Poverty Kills
aaronsw.com
aaronsw.com
Ethiopia received great quantities of foreign aid in the 1980's. Now thirty years later its population has doubled and it is on the brink of famine yet again:
Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.
Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored. ( Kevin Myers, http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/wri... )
Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, makes the same point about Johanessberg in South Africa: Well, in my opinion, you have out-of-control population growth … —we are heading for the biggest train wreck our civilization has ever come across ever. If your population curve is on an exponential growth, and the resources are on an exponential decline, what happens first is you get … rich pockets of gated communities with security guards outside them, and you get more and more poverty outside that area. … and people start having resource wars over water and food and agriculture and arable land, and then you have Joburg in 2050.
The difference in fertility rates between the classes is astounding ( source http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/tfr-by-class-and-nation.php )
-------------------Poorest-5th--|--Middle-5th--|--Top 5th
Bangladesh------4.6---------------3.3--------------2.2
Brazil----------------4.8---------------2.1--------------0.7
South Africa--------4.8---------------2.7-------------1.9
Recently I was in Rio de Janeiro. Slums push out for miles and miles. They grow bigger every year. Meanwhile the pretty old 19th century buildings slowly rot away.
When poorest 5th have 4 or 5 kids, the result is going to be even more poverty the next generation. No amount of foreign aid can alter this logic, the aid will simply fall into a bottomless well.
In theory, aid could go more towards "teaching a man to fish". But the reality is that I cannot think of a single historical example of a group of one nation/culture/ethnicity achieving economic development via the charity of another nation/ethnicity. If someone knows of an example, I'd be interested to hear it.
All cases of economic development I know have either a) come from within (Deng in China, the Meiji Restoration, etc) or b) come from colonialism ( examples range from Roman Gaul to Hong Kong to parts of Africa before decolonialism )
EDIT: To those that downvoted me, can you clarify what's wrong with the suggestion? When changing the social structure is impossible (without destroying the culture that informs it), you have to resort to a technical solution, no matter how distasteful it may be to imagine. The cultures affected most by overpopulation won't use condoms and birth control, won't listen to those that proselytize them, and won't let those that would listen anywhere near the educators. Just making a trade agreement such as "you may only have two children if you take this aid crop" won't work, because once they have the food, they'll go ahead and have the kids anyway (or more likely, just won't know how to not have the kids, whether you require it or not.) An agreement of "you must allow sexual health educators to talk to your people in exchange for the aid" might be closer, but again, nothing's making them take the advice to heart. What's so important about fertility that makes it override concerns about people's actual happiness over their lifetime? We're not talking about killing living people (or even living cells), we're talking about making sperm not attach to eggs.
And I apologize that this has turned into a definitively-non-HN comment; it was originally—humans can be "hacked" just as well as anything else, you know—but it seems people use the arrows to express their ethical opinion, which is something I've never seen before, so I decided to defend my own ethical stance, rather than just being objective and technical like most positively-seen discussions here are.
The rest of us in the room were stunned - this man explicitly valued the environment over human life. You make a similar mistake in attempting to smite a symptom. Poverty is never caused by the lack of resources - or the related overblown fears of overpopulation (look up why oil is often called the Devil's excrement where it's discovered particularly in the developing world). It's bad governments - prior and/or current. High birth rates drop dramatically after a society industrializes.
What makes the suggestion repulsive (as much as it is unequivocally absurd) is that instead trying to alleviate suffering and addressing the root causes of absolute poverty, you're effectively starving and forcing deeply impoverished people who are in no position to deny food to accept sterilization.
If you're reading HN, you've already hit a genetic jackpot having the opportunities that most of the world will never have. Not only would this be a slippery slope (if you accept forced sterilizations for the "greater good", why not deny needed medical drugs and treatments or worse?), it's an unnecessary slope. So instead of trying to provide the poor with economic opportunities you'd provide them with sterility?
I agree with this. But what should the developed countries do about fixing African governments? Anything?
