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I didn't misunderstand anything. It's defined: > Hunger: an uncomfortable or painful sensation caused by insufficient energy from diet. In this report, the ter

by bmitc 4y ago

I didn't misunderstand anything. It's defined: > Hunger: an uncomfortable or painful sensation caused by insufficient energy from diet. In this report, the term hunger is synonymous with chronic undernourishment and is measured by the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU). > Inequality isn’t the same as starvation Of course it isn't. They're correlated, but I only mentioned that in support of my comment a level above. > in the last 40 years inequality grew while starvation dramatically declined. “In 40 years, the proportion of malnourished people in the developing world has been more than halved. The proportion of starving people has decreased even faster.” Where is this coming from? I'm not sure what your point is. The numbers are what they, and the things are defined. There's not misinterpretation. If you get a different sentiment than "industrialization has increased suffering", then that's fine, but it isn't clear where that comes from.

Retric 4y ago
> Where is this from It’s from the same Wikipedia article, which makes it clear starvation is a much smaller number of people than existed in the word in 1750 or even 1000. Again chronic undernourishment isn’t starvation. There a bunch of statistics saying ~850 million people regularly don’t get sufficient quantities of nutrition and calories for ideal heath is vastly different than starvation. My father was undernourished growing up in the US. He gained weight after joining the Army and was shorter than he probably should have been, but that describes the vast majority of humanity through most of human history. Even today people in the US regularly skip meals and go hungry which is a real problem that’s being addressed by real programs that are critically important. However, it’s extremely rare for people to actually starve here and we need to remember starvation is a much worse situation. So my point is this: The human body can adapt to less than ideal number of calories it’s a fairly wide range. Starvation is below the threshold of survival there is no way to adapt to it and it can quickly result in death. Misrepresenting what’s going on as starvation has real world consequences because preventing starvation related deaths is far more achievable than improving the diets of 850 million people. The actual number of starving people is relatively small which makes it an addressable problem.

by bmitc 4y ago

Retric 4y ago

> Where is this from It’s from the same Wikipedia article, which makes it clear starvation is a much smaller number of people than existed in the word in 1750 or even 1000. Again chronic undernourishment isn’t starvation. There a bunch of statistics saying ~850 million people regularly don’t get sufficient quantities of nutrition and calories for ideal heath is vastly different than starvation. My father was undernourished growing up in the US. He gained weight after joining the Army and was shorter than he probably should have been, but that describes the vast majority of humanity through most of human history. Even today people in the US regularly skip meals and go hungry which is a real problem that’s being addressed by real programs that are critically important. However, it’s extremely rare for people to actually starve here and we need to remember starvation is a much worse situation. So my point is this: The human body can adapt to less than ideal number of calories it’s a fairly wide range. Starvation is below the threshold of survival there is no way to adapt to it and it can quickly result in death. Misrepresenting what’s going on as starvation has real world consequences because preventing starvation related deaths is far more achievable than improving the diets of 850 million people. The actual number of starving people is relatively small which makes it an addressable problem.