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.
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.
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:
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.
Basic income is better because you provide people with the money to feed themselves while preserving the free market and all its benefits (efficiency, choice, etc).
We see over and over that cash assistance is preferable to providing goods (like food or housing) directly.
As long as you build the proper taxation into bad foods, to pay for their higher healthcare costs (soda tax). Basic income doesn't remove the need for proper economic signaling.
Economic signaling based on opinion of good/bad is the bane of the free market. Pollution tax: yes; you are being taxed for affecting others. Soda tax: no; you are hurting no one but yourself, and it is a stretch to say otherwise. Not that we should be providing government healthcare anyway.
But to the previous commenter's point, free food is exactly how you end up with famines. We are NOT beyond the era of great famines. Food production rose faster than population in the 20th century but there is only so much land, so much sunlight. It will catch up. When there are good times, people multiply. Poverty is inherent to nature -- some bears are born rich (big and strong), while others scrape by their entire lives, and may or may not reproduce. If they all had as much salmon as they wanted, their population would increase until there was poverty again. Same principle, in the long term at least. Only workaround is eugenics, and I would rather have freedom to reproduce and poverty than totalitarianism and the "theoretical promise" of no poverty.
Not that we should be providing government healthcare anyway.
Also debatable, and if single-payer healthcare does exist it implicitly means that obesity has an effect on others. It's silly to take liberalism to an extreme.
there is only so much land, so much sunlight
Land used for agriculture has actually stayed the same or slightly declined since 1990.
When there are good times, people multiply
Evidence suggests that in developed economies, people do precisely the opposite.
there are good times, people multiply. Poverty is inherent to nature -- some bears are born rich (big and strong), while others scrape by their entire lives, and may or may not reproduce. If they all had as much salmon as they wanted, their population would increase until there was poverty again.
Humans are not bears. A large number of people have essentially unlimited access to food, and yet done reproduce en masse. I expect, though I haven't looked, that birth rates would actually inversely correlated with wealth.
Only workaround is eugenics
You have failed to demonstrate a problem to be worked around.
I would rather have freedom to reproduce and poverty than totalitarianism and the "theoretical promise" of no poverty
A preposterous non sequitur, given that it's quite possible to imagine ways to eliminate poverty without reverting to totalitarianism.
> Humans are not bears. A large number of people have essentially unlimited access to food, and yet done reproduce en masse. I expect, though I haven't looked, that birth rates would actually inversely correlated with wealth.
You should look, then. Wealth is positively correlated with fertility.
What's inversely correlated with fertility is education, but fertility declines with rising education only because parents realize it is advantageous to spend more resources per child.
> Evidence suggests that in developed economies, people do precisely the opposite.
That's because you're arguing from a false premise. Perceptively, then, maybe things are not as good as you would think (especially not as good as people in the SV developer bubble think), otherwise people would multiply at a much higher rate. I implore you to do some actual math to see how much one needs to earn to be able to have kids above the replacement rate (so, around 2.2), without receiving any government assistance (thus entering a poverty trap) and where that earning rate resides relative to the median household income in the US right now.
The results may surprise you.
> A preposterous non sequitur, given that it's quite possible to imagine ways to eliminate poverty without reverting to totalitarianism.
One great way to eliminate poverty is to keep redefining the poverty line until there are no longer people in poverty! And it's completely totalitarianism-free.
> Economic signaling based on opinion of good/bad is the bane of the free market.
Must we worship at the altar of the free market a priori?
The "free market" in the case of food has had disastrous health consequences by optimizing for profits over health. The entire incentive structure is to manufacture foods with an addictive quality out of the cheapest possible ingredients, because the negative health outcomes are too distant and dilute to be factored in in any meaningful way. There is a marketing advantage to claiming some processed food is healthy, and there is ample science available that can be distilled down into an unending cycle of specious claims that fall apart on the mildest inspection, but who really has the time to evaluate those claims anyway?
That's not to say government regulation is a silver bullet, but the government does ostensibly represent the people, and what other organization has the clout to balance out the fundamentally broken incentive structures within the food industry?
Nope, a government that aims to prevent fraud produces the healthiest society. See my comments on the FDA/USDA discussion -- it would be best if they advised the public, but did not outright block products/services.