To go off the anti-PC deep end in another direction I pose a different solution. The past fifty years of African history has been an unmitigated disaster. The entire continent has been plagued by war, famine, disease, awful governments, and economic stagnation or decline. The years before that - the colonial years - were generally peaceful and saw rising economic prosperity. We have model B which is awful. We have model A which worked reasonably well. The answer to me seems blindingly obvious: figure out a way to bring back colonialism.
The best gets a prize of $1 billion for his own personal enjoyment. The worst gets a prize of $1 billion for the personal enjoyment of whoever brings us his head.
But frankly, I wasn't really talking about poverty. Overpopulation is a problem we will eventually face as a species, whether or not any one of us lives in poverty. There's only so much room on this planet, and [eventually] living on other worlds just isn't looking very promising as an alternative. "Social solutions" aren't; they're really social management of the problem by given cultures, and cultures eventually fall.
As I was saying, one of the main "problems" we have as humans is that we're just too good at breeding. When left to our own devices, without cultural mores in one specific direction or the other, we naturally produce too many more humans. When we figure out genetic engineering, and how to create safe, stable methods of delivering genetic sequence "alterations" to the entire species (retroviruses that won't mutate, etc.) one of the first things we should do is lower our own natural fertility rate. More sex, less babies, fewer complications all-around. (Also note that industrial cultures have below-2.0 reproductive rates, but that says nothing about their fertility, just their willingness to put their work before the goal of creating a family. A post-industrial society doesn't necessarily have work that is all-consuming enough to let you be diverted from creating a family.)
But again, as should be obvious from even the nature of my suggestion (involving technologies which do not yet exist) this isn't a solution to a problem we have today. It's a solution to a problem we'll have when we're completely different people with completely different cultural mores, who probably would think this is either wrongheaded in the archaic sense ("we have much more civilized solutions, involving technologies they could never imagine,") or too obvious to mention.
Forced reductions in births is sterilization - partial or otherwise. And what's worse is that you would limit your approach to the developing world where they have the least number of options when their problem isn't social management or culture - but their oppressive governments that attempt to capture wealth for themselves and their cronies and in turn resulting in higher infant mortalities, inability to save making children effectively a form of social security.
While your proposed solution may not technically exist, it is this line of reasoning that has resulted in coerced insertions of depo provera in the developing world and again, the worst part is that it is a solution in search of a problem.
Secondly, population will peak because of the very factor I mentioned—people in industrial societies are too busy to have kids. However, one important fact about industrial societies is that they constantly seek to improve themselves and gain efficiency. More automation means more people out of work (or consumerism-for-the-sake-of-feeding-the-cycle, but I'm supposing we ignore that option.) Take this to its limit, and no one works (except on creative pursuits, but that won't be everyone.) What do you suppose the rest spend their time doing? I'm thinking population will start shooting straight back up in a post-industrial society. Not because each couple has more kids, but because there are more couples, well, coupling.
You haven't explained to me yet what's wrong with sterilization in-and-of-itself; you're using it like Americans tend to use the word "socialist," assuming that it's scary without explaining precisely why it's scary. Couples can still have kids under this scheme. Couples can still have just as many kids. It would just take, say, ten times as long for a couple to conceive (the regular period being a month), meaning that there would be a nine-month "fallow" period between pregnancies. Each couple could have the same number of kids, but half the children would end up in the following generational cohort, meaning that the yearly growth rate would be halved. Since conception is harder, some couples would give up after a smaller number of children, lowering the total produced. This is, in the end, a much more lax scheme than even China's one-child rule.
I can see where you are coming from in that developing counties need to have their oppression lifted in order to stop "investing in the future" with overproduction of children. However, consider this: if you do kill off the warlords, and ensure that all the infant mortality goes away, but leave behind a current population far exceeding their own supply of resources, what will happen to that generation, and the few proceeding from it, before they reach the point where the cultural tradition of overproducing young gives way to an industrial lifestyle? Assuming the resources go unequally distributed, won't those still in poverty try to take those resources by force, and become new warlords? War and anarchy will break out wherever population greatly exceeds resources, and there is no infrastructure (e.g. police) to hold down an oppressive government from forming.
