonna eat bugs no matter what

French have the reputation to eat snails and weird things, the truth is that famines made them eat this (and grass too). It's not that much ridicule to mock after all.

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