Their advice means precisely zero when your choices are the cheap, processed, unhealthy food you can afford or the more expensive, healthy option that you can't.
The parent commenter is right, the free market optimizes for cheap and addictive because it's what sells and what will continue producing sales for many years. There's absolutely no incentive for companies to produce even cheap healthy food because the addictive qualities are a much more secure bet that your customer will come back to your food in the future.
The incentive is that many people will pay a premium for healthy foods, which is why companies like Whole Foods exist and do quite well. Certainly not all, especially those who would have previously been facing hunger, so the industry will always exist. I agree there. So you can tax it and make it more expensive and inaccessible for poor people, but that does nothing to make producing healthy foods any easier. That's my point.
> Economic signaling based on opinion of good/bad is the bane of the free market.
Sure, but "a third party intervening in prices is the antithesis of a price system where the producer sets their own price" is an empty tautology without any argument for why the world is better off for people being able to obtain soda more cheaply and balancing the budget with a non-distortionary poll tax instead.
Similarly,if you're going to make sub-Malthusian arguments that free food is "exactly how you end up with famines" it would help if you could name one example of a famine significantly influenced by prior availability of free food. In the interests of fairness, I'll name three that definitely weren't: the Irish potato famine, the Holodomor and the Bengal famine. Developed countries are a long way ahead of the era where free food is likely to have a statistically significant effect on the birth rate and all the data would suggest causality ran in the opposite direction with birthrates having fallen sharply against a backdrop of increasing access to better nutrition and increasing universal welfare access. It's developing countries, where people have to ensure enough surviving descendants to guarantee they continue to be fed in old age, that are the ones with the higher birthrates and rapidly growing populations...
Soda tax is a way (albeit a somewhat flawed one) for state and local governments to nullify the effects of agricultural grain subsidies, which is something I wholeheartedly support. If rural constituencies have a right to spend urban tax money to support their crops, then urban constituencies have a right to claw that money back with a tax on products made with those crops. Now, if the federal government dropped all grain subsidies tomorrow, I'd drop my support for a soda tax.
> It will catch up.
No it won't--TFRs have been dropping across the world for a few decades now, and soon it will be at or below the replacement rate. People don't have kids for shits and giggle or just because they can--it's just that in the past, for agricultural and pastoral societies children were short-term investments, not long-term ones, and child mortality was high, so having more kids==better. It takes a while to shed traditional wisdom, but it does happen.
> I would rather have freedom to reproduce and poverty than totalitarianism and the "theoretical promise" of no poverty
Speak for yourself. If I had to give up reproductive freedom in exchange for prosperity and all other freedoms, I'd do so in a heartbeat. You don't need to control every aspect of citizens' lives in order for them to have less children.
Or maybe they should just get rid of the subsidies.
Maybe you should visit India or the Philippines and let me know how soon you expect that cultural shift to hit them. Something happening in your world does not equal global paradigm shift. The western world is not "the world." I do agree that it's happening in western Europe, though.
I was speaking for myself (in case you missed the use of "I"). You go ahead and believe all the promises that strongmen tell you in exchange for little bits of freedom. The NSA, FDA, etc. will take care of you. Sleep easy champ.
> Or maybe they should just get rid of the subsidies.
Oh we in the cities would love to get rid of the subsidies, but rural areas are overrepresented under our political systems. Clawing back the subsidies is the second-best option.
> Maybe you should visit India or the Philippines and let me know how soon you expect that cultural shift to hit them.
It's hitting them already. India's TFR is down to 2.4, which is pretty close to replacement, and while the Philippines is still at 3 or so, it's still down from 6-7 a generation ago.
> The NSA, FDA, etc. will take care of you. Sleep easy champ.
I had to live under the Ministry of State Security and the People's Armed Police for the first decade of my life. Compared to those guys, NSA are a bunch of cuddly teddy bears. Hell, they can't even arrest anybody!
> Pollution tax: yes; you are being taxed for affecting others. Soda tax: no; you are hurting no one but yourself, and it is a stretch to say otherwise.
In this case you should consider: who is hurting whom? The research of Ariely and the experimental results of the marketing industry have made it clear that your choice to buy soda is not simply a transaction between yourself and the grocery store. It involves the government’s need for cheap calories to prevent social unrest, and it involves the sugar industry’s ongoing efforts to keep carbohydrate overloads socially acceptable. Soda is the industry hurting you.