To beat tyranny, the population must sharply drop, or the resources must greatly rise, along with the removal of the government, or the attractor won't be escaped. Food genetically modified to lower fertility does both. It might not be the best solution, but it's a solution, and unlike most others, it's one that's impossible to screw up. Contraceptives can be discarded for religious or cultural reasons, but food must be eaten. Educators' teachings can be ignored as misguided, but your body's egg or sperm count is a cold, hard fact. Other resources given as aid can be confiscated by a warlord for their value (OLPC laptops, anyone?), but what value does food that lowers your virility have to a warlord that could just as well eat something else?
I'm not suggesting there isn't a better, social solution. I'm just saying that as purely technical solutions go, this one is pretty damn air-tight.
Such is the unfortunate myopia of relying on biologists for economic analyses. The solution for actual resource shortages is trade. As for the farmland issue, it's technically feasible to build a couple skyscrapers with hydroponics with a small footprint that would satisfy those requirements though we're also not running out of farmland or ability to grow food - and our ability to be increasingly productive with existing farmland increases.
Consider for example China - where those like Paul Erlich had predicted massive famines. After implementing property rights, China moved from becoming a massive importer of food to being a massive exporter - ie generating large surpluses. And there remains vast tracts of potential farmland that is underused as you move inland.
You assume war and anarchy break out wherever population greatly exceeds resources but this is a false assumption. People create their own resources and develop new ones which is why the long term trend for nearly all if not all commodities is negative sloping (very much counter intuitive since supply and demand should suggest that with greater numbers of people and fixed resources prices should rise - but the reality is that resources aren't fixed because of substitutes). I note further a number of Asian countries where demand greatly exceeds demand - HK and Singapore being two. HK was pretty much a barren rock before the British got there.
As for the term sterilization - I don't consider it scary so much as repugnant. It's proposed for societies other than one's own or or one's own social class. It is inherently oppressive as it is using your power to enforce your own value choices. Sure, I suppose one could consider it to be a technically feasible insomuch as slaughter or genocide might be, but it is as much morally repugnant as it is unnecessary.
More simply, you might just like to imagine how you'd feel if the roles were reversed. So, e.g., let's suppose that the Chinese government said: "All these Westerners are relying on our services to make lots of super-cheap goods. Why don't we put something in the plastic that makes them less fertile? It's for their own good." And let's suppose that you have been trying to have children for a few years and failing (or some close friend or relation has been) when you discover this. How do you feel?
A few other obvious things that I hope you missed: (1) Different people are fertile to different extents, and if you lower the average fertility you're most likely making lots of people completely infertile. (2) Your measures are going to affect the extra-specially poor disproportionately. To make a whole country's average fertility go down to replacement level, it may have to reduce the fertility of those people much more drastically. Down to zero, perhaps. (3) Having children is really, really important to a lot of people. You may think that's irrational; you may even be right; but that's how it is, and that's why you'd most likely get the effects I described above. (4) Having to make a choice between two horrible alternatives -- e.g., starving versus sterilization (see #2 for why it might really be pretty much exactly that choice) is, for many people, substantially worse than the better of those two alternatives. (See, e.g., "Sophie's Choice".)
1. I never said it would be a secret. It would be a very publicly stated condition, told to every villager, as part of accepting the aid.
2. I never said that the drug would be so blunt an instrument. A drug that dropped any given person's fertility to zero would be completely unacceptable (as I said, actual culture-wide sterilization is as good as genocide, give or take a generation.) Lowering fertility, all by itself (and not as a side-effect of some other drug that people sue because of), isn't something we can even do right now—so if we're going to research it, we may as well figure out how to do it right. That means only affecting those people who have average-or-above fertility, and leaving those with below-average fertility right where they are (or maybe even bringing them up to the lowered average.)
