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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

It's good that scarcity of material goods and services has ceased to be a problem, and now the only remaining problems are self inflicted.

Similarly it would be a good thing if no one murdered anyone else even if people occasionally committed suicide.

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I don't quite get how getting over the dust bowl famine means that poverty is solved. Obesity doesn't really imply that the poor are now just applying all their affluence wrongly and could easily buy houses if they just would get their hands off the Mickey D, so it's all their fault if that isn't the case.

"Self inflicted" is really over-simplifying things and sounds like something out of Rand (or misunderstood Nietzsche).

I don't think the point is that they could buy houses and live a middle class lifestyle. If you compare the two absolute circumstances: 1. Not having enough calories, and literally being pained by hunger, and the associated near-term consequences thereof. 2. Having too many calories in not the right proportions, which have longer-term consequences.

I would expect that people in both circumstances #1 and #2 would prefer for #2 to happen to them. Just because things aren't perfect, doesn't mean they aren't better than they were.

If you look at things as absolutes (as opposed to comparing "poor" people to the middle or upper class), then you can fairly assert that the kind of poverty that was more common in the US in the past and is still common in the developing world is, for the most part, solved.

Again, that's solving starvation, not poverty. Those might often go together, but aren't really identical. You could have all the money in the world, if there's a omnipresent famine that wouldn't help you a lot.

If the goalpost for poverty is not starving, than that's a friggin' terrible definition. If that's the end of one's aspirations, just making sure that other people don't croak from hunger, then this paints a sadder picture of humanity than my initial interpretation of the original quote.

I'm not denying that things haven't improved for people in the US, but in what kind of morality system would we consider this the end of the line?

I don't see it as a goalpost for poverty, more of a milestone -- it's the first symptom of poverty that IMO humanity wants to relieve

But that's missing the point. There's still plenty of places where it's hard to impossible to eat _healthily_ in the U.S. Yes, we've won the calorific scarcity battle, but regarding obesity as self-inflicted lacks nuance at best and victim blames the poor and disadvantaged at worst.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert#Barriers_and_propos...

Places are food deserts primarily because the inhabitants choose not to pay for healthy food. Providing access to food does not change people's consumption choices:

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/giving-people-ac...

(There are lots of natural experiments too - e.g., Jersey City, where I used to live, had lots of fat poor people and lots of svelte yuppies. Strangely, the poor didn't start eating Kale when the yuppies moved in.)

Assigning the label "victim blaming" to an idea does not prove it wrong.

education & available time are issues for the poor as well, not just availability.

You could easily verify that hypothesis with statistical analysis of obesity amongst people of varying levels of employment/busyness and education. Are you (or anyone here) aware of any such studies?

ATUS data is available that can provide a partial answer to this.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11.htm

This data can answer the question "are poor people busy in general". (The answer is no.) But it can't answer the question "are poor obese people busy", since it doesn't allow you to slice by both busyness and obesity jointly.

I don't think the remaining problems are self incflicted. That's kind of the whole point. If these problems are systematic they might be even harder to solve, and then we haven't gotten closer to the eventual goal (except for the mentioned stock price of course).

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