I subscribe to chaos theory, so yes, any action has enormous repercussions in the future. But policy-wise, I don't think what you are saying is at odds with what I'm saying. If you get rid of the soda tax AND the subsidies on corn (syrup), it balances out nicely.
Human rights are things that are inherent to being human.
That is your definition. If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1], the definition they employ is much broader. E.g.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health
and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing,
housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to
security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood,
old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.
All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social
protection.
Because I think it's really important people stop thinking healthcare is a fundamental human right: Somebody has to provide healthcare for you. There is limited supply. There is INFINITE demand. That's right, infinite demand. People demand exponentially more healthcare as they get closer to death, and the majority of a person's lifelong costs are incurred in the final year of their life. The entire healthcare sector couldn't keep one person alive forever, and there is a diminishing return on each dollar that is spent on keeping a dying person alive for another hour (measured in hours/$).
Slavery also existed 200 years ago, and yet "not being a slave" is a basic human right.
Equally good healthcare for everyone, independent of their wealth, is a worthwhile goal for society, and all but one of the so-called developed countries have pretty much achieved it.
Your first point is illogical. It was a violation of basic human rights then and it still is now. The underlying tenet (liberty) is independent of "not being a slave" and has nothing to do with whether slavery has been invented yet/is being practiced. Make sense?
That's a nice fantasy, but it's also a fantasy. If you think Canada has equal healthcare for all, then please explain why various prime ministers and EU dignitaries come to the US for major operations.
On a tangent, I do think the US has an arguably worse healthcare system than some of these socialist countries, but not because the socialist system is good -- it's because we have such a distorted market. We have Medicare/Medicaid which basically social healthcare, almost any prescription for $5, but it's even worse than social healthcare because it only applies to some of the population, driving prices up for those who don't yet qualify. We have overbearing occupational licensing. It is TOO hard to become a doctor. We have overbearing malpractice regulation -- a huge percentage of a doctor's salary goes to malpractice insurance, making regulators/lawyers richer. We have a stifling FDA, which combined with our over-powered IP system grants monopolies to drug companies and enables price gouging.
We have nothing resembling a free healthcare market, my friend, so don't blame capitalism for America's problems.
I don't know about Canada. But for various reasons I believe that healthcare cannot be a free non-distorted market. You cannot choose too often when or where or by whom you'll be operated; some people (the elder or those who have genetic issues or those that have a relatively dangerous self-employed job, for example) need healthcare more than others; patients obviously die during surgery putting doctors at a higher risk of malpractice litigations; and so on. My point is that the only way to mitigate all of this is to build an economy of scale, and single-payer/mandatory insurance is exactly that.
> you are hurting no one but yourself, and it is a stretch to say otherwise. Not that we should be providing government healthcare anyway.
educate me here. but ignoring government healthcare, wouldn't private healthcare companies have higher costs for health conscious members if many of their members are making poor health decisions?
if someone chooses to smoke cigarettes and ends up getting lung cancer, I don't feel great about paying for their lung transplant even with private healthcare.
And this is where I make a hard cutoff between what is expected for the social good and what is clearly infringing on individual rights. There is no perfect legal framework that knows how to balance individual freedoms with impacts to the "social good," so the heuristic I typically use is: if you are directly and provably infringing on someone else's rights (e.g. you can prove a factory is outputting a negative form of pollution, CO2), then it should be legally addressed. If it's an indirect concern like the above (how direct something is is also arbitrary, sure, so it comes down to being reasonable) which also assumes that the economy has a right to a person's money, then I would generally say leave it alone. Reasonable?
I thought we abandoned Malthusianism a century ago.
Humans need a lot more than food to "reproduce". And there's plenty of proof that as people move up the pyramid of needs having a litany of kids becomes a chore few people want.
Reminds me of Amdahl's Law... There will always be a pyramid that has more people on the bottom (i.e. increasing the population), and the reproductive tendencies of the minority of the population are mathematically insignificant. But let's assume you meant to refer to the general availability of modern goods/services, which is indeed increasing for everyone on the pyramid. I don't have the numbers there, but I believe cultural changes / improvements in birth control with voluntary adoption / technology could slow the tide, but we're still animals driven by evolution. This isn't a characteristic that will be going away anytime soon.
