12 ms·

Is the Era of Great Famines Over?

117 points by upen 10y ago

phreack 10y ago
It's easy to not realize that without major single headline grabbing breakthroughs, progress on ending these injustices is still ongoing. So it's a refreshing reminder to see articles like this one every now and then, specially after such a hard year.
- tajen 10y ago
  In France evryone is convinced that "The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer". This proverb/pseudo-analysis is a huge emotional trigger for a leftish vote, and is liberally repeated by many newspapers. I systematically try to counter this proverb, because every available evidence points at the opposite: - The poor are getting less poor. Famine is less harsh and UN reports lower poverty levels for the bottom 10%. There are severaly explanation, basically the poorer benefit from the globla growth and global scientific advance. Of course it's limited because of patents and other hindrance, but we should not deny the globlal trend. - The rich are getting richer, that's exact, but it's also because the population is increasing and the top people today serve bigger economic interests than 50 years ago (whether it be Snapchat for beginner CEOs or Tesla for traditional CEOs). Hence, maybe the spread between the rich and the poor widens, but that's not what the proverb denounces, and the proverb is wrong. The proverb specifically says the poor are getting poorer, which is widely false. Moreover the variation of gap is not demonstratedly unfair.
  - gph 10y ago
    >"The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer" I think typically when people say that they mean within their own country, not globally. And in some Western countries if we look at the very recent trend (last 10-20 years) I think they have somewhat of a point. The poor are mostly stagnant while the rich are getting much richer and those in the middle are generally getting poorer. The proverb may be technically incorrect, but the sentiment behind it may not be all that far off.
drcross 10y ago
Across the world we really need to start providing free food at a national level- 1. Many large nations already heavily subsidise food for food security as it stands. We need to avoid butter mountains and milk lakes because it's wasteful. 2. Many first world countries already feed their population to high school level anyway. 2. A national plan for good, healthy, free food will prompt people to eat properly, on average it would encourage responsible eating (you can only get so big eating potatoes, broccoli and meat, it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous). 3. Job Automation is going to change our work situations anyway, within 5 years alone we'll have taxi drivers and hauliers without jobs. Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment. 4. If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves maybe we could concentrate on what's more important, like getting to mars or something.
- narrowrail 10y ago
  >within 5 years alone we'll have taxi drivers and hauliers without jobs. I'm going to continue objecting to this idea. Maybe by 2050, but I'd bet $10,000 that this will not happen in 5 years.
  - rqebmm 10y ago
    Yeah, any large-scale self-driving car automation is going to take at least a decade to have a large effect, possibly more. Between the inevitable hiccups, upgrade/replacement costs and safety/labor regulations, it's not going to happen overnight. Even that White House study that said those jobs were going to disappear gave no time frame.
    - Retric 10y ago
      These things are predicted to cost less than 2 years salary making the transition rapid and only really limited by manufacturing. However, the important thing is not if it's 7 or 10 years, but the fact shrinking job markets mean everyone laid off is going to be unable to find a job in the sector.
  - 10y ago
poiuz 10y ago
There shouldn't be any hunger. We produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. There are only 8 billion people. Yet 20'000 die everyday of (capitalism) hunger.
- rqebmm 10y ago
  You're right that we produce enough raw food, but what alternative solution would you provide for more efficiently distributing it? Once there's sufficient supply all that Capitalism determines is methods of distribution.
- gizmo686 10y ago
  Distribution is hard. We throw away so much food because it is cheaper throw it away than transport it to where it is needed. "Cheaper" in this context does not refer to a capitalistic construction, but the real resources necessary to transport (mostly perishable) goods across the world and get them to everyone who needs them.
  - snrplfth 10y ago
    Basic foodstuffs are remarkably cheap. Unmilled commodity wheat is usually only $100 to $150 per metric tonne. But that's what it can cost to transport that tonne for only a few dozen miles overland in a place with few or no paved roads. Add in the distribution costs of getting it to every specific consumption location, and you can see why it's so hard.
    - bluedino 10y ago
      Or if you have warlords that hjiack the trucks
      - snrplfth 10y ago
        Yes, that also does not help. Even in stable times, though, transportation costs are surprisingly higher than most people think - especially if they've grown up surrounded by ubiquitous high-quality roads and rail everywhere.
jerkstate 10y ago
Headline says world hunger, article is about Ethiopia. This is good news but does the article support the headline?
- dang 10y ago