See my reply to cwan, though: people can still have as many children as they want—it'll just take them longer, and they may give up before they get to the number they'd like (just as people give up today, only fewer children would be required before they'd decide to.)
The only proven way to get birth rates down is to get death rates down; cultures will do whatever it takes to reproduce themselves -- the solution is to make reproduction easier, so they no longer have to err on the side of caution.
The suggestion is actually quite progressive, in the political sense, which should lead to upvotes.
I personally don't think we can help other countries develop by giving them charity and I don't think I said that. I think we can help them develop by stopping our policies of stealing from them. Right now we saddle them up with debt, have large companies steal their natural resources, force them to adopt trade policies that prevent industrialization, and domestic policies that prevent them from educating their people. Let's stop doing that.
Or we can go back further, to pre-industrial England. The families with the highest incomes (and much lower death rates) had higher fertility rates. Pre-industrial practiced population control to prevent complete demographic disaster (there were strict taboos on extra-marital sex, and young people were limited as to when they could marry by what the community could support). If you actually read the Kevin Myers piece, who as actually been to Ethiopia, you'll see that the Ethiopians do not practice the same kind of control, hence their birth rates are almost twice that of even pre-industrial England.
I feel rather naive, as I have no idea what you're talking about. The only thing I can think of is NAFTA, and I've heard that had the opposite effect (damaging the Mexican agricultural sector.)
Domestically, the same sort of "structural adjustment" policies require countries to dismantle social safety nets and privatize government and institute "austerity" measures which have disastrous effects on human capital.
An alternative view to the malthusians: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
Though from a policy/historical perspective with a bit more utility - Against the Dead Hand, by Brink Lindsey: http://www.amazon.com/Against-Dead-Hand-Uncertain-Capitalism...
And also - "The Invisible Hand of Population Control: The tragedy of the commons meets economic freedom" : http://www.reason.com/news/show/134136.html
At the very least there's feedback loops at work here.
This fact brings to mind an anecdote illustrating the fact that people have no clue about relative risks.
While jogging, I passed by a protest near Harlem Hospital. Signs mentioned this death rate disparity. I asked someone what the protest was about, and was told that they wanted more funding for the hospital.
Most of the protesters were sitting on lawn chairs, smoking, and eating fast food. Many were obese, few were of healthy weight. They didn't seem to realize that running in circles around the hospital would do far more to reduce the disparity in death rates than any amount of funding.
I've worked as an ER nurse for 15 years in over 30 hospitals in 5 states. A lot of that work was contract work in hospitals in poor neighborhoods that had a lot of trouble staffing their departments. I now work in a very, very nice upper middle class neighborhood in Silicon Valley.
Absolutly, unequivocally I can say that if you're sick and want the best medical care, go to the hospital in the neighborhood where the rich people live. The difference in care is night and day. Well to do hospitals have patients with private insurance that pay a lot more than Medicare or public health insurance. They also tend to expect more from their medical care, and are usually a lot more educated and can be more proactive in their care.
One ER that I worked at in Chicago, I drove past a funeral home. And almost every single shift, there was a group of kids standing on the street corner outside of the funeral home "tipping a forty" for a friend that had just died.
I've worked in ER's that were so overcrowded, that when a patient died, we'd have to shove the body into a dirty utility room to make room for patients we could still help. That would * never * fly in a rich hospital.
In poor neighborhoods, people are used to dying young. They are used to the crappy care that's given them, and yes, they tend to have a lot more lifestyle diseases.
But, why do they have more lifestyle disease? In Silicon Valley, I can go to my local farmers market, and I can afford to spend money on organic produce. When I didn't have a car, and lived on the edge of the ghetto in Chicago, it was really easy to get my calories at McDonald's down the street or get crap food at the 7-11 down the block instead of walking 12 blocks each way to the grocery store.
Poverty does kill, for many reasons. Please dont just chalk it up to "they should stop eating crap and get some excercise."