UN statistics prove that fertility rates are going down around the world. Even the lowest of the low will reach fertility rates around the replacement rate of 2.1 by 2050.
Yes, the population will increase until 2010 by most estimates, but it will increase at a decreasing rate.
And if as animals driven by evolution we have 1-2 kids per couple we still achieve our evolutionary goal while maintaining balance with nature.
Unfortunately, Malthusianism was never abandoned at all. I graduated from high school only ten years ago, and Malthus is accurate, up-to-the-minute doctrine as far as my high school and university courses were concerned.
The "free" market with companies under heavy competition looking to make consumers into fatty addicts obvious fails in many ways. The choice which is available is often extremely unhealthy and dominated by a few conglomerates. So though the argument for the free market works for many things, I think there is ample proof that it does not produce good outcomes for food.
It's optimized to produce cheap, addictive food because that's what the people crave. Much like Brawndo.
It's dubious to blame obesity on the free market. At the end of the day eating well and staying healthy is a personal responsibility. In most cities and towns there are just as many healthy options available as there are unhealthy options, and most of the time it's no more expensive (or even cheaper) to eat well than it is to buy junk. Fact of the matter is, a lot of people choose to eat poorly.
I strongly disagree with the concept that another person knows better than I do which food I should eat or how I should otherwise live my life.
That said, there should be more education around nutrition. Even free healthy food doesn't help anything if people are too dumb to choose it over junk.
> At the end of the day eating well and staying healthy is a personal responsibility.
A significant portion of human beings are wired for addiction. It's a fiction to claim that people are all free and are responsible for every choice that they make. We for instance control market on all drugs that have any potential for addiction, food has a potential for addiction for lots of people. If people are so free to choose to stay healthy and eat well, then why are all drugs not freely available to anyone who wants them. Opiates, benzos, etc.
No one is saying that anyone else should tell you what to eat. I am simply saying that free food that is healthy should be freely available. No friction and no excuses to not eat healthy. And economically there is a huge incentive to eat that free food as it's free.
Drugs are kind of a straw man, but FWIW, I think those should be legal too. I'd rather my tax money not be spent baby sitting people.
But they are a great example of just how useless it is trying to control people. Heroin is illegal, yet overdoses are at an all time high. A lot of people only end up on heroin because it's so difficult to get less powerful opiate pain killers. Prohibition doesn't work. People are going to do what they want to do anyway.
Some portion of the population are going to make really stupid decisions no matter what. The rest of us need to get over it and stop trying to "help" them if they don't want it.
I feel like personal responsibility is one of those things that work nice on paper, but that requires forethought, correct information, good education, processing power. Then there's things like genetics, bad upbringing, peer pressure, propaganda (adverts), etc... which all subvert those. Human beings are not rational actors who can be expected to make optimal choices even most of the time. Even if we were robots in the sense of a computer program we would still have to deal with limits to complexity, information and processing time. Exerting restraint and self control is known to take time and energy, energy which is in limited supply and requires replenishing through intake of calories.
That's life, though. People have different information, different education, different intelligence, different upbringings, and they make different choices than you or me. I make the best decisions for myself given my experience and situation, and you do the same for yourself, and everybody else does the same for themselves. I'm not going to force my choices on you, and it's not your place to force decisions on me.
Nobody makes the absolute best decisions every single time, but in general they certainly make better decisions for themselves than a stranger.
It does not produce good outcomes for food you believe others should eat. But it produces enough of a variety and abundance of foods to serve a variety of needs from celiac to halal to vegan to allergies.
How do you propose to do better by having the government mandate specific foods?
The variations you are talking about are not really variations, they are mostly marketing variations mixing the same stuff to produce things that appear different in the minds of consumers, but are really variations of the same thing. Our choice of food is severely limited, i.e. everything is made from corn. The variation of crops planted to feed our limited choice is again a mono-culture and optimized for profit, not for the environment or food diversity or animal rights. We have bad diets in general, any dietitian will tell you that.
I don't propose the government mandate anything. I propose the government give out good, healthy food for free. The market can continue to compete for people who wish to participate in it. Food is already subsidized heavily. So what if we give a certain amount of it for free to anyone who wants it.