  We reverted the title to the article's original. (Submitted title was 'World hunger reached its lowest point in 25 years'.)
jandrese 10y ago
From the headline only: no. Why? Because we still have political strife in the world, and political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years. If anything our political systems are gearing us up for even more devastating famines, as countries turn inward and more oppressive.
- snrplfth 10y ago
  Well, a modern economy is pretty thoroughly different from the premodern one. When it took 90% of the population working in agriculture to feed the whole population (nonfarmer/farmer ratio of 1:9), and food transportation costs were extremely high, then even a minor shortfall in food production could induce famine conditions in short order. Now that the nonfarmer/farmer ratio in an industrialized economy is more like 97:3 (and moving toward that figure elsewhere) famine is decreasingly caused by shortfalls only, and increasingly by other factors. Fundamentally, though, it's about productivity. And there's no obvious reason why productivity will be going down in most places in the world, nor why transportation should be getting more expensive. I think short-term oscillations in political fortunes are not a very good marker of these things.
  - jandrese 10y ago
    That was my point. We have produced enough food to feed the world for centuries now, and we have had the means to transport it, but choose not to for political reasons. North Korea is a prime example, there's no reason anybody in the country should be hungry, except that their government is both highly isolationist and likes to meddle with the internal food supply.
    - snrplfth 10y ago
      No, you said that "political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years." Which is not true - in a low-productivity, pre-industrial economy, inherently near the subsistence baseline, food shortfalls (and consequent famines) are frequently caused by weather, pestilence and other non-political-strife events. When it takes 8 or 9 farmers to feed themselves and one non-farmer (and year-to-year food storage capability is very poor) then even a 10% food production decline is a crisis. We absolutely have not had "enough food to feed the world for centuries", nor the means to transport it. In 1800, worldwide GDP per capita was barely above $1000 USD (current, PPP), and by 1900, just over $2000. The supposed surpluses simply did not exist. Ship transport was still relatively inefficient, and overland transport was extremely expensive in a world where ~80% of people lived in small rural communities with no paved roads between them, and even where roads did exist, they were of poor quality. The food surpluses and easy transport we see today are really quite a recent development, well within the 20th century.
genieyclo 10y ago
It is amazing to see this on the top of HN right after I get off a call with my mother about sending more emergency remittances to my uncle's family in remote east Ethiopia/Ogaden. The situation there is very dire with all the livestock (all their wealth) perished, no rains from this year's Deyr rainy season that just ended and no working wells for groundwater. If anyone is reading this and wants to help with the crisis situation there, please donate to The Denan Project[1] which is basically the only aid group on the ground. All the majors (Oxfam, ICRC, etc) have been awol during this year's extreme drought (worst in more than 30 years). 100% of donations go to directly supporting people with food and water aid, medical aid (we built the only clinic for hundreds of miles) and other direct support. All overhead costs are already covered by the very generous, selfless folks behind The Denan Project. Dick Young, founder of The Denan Project wrote a letter to the editor response to this same article by Alex de Waal in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/ethiopia-and-the-end-of-famine.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/ethiopia-and-the-e... [1]: http://www.thedenanproject.org/ http://www.thedenanproject.org/
- pdeuchler 10y ago
  It's rather disturbing to see such a disconnect between reality and the perception of it among the western elite, specifically concerning the general living conditions most of the world lives in. This article seems to be nothing more than the same old post-scarcity rhetoric that certain groups push for political gain every couple of years. The world is as it has always been; some things are getting better in some places, other things getting worse elsewhere, and in many places the status quo is largely continued. Making such sweeping declarations like the article does merely serves to turn extremely nuanced and interconnected systems into black and white judgement calls. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to why that is, and why it's being printed in the NYT.
  - andrewmutz 10y ago
    Perhaps the article linked is wrong about the conditions in Ethiopia. However, aside from this particular instance, I think it should be mentioned that the world is not as it always has been. Tremendous progress is being made at reducing global poverty and global undernourishment. You can see evidence and data here: https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment/#ref-8 https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment/#ref-... I think it is important to acknowledge successes so that we don't falsely believe we are failing and as a result, reject systems that are working.
ewindisch 10y ago
No. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/03/31/north-korea-warns-new-famine-as-kims-weight-belligerence-balloon.html http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/03/31/north-korea-warns-ne... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/north-korea-fears-famine-as-drought-halves-food-production-says-un https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/north-korea-fe... https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/pyongyangs-hunger-games.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/pyongyangs-hunger... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine
- John23832 10y ago
  > No Clear and concise. If you believe in climate change, we really could just be entering a new Great Famine Age. Especially since the US sits at the bottom of the food chain for most of the world (grain exports). http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34610205 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34610205
- tomjen3 10y ago
  Lets rephrase it to include only people not run by batshit crazy clones of Stalin.
  - snrplfth 10y ago
    "Let's do what North Korea does, that seems to be working out really well," said nobody.
    - m0llusk 10y ago
      The situation in North Korea actually works out quite well for a very small number of people which is one of the main reasons why it endures.
      - snrplfth 10y ago
        But not even that well by global standards of autocrats! I mean, that small group could be like the wealthy, globe-trotting Communist Party of China apparatchiks, or the gilded, pampered princes of the Middle East. But instead they get to sit around their grey concrete bunkers, watch irritating propaganda TV, and drink overpriced imported cognac. Whoopee. I mean, you have to be truly incompetent to be next door to China for the last thirty years and think "nah, we shouldn't do reforms - wouldn't want to lose our luxuries as members of the political class!"
exit 10y ago
"Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth." [0] that's more people than were alive globally in 1700 [1]. looks like the last 300 years have been a complete catastrophe with respect to hunger. [0] https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats [1] https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpo...
- snrplfth 10y ago
  But that's a smaller proportion of people than ever before. So not only are we capable of supporting more people total, but a far smaller percentage of those are hungry.
  - exit 10y ago
    do you believe one persons happiness redeems another persons suffering?
    - snrplfth 10y ago
      ...what? No, what I'm saying is, if you're trying to figure out "how well we're doing" at solving some particular problem, then you have to look at proportions. Any group of humans will suffer various things, the point is to decrease the likelihood that they do. If there's a group of ten people, and five are hungry, then they're doing worse on that metric than a group of a hundred people where five are hungry. This doesn't change when the groups you're looking at are "humans in past" and "humans presently".
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      No, but 2 people's happiness redeems the suffering of 1.
lend000 10y ago
"Easily debatable" is not an argument lol, and then you have the audacity to declare a non sequitur. Are you just playing devil's advocate or do you actually believe the population is going to balance out/ the same farm land will produce exponentially more apples over time? For your edification, agricultural land has been getting more efficient, but there is a hard limit, and it is called sunlight. Maybe we can increase capacity by growing crops indoors powered by nuclear, or maybe we can colonize space, but your petty arguments (if I could even call them that) do little to prove this is guaranteed before population catches up.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  I'm not arguing - I'm pointing out that it's obviously an arguable point wrt. obesity having an impact on others, since we obviously have functional countries with public health systems where that applies. There is no basis for dismissing it in the way you have. More on topic, you don't seem to appreciate my point - we are not currently in food production, and there is no evidence that increased food availability would increase human population. So I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
  - lend000 10y ago
    I'm not arguing My dear Matthew. You clearly just like to argue. I'm pointing out that it's obviously an arguable point wrt. obesity having an impact on others, since we obviously have functional countries with public health systems where that applies Despite using "obviously" twice, having 'functional' countries that happen to have certain laws, as well as hundreds of thousands of others does not validate the laws. I'm not sure what the term for this is in formal logic, but it's probably along the lines of non-sequitur or as I prefer, pure simple mindedness. More on topic, you don't seem to appreciate my point. Ah, I see what it is you crave now. we are not currently in food production, and there is no evidence that increased food availability would increase human population I agree. That is not relevant. The point is that EVENTUALLY there will be a time when increasing food production would, once population catches up and there is more scarcity. So I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I know, Matthew. I know.
- 10y ago