Scratch all that stuff that defines the where and the why, and just focus on the what. You eat produce: fruits and veggies. That alone is likely why you are much less likely to develop a lifestyle disease than those who chow down McD's. The fact that it is local farmers or organic produce is at best trivial, and likely is statistical noise comparatively.
I realize, searching around in the HN history, that this is a matter of identity for some people; I have no intention of starting another pro-con propaganda war regarding organic food in yet another thread. But can we at least concede that produce, regardless of its source and classification, is significantly better than a Big Mac and fries?
The last thing we need is for people to decide that, because they can't afford the high class choice in food -- which organics are -- they might as well not bother at all, because someone is going to heckle them for not caring about their health enough. Enough people, especially in neighborhoods like the ones we are discussing, can't decide that organic food is better for them than conventional food. The added cost may drive them into eating sufficiently little they start suffering from malnutrition. The McD's food might do that too, but if you're going to end up in poor health either way...
From a recent article on infant mortality: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0823ch... "African-American babies are far more likely to die than white ones, which is often taken as evidence that poverty and lack of health insurance are to blame. That's entirely plausible until you notice another racial/ethnic gap: Hispanics of Mexican or Central or South American ancestry not only do consistently better than blacks on infant mortality, they do better than whites. Social disadvantage doesn't explain very much."
Poor people are fat for the same reason they're poor: they have a lack of self-control and are not very good at making decisions.
Or if that sounds cruel, an alternative formulation: some people lack self-control and aren't very good at making decisions, and they tend to wind up being both fat and poor.
But I really don't buy this theory. If it were true, it would imply that graduate students should be fat too (which they usually are not). The fact is, big macs are cheaper than most other foods per calorie. They are not cheaper per meal.
Incidentally, Harlem has plenty of produce (organic and non). But (based on my anecdotal observations) it's mainly purchased by the yuppies.
I rarely see grad students eating at McDonald's.
I even rent-to-owned a house to a family with 5 kids. This family would never have had the opportunity to own a house had I not given them that opportunity. They didn't have a high school diploma, no credit. Judgements against them. Criminal history. So I thought, "If they have the opportunity, will they take it to improve their life? If they have the opportunity to buy and own a home, will they make the most of it?"
They destroyed the house. They caused more damage than they paid in rent.
It isn't the lack of opportunity. I thought it was, but it isn't. Opportunities are external motivators. It takes internal motivation to succeed. You can't provide that to someone. They have to create it within themselves. It's the people who have that internal motivation who find opportunities and make the most of them.
Since this puts us way off the track of political correctness, I'll bring up what I consider the shining example of social mobility in the US: American Jews. I would argue that the Jewish community maximizes both economic opportunity and a variety of social pressures - on education, family, and community.
"We don't take steps to redress inequalities of looks, friends, or sex life. We don't grab a kidney from you to save someone's life, even though that health difference was unfair brute luck. Redistribution of wealth has some role in maintaining a stable democracy and preventing starvation. But the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited. The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary. Most of America's poor are already among the best-off of all humans in world history. We should be putting our resources, including our advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much as we can." -Tyler Cowen
Considering what some rhetoricians label as "wealth redistribution", this is flat-out wrong. Consider socialized education, medicine, or early childhood education - all have shown to have strong impacts on social mobility, and hence, wealth creation.
This might be too subtle for a slogan, but it isn't rocket science, either: systems of smart wealth redistribution are absolutely necessary, although not sufficient, for maximum wealth creation. Also necessary, off the top of my head: social pressure for parents to be responsible, and a "path to prosperity" with which individuals can identify.
Evidence? Sources?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
Early childhood education is found to produce persistent effects on achievement and academic success, but not on IQ . . . Cost-benefit analysis based on one randomized trial finds that the economic return from providing early education to children in poverty far exceeds the costs.