Government giving out food = introducing inefficiency, throwing away valuable information flows.
This may be reasonable in some cases (food banks/stamps for the poor), but in others, you will inevitably end up with unfortunate effects like people taking free 'healthy' food and feeding it to the pigs to support their 'unhealthy' cravings.
That would raise the cost of healthy food if it is done wastefully. If the government purchases produce, that bids the price upward. If the produce is unconsumed and then rots, then there is no countervailing downward pressure on price. This would lead to lower dietary consumption of produce.
So the burden is on you to propose a system that would be less-wasteful than our current method of destributing produce. Government-run systems can be more efficient (see: NHS), but the details matter.
EDIT: by details, I mean the specifics of "give people food". If putting it on their doorstep every morning, is it already cooked? Who chooses what is in the packages? How do you know how many people live somewhere? Can I use the unretreived packages to find empty houses to rob?
Here it is. An extremely lean supply chain from farmer or producer to consumer facilitated by automation, probably drones or whatever. A website to order whatever you want and have it delivered to you in a day or two. Works on-demand with a JIT supply chain. Works with the market as the farmer or producer that agrees to such a program still supplies the normal market, and the government pays for the free food according to a certain allowance per citizen. System chooses supplier based on price offered or whatever criteria, for instance shipping cost, to optimize for cost.
The market isn't free; there are government farm subsidies in all the wrong places. It's no coincidence that cheap junk food is built on a subsidized corn industry.
Humans are still hardwired for the state of nature where high caloric foods are a scarcity, evolution has not caught up yet. It is very silly and unrealistic to suggest that raising the profit motive above others will bring out the best results in every sphere of human endeavours.
If we're comparing free food to basic income, the comparison should be against basic income that's just enough to feed yourself. Somewhere around $1000/person.
Even if you want full basic income, I'd argue that $15,000 is high. As a (Canadian) student in an expensive city my living expenses (everything but tuition) are easily under $10,000 USD. Using the numbers you linked we're almost certainly talking about less than $8,000/person to keep everyone above the poverty line (the exact number depends on what the average family unit looks like, which I don't know).
I have a roommate (which really means shared kitchen, separate bedrooms and bathrooms).
New york is a really expensive place to live, the conclusion is that people who are relying on only basic income shouldn't live there. Likewise living alone is expensive. The conclusion is people living only on basic income shouldn't (especially if they are living somewhere which is already well above average pricing wise). Basic income isn't "everyone lives a luxurious life", it's "everyone can afford food, clothes, and a roof over their heads".
Most of the GDP doesn't go to wages, so it's silly to tax wages to fund a UBI. UBIs are only necessary because more and more GDP goes to capital gains, so capital gains, not labor should be the tax base.
> Across the world we really need to start providing free food at a national level-
This is a terrible idea in my opinion, because you are going to end up subsidizing population growth in areas that aren't naturally capable of supporting that number of people. Thus you'll create a never-ending dependency on free food, which will result in even more human suffering when the free food inevitably goes away for some reason.
> This is a terrible idea in my opinion, because you are going to end up subsidizing population growth in areas that aren't naturally capable of supporting that number of people.
Ethically, this is a really frightening argument. Same argument with different words: We have to have people hungering to death to provide a disincentive for population growth.
Besides, food availability doesn't really affect population growth (upwards of a certain lower bound, of course). The most effective way to lower birthrates is readily available female education.
>Ethically, this is a really frightening argument. Same argument with different words: We have to have people hungering to death to provide a disincentive for population growth.
Not to endorse GP's point, but people move to places with income / food before they start to starve. Like, this scenario plays out a million times a day with old ladies that put a bunch of cat food outside their house, after a couple decades there's 10x as many cats living in a 100 metre radius and the lady dies and then shortly after all the cats die too, of hunger or killed by the municipality. With no old lady to begin with the cats wouldn't have starved, they'd just spread out over a larger area so that they don't have to compete over other sources of food like vermin or trash.
Your analogy is flawed. Or you consider that some people in this world live like stray cats, which is highly insulting.
People who have lots of children usually don't know how to have fewer plus they fear that many of their children will die before adulthood. They also rely on their children to be their "retirement fund". All these aspects are changing across the world.
You have to appease selection pressures. They are facets of reality. You can do it in ways that doesn't involve suffering, or you can allow a natural solution to take hold.