117 points by upen 10y ago

It's easy to not realize that without major single headline grabbing breakthroughs, progress on ending these injustices is still ongoing. So it's a refreshing reminder to see articles like this one every now and then, specially after such a hard year.

tajen 10y ago
In France evryone is convinced that "The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer". This proverb/pseudo-analysis is a huge emotional trigger for a leftish vote, and is liberally repeated by many newspapers. I systematically try to counter this proverb, because every available evidence points at the opposite: - The poor are getting less poor. Famine is less harsh and UN reports lower poverty levels for the bottom 10%. There are severaly explanation, basically the poorer benefit from the globla growth and global scientific advance. Of course it's limited because of patents and other hindrance, but we should not deny the globlal trend. - The rich are getting richer, that's exact, but it's also because the population is increasing and the top people today serve bigger economic interests than 50 years ago (whether it be Snapchat for beginner CEOs or Tesla for traditional CEOs). Hence, maybe the spread between the rich and the poor widens, but that's not what the proverb denounces, and the proverb is wrong. The proverb specifically says the poor are getting poorer, which is widely false. Moreover the variation of gap is not demonstratedly unfair.
- gph 10y ago
  >"The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer" I think typically when people say that they mean within their own country, not globally. And in some Western countries if we look at the very recent trend (last 10-20 years) I think they have somewhat of a point. The poor are mostly stagnant while the rich are getting much richer and those in the middle are generally getting poorer. The proverb may be technically incorrect, but the sentiment behind it may not be all that far off.

drcross 10y ago

Across the world we really need to start providing free food at a national level- 1. Many large nations already heavily subsidise food for food security as it stands. We need to avoid butter mountains and milk lakes because it's wasteful. 2. Many first world countries already feed their population to high school level anyway. 2. A national plan for good, healthy, free food will prompt people to eat properly, on average it would encourage responsible eating (you can only get so big eating potatoes, broccoli and meat, it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous). 3. Job Automation is going to change our work situations anyway, within 5 years alone we'll have taxi drivers and hauliers without jobs. Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment. 4. If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves maybe we could concentrate on what's more important, like getting to mars or something.

narrowrail 10y ago
>within 5 years alone we'll have taxi drivers and hauliers without jobs. I'm going to continue objecting to this idea. Maybe by 2050, but I'd bet $10,000 that this will not happen in 5 years.
- rqebmm 10y ago
  Yeah, any large-scale self-driving car automation is going to take at least a decade to have a large effect, possibly more. Between the inevitable hiccups, upgrade/replacement costs and safety/labor regulations, it's not going to happen overnight. Even that White House study that said those jobs were going to disappear gave no time frame.
  - Retric 10y ago
    These things are predicted to cost less than 2 years salary making the transition rapid and only really limited by manufacturing. However, the important thing is not if it's 7 or 10 years, but the fact shrinking job markets mean everyone laid off is going to be unable to find a job in the sector.
- 10y ago

poiuz 10y ago

There shouldn't be any hunger. We produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. There are only 8 billion people. Yet 20'000 die everyday of (capitalism) hunger.

rqebmm 10y ago
You're right that we produce enough raw food, but what alternative solution would you provide for more efficiently distributing it? Once there's sufficient supply all that Capitalism determines is methods of distribution.
gizmo686 10y ago
Distribution is hard. We throw away so much food because it is cheaper throw it away than transport it to where it is needed. "Cheaper" in this context does not refer to a capitalistic construction, but the real resources necessary to transport (mostly perishable) goods across the world and get them to everyone who needs them.
- snrplfth 10y ago
  Basic foodstuffs are remarkably cheap. Unmilled commodity wheat is usually only $100 to $150 per metric tonne. But that's what it can cost to transport that tonne for only a few dozen miles overland in a place with few or no paved roads. Add in the distribution costs of getting it to every specific consumption location, and you can see why it's so hard.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    Or if you have warlords that hjiack the trucks
    - snrplfth 10y ago
      Yes, that also does not help. Even in stable times, though, transportation costs are surprisingly higher than most people think - especially if they've grown up surrounded by ubiquitous high-quality roads and rail everywhere.