If it helps, here's one with more details: http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/cls/cbaexecsum4.html
Site with more details, including sample surveys etc: http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/cls/REPORTS.HTM
Conclusion: As the first cost-benefit analysis of a federally-financed, comprehensive early childhood intervention, findings indicate that participation in each component of the program was associated with economic benefits that exceeded costs. This was accomplished by increasing economic well being and reducing educational and social expenditures for remediation and treatment. Similar to Head Start, the CPC preschool program is the most intensive and comprehensive component and yielded the greatest benefits by age 21. Findings for school-age and extended intervention demonstrate the benefits of reduced class sizes and enriched school environments in the early grades. Thus, contemporary, large-scale child-development programs can provide substantial long-term benefits to society.
Google has many many studies that you can look at: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=effect+of+early+childhoo...
The effect of education on income is a subject that has been studied heavily. I'm sure that you can find studies that support many conclusions. But I think you will have trouble proposing that someone is making an unsupported claim when they say that education increases wealth and social mobility.
Edit: This doesn't mean you can't claim "I think that system X would achieve better results." It's not necessary to tear down the economic results that the American system has achieved in order to propose something that would work better in the future.
Well yes. And in general, the flaws are pretty gaping flaws. If you have studies with gaping methodological flaws, then you must completely disregard them. They are not evidence.
The study you cite about the CPC program, is majorly flawed. In general, the most astute parents figure out how to find their way into these types of programs. When you look at a more broad based program - like Head Start - the evidence effectiveness does not seem to be exist or be enough to stand out from the noise ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_Start#Reports_and_statemen... )
But I think you will have trouble proposing that someone is making an unsupported claim when they say that education increases wealth and social mobility.
I dispute it. If you want to play the social science game, check out this article: http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/does-education-really-...
Despite dramatically increasing the amount we spend on education, and the time spent in school, basic measures of vocabulary and math have been flat over the last century.
But I don't like playing the social science game.
The real reason I don't believe schooling increases national wealth is because I got a topflight education. But after a private high school and an ivy league college, neither I nor virtually any of my friends learned much in the way of wealth-creating skills. I earn a much higher than average income, but its all because of self-taught skills.
After spending some time in the workforce, I've noticed the vast majority of people learn their wealth producing skills on the job. This is the norm now, it was the norm fifty years ago, and it was the norm one hundred fifty years ago. It applies to machinists and it applies to software engineers. The only difference is that we are so rich now, we can afford to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on formal schooling.
If people who graduate college earn more, it must because of some other affect ( selection effects, zero-sum credentialing laws, or because of social networks). I know this must be the case, because I knows what happens in schools, and I know that outside of engineering (which is a tiny minority of all majors) college does not teach wealth producing skills.
The claim is that going to college somehow increases your chances of being successful. I.e. that it sets you on the right path to becoming successful. How could this be? Could be that it teaches you something useful (problem solving, the ability to power through difficult assignments, etc...) that is necessary in a lot of jobs.
I worked for a company before where they didn't necessarily hire people with CS degrees or backgrounds. They just hired smart people and taught them what was necessary. Some people would claim that these people were smart enough to do this because of their college education.
Note: I'm not necessarily sure that college does make you smarter in a relevant way. As has been pointed out, most of the studies have bad methodology and anecdotal evidence is not sufficient to prove a point. So all we can do here is lay out theories .
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And neither Britain, the U.S. nor China had a welfare state during their industrial revolution.
Correlation != causation
It seems there are way too many variables to look for clear examples. We certainly can't look at the industrial revolution for examples of what will make a prosperous society - wealth creation then relied mostly on optimizing physical manufacturing, not intellectual products, as it does now.
Indeed. The social science method of finding truth through regressions is an intellectually bankrupt exercise.
My overall views are these:
a) I suspect that developed countries (the U.S. in particular) over invest in the money spent on education
b) developed countries over invest on the time spent in school
c) the quality of the time spent in school sucks, and could be much improved
I don't believe the above because of social science regressions. I believe it because I am a software engineer, and I can mentally add up the time it took me to learn the skills I have now. It does not require 16 years of full time schooling to become an engineer. For example, when I put my mind to it, I was able to learn enough calculus to pass the AP tests in about 50 hours total.