Especially lower child mortality rates. When people are reasonably confident of seeing all of their children grow to adulthood, they just have fewer of them.
I'm sorry but this is just incorrect. Education, specifically the education rates of women, is the leading indicator... all other correlations are merely side effects of this.
I would love to see some research touching upon the finer points of this, I've always assumed child mortality was the leading factor. The education thing I think might be some causal reversal, women have time to study because they have less children to take care of. She can study (as well as invest in daycare) because she is more wealthy? This is just armchair theorizing, haven't bothered to look it up.
We've successfully fought population growth in some areas to the point that we are now making sure to teach folks what to do if they want to have children.
It seems to me that the prudent thing to do would be to extend this stuff to those areas. These things include better sanitation and medical care to lower mortality rates - especially among children - and making sure comprehensive sex education and contraception is both readily available and used.
Assuming free food is actually free (to the providers as well as the consumers) is this bad? Humans are a resource, think of us like a lottery. 99% of us may not be that commercially valuable but the other 1% pay it off.
This is one potential post-scarcity future: Big corporations sponsor whole villages, just on the off chance that a genius is born to that population who will then work for the corporation.
Yuck. In that future, the genius born into that village will have to work for that corporation, by a contract that his/her parents signed. Alternately, the genius will be raised with a sense of being morally obligated to work for that corporation. This is pretty close to dystopian nightmare stuff.
The dystopian nightmare novel probably ends up with the genius resenting their pre-destined career choice and taking out revenge on the corporation in question though ;-)
Unlike the many non-geniuses born over many centuries whose career choices were pre-determined by the social status of the family they grew up in, and the fact neither they nor [later] their parents would have anything to eat if they left the village to seek their fortune elsewhere...
Yeah, if done the wrong way it would be way too slave-y. Maybe instead of the corporation sponsoring the village up front, it could fund some aspect of the village as part of the deal if it hires someone from the village. Basically like an extension of the way health cover works in the U.S. but for the village rather than just the immediate family.
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.
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.
Seriously? Tesla, Mercedes, BMW, and Uber are all aiming for "a year or so". Volkswagen and Volvo seem to be about a year behind that. Don't get me wrong, I think there are significant challenges to overcome, but this "self-driving is always 20 years away" view doesn't mesh with most credible projections.
The automotive industry is only one piece of the puzzle. And narrowrail disagrees (as do I) that the change will happen in 5 years. That's less than the average age of all vehicles being used!
Taxis are replaced roughly every two years because they are driven so hard. Passenger vehicles changing to autonomous won't affect jobs, but taxis going autonomous will.
By 2050, we'll have AI Luddites, who'll be able to predict that this time, no really this time for real you guys, automation is going to put everybody out of work and crash the economy.
Or, instead of having a grand people's subsidized agricultural regulatory capture program, we could just recognize that the open food market has made food so inexpensive and plentiful that anyone in the free world can already afford to eat.
> it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous
It's this kind of ignorance that makes me not want some bureaucrat deciding what everyone eats and making me pay for it.
As an aside, did you see the article posted here yesterday about how the FDA just redacted their long-standing advice about cholesterol? The government is operating almost as ascientifically as the general public, making laws and declarations based on extremely weak predictions.
> Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.
We'll also remove one of the biggest cost centers in food production, so feeding unemployed people will be, remarkably, even easier and we still won't need a state-controlled feeding apparatus.
> If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves
No one in the first world needs to struggle to eat. Eating healthy is dirt cheap; many people just don't know how to do it. Instead of bringing back soviet bread lines, we could just teach people practical stuff like how to eat healthily and affordably.
> As an aside, did you see the article posted here yesterday about how the FDA just redacted their long-standing advice about cholesterol? The government is operating almost as ascientifically as the general public, making laws and declarations based on extremely weak predictions.
No kidding. I remember the "old" Food Pyramid. For decades, you saw that everywhere - in school, doctors' offices, wherever. "8-10 servings a day of bread, pasta, rice, corn, cereal. Carbs carbs carbs! Fats are the enemy!"
And now, it's "oh, maybe that wasn't such good advice for everybody, hm, okay....but you can totally trust our New Food Pyramid! Yay!"