jerkstate 10y ago

Headline says world hunger, article is about Ethiopia. This is good news but does the article support the headline?

dang 10y ago
We reverted the title to the article's original. (Submitted title was 'World hunger reached its lowest point in 25 years'.)

jandrese 10y ago

From the headline only: no. Why? Because we still have political strife in the world, and political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years. If anything our political systems are gearing us up for even more devastating famines, as countries turn inward and more oppressive.

snrplfth 10y ago
Well, a modern economy is pretty thoroughly different from the premodern one. When it took 90% of the population working in agriculture to feed the whole population (nonfarmer/farmer ratio of 1:9), and food transportation costs were extremely high, then even a minor shortfall in food production could induce famine conditions in short order. Now that the nonfarmer/farmer ratio in an industrialized economy is more like 97:3 (and moving toward that figure elsewhere) famine is decreasingly caused by shortfalls only, and increasingly by other factors. Fundamentally, though, it's about productivity. And there's no obvious reason why productivity will be going down in most places in the world, nor why transportation should be getting more expensive. I think short-term oscillations in political fortunes are not a very good marker of these things.
- jandrese 10y ago
  That was my point. We have produced enough food to feed the world for centuries now, and we have had the means to transport it, but choose not to for political reasons. North Korea is a prime example, there's no reason anybody in the country should be hungry, except that their government is both highly isolationist and likes to meddle with the internal food supply.
  - snrplfth 10y ago
    No, you said that "political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years." Which is not true - in a low-productivity, pre-industrial economy, inherently near the subsistence baseline, food shortfalls (and consequent famines) are frequently caused by weather, pestilence and other non-political-strife events. When it takes 8 or 9 farmers to feed themselves and one non-farmer (and year-to-year food storage capability is very poor) then even a 10% food production decline is a crisis. We absolutely have not had "enough food to feed the world for centuries", nor the means to transport it. In 1800, worldwide GDP per capita was barely above $1000 USD (current, PPP), and by 1900, just over $2000. The supposed surpluses simply did not exist. Ship transport was still relatively inefficient, and overland transport was extremely expensive in a world where ~80% of people lived in small rural communities with no paved roads between them, and even where roads did exist, they were of poor quality. The food surpluses and easy transport we see today are really quite a recent development, well within the 20th century.

genieyclo 10y ago

It is amazing to see this on the top of HN right after I get off a call with my mother about sending more emergency remittances to my uncle's family in remote east Ethiopia/Ogaden. The situation there is very dire with all the livestock (all their wealth) perished, no rains from this year's Deyr rainy season that just ended and no working wells for groundwater. If anyone is reading this and wants to help with the crisis situation there, please donate to The Denan Project[1] which is basically the only aid group on the ground. All the majors (Oxfam, ICRC, etc) have been awol during this year's extreme drought (worst in more than 30 years). 100% of donations go to directly supporting people with food and water aid, medical aid (we built the only clinic for hundreds of miles) and other direct support. All overhead costs are already covered by the very generous, selfless folks behind The Denan Project. Dick Young, founder of The Denan Project wrote a letter to the editor response to this same article by Alex de Waal in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/ethiopia-and-the-end-of-famine.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/ethiopia-and-the-e... [1]: http://www.thedenanproject.org/ http://www.thedenanproject.org/

pdeuchler 10y ago
It's rather disturbing to see such a disconnect between reality and the perception of it among the western elite, specifically concerning the general living conditions most of the world lives in. This article seems to be nothing more than the same old post-scarcity rhetoric that certain groups push for political gain every couple of years. The world is as it has always been; some things are getting better in some places, other things getting worse elsewhere, and in many places the status quo is largely continued. Making such sweeping declarations like the article does merely serves to turn extremely nuanced and interconnected systems into black and white judgement calls. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to why that is, and why it's being printed in the NYT.
- andrewmutz 10y ago
  Perhaps the article linked is wrong about the conditions in Ethiopia. However, aside from this particular instance, I think it should be mentioned that the world is not as it always has been. Tremendous progress is being made at reducing global poverty and global undernourishment. You can see evidence and data here: https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment/#ref-8 https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment/#ref-... I think it is important to acknowledge successes so that we don't falsely believe we are failing and as a result, reject systems that are working.