I know that many peers who were fully productive - either doing software, carpentry, or even C.A.D. design for an architectural firm by early high school. We may need in a knowledge economy, but perhaps 1% of jobs need more than a year or two of secondary schooling to do them effectively.
d) The primary problem of the urban poor youth in America is not lack of schooling, but lack of discipline. We could spend one quarter what we do on schooling in D.C., but make it many times more effective it we simply re-imported pre-1970's discipline. Note that old school discipline was not abandoned because it did not work, it was abandoned because of disastrous court decisions that basically made teachers unable to control their own schools. The lack of discipline means that kids do not learn, and that when they drop out they do not even have a good enough attitude to get a job in skilled labor.
It's should also be noted that average heights were about 4 inches shorter than the height of a modern American. Not having good enough nutrition to reach a full height seems like a pretty sure sign of poverty to me.
They did not so much have the crowded slums that are typical of modern poverty. People would die of disease before cities could reach such densities. But relative to us, people were impoverished in terms of health, nutrition, or material comfort.
EDIT:
One more point. Overall violent death rates ( including war and homicide) in 16th-19th century Britain were about the same as the violent death rate in modern Houston, Texas. See Greg Clark, A Farewell to Alms, pages 128-129.
You realize most of the world would think this is abnormally high?
We've known about the solution to poverty since the 18th century (free trade - aka capitalism) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations but the solution isn't popular among intellectuals, despite the correlation of free trade and per capita GDP (admittedly crude but one the more objective measures available).
http://www.investmentu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/200601...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/e/e2/2...
http://images.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimage...
http://www.invest.is/resources/images/invest.is/News/Index05...
The current state of the third world was caused by the UK and others encouraging places like Africa and India to follow the socialist model in the post collonial era after World War 2.
The extent to which former collonies have prospered is the extent to which they ignored that advice (Singapore, India since 1990 etc) http://mises.org/books/conquest.pdf
Social status is a positional good. I.e. relative affluence counts more than absolute affluence. High status people have better health etc than low status people. This seems to be at least partly a psychologic effect.
Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality. So framing everything by projecting the outcome that is the most likely to provoke an emotional response (e.g. death) is basically the recipe for a thought process that won't solve the world's problems.
Let me put it another way. We all know it's better to teach a man to fish than to just give him a fish. But if that man refuses to learn the emotional person will give him the fish anyway while the rational person will force him to choose between learning to fish or nothing. In that way the rational person forces the man to learn how to feed himself while the emotional person simply rewards his laziness and feeds him for a day.
Health care is actually a great example of this: classical theory and basic common sense suggests that if you make people pay for their health care more directly, they'll have more of an interest to negotiate a better deal, or at least comparison-shop. This is occasionally true, but far more often, people aren't actually comfortable bargaining with the surgeon who's going to be handling their innards.
Likewise, with health care, people often make "irrational" decisions and go into $500K debt to prolong an 89-year-old grandparents' life for 6 days, because life, death and health just seems to be one of those areas that we're not wired to be rational about.
Health care aside, there are all sorts of other examples of irrationality - for instance, I remember seeing multiple studies in which people preferred a lower reward as long as everyone got the same reward (basically they valued relative well-being and parity over absolute well-being).
The point of all this is that while rationality is a great tool for "solving problems" generally speaking, when you deal with people you really must take into account the fact that most people (and I suspect even most people on HN, which is a pretty atypical group!) aren't all that rational in many, many areas.
Yup, it does. What of it? What makes you think that giving him the fish helps?
You can spend all your resources on problems that can't be fixed, and accomplish nothing, or you can spend them on problems that can be fixed and actually accomplish something.
It's unclear why you prefer the former.
What if it is just embedded historical rationality? cf. evolutionary psychology.
I read this piece by him:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall
Short summary: A speaker tells a story about an evil king. The king gets 10 hostages, and you, and asks you to decide, "I'll kill the hostages, or you can die in their place. What do you choose?" When asked, most people choose to sacrifice themselves.