The fallacies around dietary guidelines have been known to the scientific community for over 15 years at least. I read that article when it was in the original issue and I was dumbfounded by the slapdash way nutrition guidelines are established with minimal proof.
When I was in elementary school around 15 years ago and we covered nutrition, I remembered being very confused one year when our teacher was outright and honest about the ACTUAL literature on healthy eating, and then taught us the completely contradictory food pyramid after because she was required to.
Yep, it's amazing how long things like that go on. Of course, when the objective is "establish guidelines for the One Best Way to Eat", it's sort of a futile venture from the start.
I think you would still have an issue because people still have to afford to eat. That implies some sort of barrier to entry to eating.
Half of all food in the US is thrown away. We don't have a food production problem, we have a resource allocation problem. Humans are notoriously bad at resource allocation.
Well, most of that food waste is at the consumer/household level. The distribution chain up to that point wastes very little (indeed, when it comes to things like meat scraps and produce trimmings, it's almost too thrifty.) A big part of this consumer waste is because food is cheap enough to not eat all of. So, do we make it more expensive to encourage less waste? It's an inherently hard problem.
I agree, a lot of waste is on households. However, I used to work at the nations largest grocery chain (surprise, not Walmart) and food waste was rampant... particularly in the bakery and produce department. Food that was a little off date was thrown away rather than given to local shelters due to the liability. This happened every day.
Right, but that's not due to what the chain wanted to do, but due to liability. Allow people to waive liability claims for past-due food, and this problem mostly goes away.
I remember working in a produce warehouse, and due to some clever particularities of our non-profit status, we were allowed to give away surplus produce to employees with no liability. I don't think we ever threw out anything except old bananas; it all got taken home.
A problem with this is that government intervention/subsidies competes directly with local businesses and farmers and they won't be able to compete.
This will lead to a situation where once you start giving them food, you won't be able to stop or it will devastate the economy and people will starve.
It's better to give local businesses and farmers the tools and knowledge to grow the food instead. This way, they won't be completely dependent on another nation for survival.
Many of these poor countries have governments that rule with an iron fist and make it nearly impossible for anyone to thrive. This problem needs to be fixed first, or all of our other ideas will only end up hurting them in the long run.
Four years ago Google said they would have a driverless car for sale in 3-5 years. That means we'll see it any day now, right? Probably not. What makes you think the next five years will be any different?
Nuclear fusion is always 20 years away and self driving cars are always 5 years away. I don't see that trend stopping any time soon.
> we'll have taxi drivers and hauliers without jobs. Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.
In the US, truck drivers account for about 1% of the workforce, and there are only ~200,000 taxi drivers in total. Even if the employment rate goes up by several percentage points, it will still be below periods in the past. Serious problem seems a little overdramatic. Worse storms have been weathered.
"Four years ago Google said they would have a driverless car for sale in 3-5 years."
This is a side tangent, but do you have a source for that? I'm only curious because it has seemed to me most makers of autonomous vehicles, and in particular google, were overly cautious with their estimates and have been repeatedly beating them.
>(you can only get so big eating potatoes, broccoli and meat, it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous).
That's about as handwavingly ignorant as the government nutritional guidelines. You can get as big as you want eating potatoes, broccoli, and meat if you eat enough of it. Likewise you can remain perfectly thin eating only processed food. Portion control and learning how well your body reacts and processes different foods is the best we can tell so far.
Foods high in protein and fat cause you to self-regulate due to feeling more satiated than consuming foods high in sugars and starches. You will never get fat on broccoli.
This is how a ketogenic diet works (high fat, moderate protein, low/no carbs). It is ridiculously effective.
Yes, I'm aware of what a keto diet is. OP never said anything about keto, and you happily skipped over the first item in his list (potatoes) just so you could cram in a spiel about keto.
Edit: Just as a follow-up I seriously doubt we could feed the entire world if we all adopted a keto diet. Carbs are cheap.
Read up on Resistant Starch; nutritionally potatoes can behave more like soluble fiber (eg: indigestible) than they do with wheat and sugar based carbs. Besides not getting digested and turned into glucose, they're also very satiating. That makes it difficult to consume enough of them to exceed your caloric needs.
> Edit: Just as a follow-up I seriously doubt we could feed the entire world if we all adopted a keto diet. Carbs are cheap.