ewindisch 10y ago

No. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/03/31/north-korea-warns-new-famine-as-kims-weight-belligerence-balloon.html http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/03/31/north-korea-warns-ne... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/north-korea-fears-famine-as-drought-halves-food-production-says-un https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/north-korea-fe... https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/pyongyangs-hunger-games.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/pyongyangs-hunger... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine

John23832 10y ago
> No Clear and concise. If you believe in climate change, we really could just be entering a new Great Famine Age. Especially since the US sits at the bottom of the food chain for most of the world (grain exports). http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34610205 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-34610205
tomjen3 10y ago
Lets rephrase it to include only people not run by batshit crazy clones of Stalin.
- snrplfth 10y ago
  "Let's do what North Korea does, that seems to be working out really well," said nobody.
  - m0llusk 10y ago
    The situation in North Korea actually works out quite well for a very small number of people which is one of the main reasons why it endures.
    - snrplfth 10y ago
      But not even that well by global standards of autocrats! I mean, that small group could be like the wealthy, globe-trotting Communist Party of China apparatchiks, or the gilded, pampered princes of the Middle East. But instead they get to sit around their grey concrete bunkers, watch irritating propaganda TV, and drink overpriced imported cognac. Whoopee. I mean, you have to be truly incompetent to be next door to China for the last thirty years and think "nah, we shouldn't do reforms - wouldn't want to lose our luxuries as members of the political class!"

exit 10y ago

"Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth." [0] that's more people than were alive globally in 1700 [1]. looks like the last 300 years have been a complete catastrophe with respect to hunger. [0] https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats [1] https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpo...

snrplfth 10y ago
But that's a smaller proportion of people than ever before. So not only are we capable of supporting more people total, but a far smaller percentage of those are hungry.
- exit 10y ago
  do you believe one persons happiness redeems another persons suffering?
  - snrplfth 10y ago
    ...what? No, what I'm saying is, if you're trying to figure out "how well we're doing" at solving some particular problem, then you have to look at proportions. Any group of humans will suffer various things, the point is to decrease the likelihood that they do. If there's a group of ten people, and five are hungry, then they're doing worse on that metric than a group of a hundred people where five are hungry. This doesn't change when the groups you're looking at are "humans in past" and "humans presently".
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    No, but 2 people's happiness redeems the suffering of 1.

lend000 10y ago

"Easily debatable" is not an argument lol, and then you have the audacity to declare a non sequitur. Are you just playing devil's advocate or do you actually believe the population is going to balance out/ the same farm land will produce exponentially more apples over time? For your edification, agricultural land has been getting more efficient, but there is a hard limit, and it is called sunlight. Maybe we can increase capacity by growing crops indoors powered by nuclear, or maybe we can colonize space, but your petty arguments (if I could even call them that) do little to prove this is guaranteed before population catches up.

matthewmacleod 10y ago
I'm not arguing - I'm pointing out that it's obviously an arguable point wrt. obesity having an impact on others, since we obviously have functional countries with public health systems where that applies. There is no basis for dismissing it in the way you have. More on topic, you don't seem to appreciate my point - we are not currently in food production, and there is no evidence that increased food availability would increase human population. So I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
- lend000 10y ago
  I'm not arguing My dear Matthew. You clearly just like to argue. I'm pointing out that it's obviously an arguable point wrt. obesity having an impact on others, since we obviously have functional countries with public health systems where that applies Despite using "obviously" twice, having 'functional' countries that happen to have certain laws, as well as hundreds of thousands of others does not validate the laws. I'm not sure what the term for this is in formal logic, but it's probably along the lines of non-sequitur or as I prefer, pure simple mindedness. More on topic, you don't seem to appreciate my point. Ah, I see what it is you crave now. we are not currently in food production, and there is no evidence that increased food availability would increase human population I agree. That is not relevant. The point is that EVENTUALLY there will be a time when increasing food production would, once population catches up and there is more scarcity. So I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I know, Matthew. I know.
10y ago