Same scenario. Evil king, 10 hostages. But now the king asks, "I'll kill the hostages, or you can give me all your money and live in poverty for the rest of your life. Which do you choose?" And the people asked think, and it seems reasonable to choose the poverty alternative. Certainly, it's better than dying, and they already agreed to die to save the people.
Then it talks about children dying in Africa, and how with just a little bit of money you could save those people. The speaker concludes, "Thus if you decide to go on with the life you were probably planning to lead, you will be letting 10 people die rather than give up your flat-screen television and your cocktail parties. And that is more than gluttony, it is murder."
Now there's a major, major, major flaw with this line of thinking, which is also in "Poverty Kills" and many pieces along those lines. It's the assumption that there are no choices besides the "evil king" and "dying/sacrificing for the rest".
Never was this more clear than my travels in the back provinces of China. I climbed Mount Emeishan in China, and the locals farm the mountain and live quite poorly. By selling food and crafts on the side of the road to visitors (mostly Chinese, didn't see any foreigners besides me) - by selling, they got the money they needed to buy tools, medicine, and so on. I got to eat some local food, and bought a wooden sword for my then-kid brother. The sword cost basically nothing except a few hours, and the money from that could buy weeks worth of medicine or seasons worth of clothing, and so on.
This money went to the heads of households and most industrious people on Emeishan, who in turn would help their relatives and so forth. The Communist Chinese government couldn't begin to do half the job feeding and providing medicine to these people that free trade did. It was never more clear to me - honestly working for money and spending it on things I wanted helped other people. It helped the people who paid me to for them (I freelance/contract work, I haven't been salaried ever). It helped the people who I bought food and crafts from. Everyone won.
So back to the "evil king" - what if instead of giving in for the hostages right now, you came back later, kicked in the door with your sword, and assassinated the evil murderous king? That's the third option.
There's more choices than "give up your money in taxes/charity or bad outcomes happen". I almost built an international school in China with my girlfriend. I still might go build schools someday. If I do, they'll run for a profit. The teachers will be paid more than they would at another job (or else they wouldn't come work for us). The parents will value it (or else they wouldn't send their kids there). The administrators of the school will be paid. The kids will learn better, speak more fluent English, and increase trade between China and English speaking countries. That'll bring more money to China, and lower the expenses of all English speaking people abroad who can afford the Chinese goods.
If there were more taxes, and I had less of my own money to fund a school, it wouldn't be possible. The Chinese government is not run by people as driven, intelligent, and empathetic as my girlfriend. If they took her money, and the American government took my money, then we couldn't build a school, and instead you'd have schools like Sichuan and the United States currently have. Quality - not so much.
Charity has its place. I've run charity events and donate to charities. I tend to support St. Jude's Children Hospital in North America and Great Ormond Street in London. A friend is getting a therapy dog program started in Tokyo, I pledged some money for that and volunteered for the auction.
But there's greater options. Really now, governments have proven themselves incompetent many times over. And nonprofits, God bless them, frequently have people drawing way over market salaries and making themselves rich, while working at a job with less pressure, lower expectations, and very little accountability. If you look at the statistics, nonprofits are depressingly ineffective and do very little towards succeeding in their missions and improving the world.
There's a third option. It's improving the world honestly, getting compensated for it, and paying people who improve your life in return. That system has built almost everything of value on the planet. I reject the "evil king or your life" dichotomy; it is false; there are other options.
Aaron's a hell of a writer, and I hope he reads this. I know political views can be like religions - but I try not to make mine. I've studied all sorts of history and sciences and commerce and all manner of things. The results look like charity/government (and especially taxes) underperform the rather cold and heartless market in any long term time horizon. Now, these aren't fashionable viewpoints in many intellectual circles, but we all ought to consider them - is the end good is our objective, then even unfashionable opinions against our circles' worldviews must be considered.
If anyone knows Aaron, would they kindly point him to this comment? He seems like an incredibly intelligent and thoughtful guy, and I really hope there's something I've written in here that's valuable to him.