So maybe we need to spend more on agriculture subsidizing healthy foods instead of funding the wrong agriculture subsidies that increase healthcare spending?
And yes, I take every opportunity when its relevant to mention a healthy diet.
>And yes, I take every opportunity when its relevant to mention a healthy diet.
Potentially healthy diet. I don't mean to be pedantic here, and as someone who has adopted a keto diet I think it's far better than the standard american diet. Clearly it stops obesity, we know the body doesn't synthesize fat if there aren't any carbs. But the same thing can be accomplished with some exercise and portion control. Still from mine and others experience it seems to help with issues like concentration and constant fatigue.
But at the end of the day we don't completely know the effects of keto long-term, the same as we didn't really know the effects of a high carb diet long-term, especially in terms of overconsumption. Overconsumption of carbs will definitely lead to obesity and health problems, but it's possible that long-term overconsumption of fats/proteins may have their own effects (though not obesity). We also largely don't know what effects a keto diet will have on childhood development, perhaps there are parts of the brain or body that don't develop as well without a moderate amount of carbs in the diet.
We do know people have adopted keto long-term without any apparent issues (those who suffer from certain types of seizures), but it hasn't been adopted on a large enough scale over time to see the effects on a population like we have from the large scale adoption of high carb diets.
I think there's too much going on between genetics, gut biomes, and lifestyle to really say keto is a healthy diet for everyone. Those promoting keto should be cognizant of our deficiencies in knowledge while still promoting the benefits.
tl;dr IMO it's too early to flat out say keto is a healthy diet, especially when extrapolating that statement to the entire population (though I don't think you were).
A "free stuff" is incompatible with unlimited fertility. The bargain has to be that the necessities of life are provided only if you agree to limit yourself to replacement fertility. If we allow unlimited fertility, then no matter the starting conditions, any group that breeds faster than the rest will come to dominate the whole population.
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).
The article explicitly mentions liberalism (democracy) as a reason famine is becoming far less frequent, so the fact that the world's leading communist dictatorship is threatened with famine doesn't contradict the article at all.
Or perhaps you are one of those cynical people who think all forms of government are equally bad.
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!"
They have different goals such as enjoying power and raping young girls. Do you really think that other autocrats and oligarchs get to do things like rape with impunity? Maybe some of them. You are projecting your own tastes and ideas onto people with orders of magnitude more power and money than you will ever have.
I guess so. But they're not even actually that good at being dictators. Even a solely power-maximizing autocrat should realize what does and does not work economically. It's like Venezuela - their incompetence means that their influence is limited and their eventual downfall made more likely.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
You've repeatedly broken HN's civility rule in this thread. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that. Instead, please read the following and take extra care to remain civil when commenting here.
Now that's fair, but I disagree. Some of the fastest growing countries have very high populations (like India), and it makes the stagnant growth of some Nordic countries mathematically insignificant. I am personally skeptical that the largest countries will all see sustainable birth rates in the next few decades, which is when, by conservative projections, population will again start to rival global food production.
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.
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.
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.
> In 1987, .... We reached a simple conclusion: When farmers could bring foodstuffs to points of sale — when the roads were clear of army checkpoints, when markets were held at night to reduce the risk of being bombed — the local economy worked efficiently enough. With markets in operation, the production of local crops increased, and food prices fell to levels people could afford.
> Ending famine required ending fighting.
Seems capitalism improved things once the government got around to providing basic security.
To describe Ethiopia's economic system as capitalistic is at best naive... but even if you were correct then given the signs of a burgeoning crisis one could just as easily say that said capitalism is largely failing there.
Regardless, the paragraph you quoted merely states that once people were once again free to trade their goods for food without being threatened with death more people got fed. Capitalism has literally nothing to do with that, people have been trading goods for foodstuffs for millennia. When they say "markets" they're not talking about the fever dreams of a U Chicago professor, they mean physical locations where goods are bought and sold which are just as much a condition of feudalism as they are capitalism.
A communist society where the government owns all the means of production and everyone gets a $60,000 UBI can still use markets to allocate resources for production.
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.
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.
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.
You mention capitalism, but I know plenty of people in Venezuela hungry and it is because of the government. From the article "Politics creates famine, and politics can stop it".
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.
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-e...
[1]: http://www.thedenanproject.org/