Easy there OP, do you think food is some kind of "human right" or something? Before you know it, people will be saying housing is too.
In 2021, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that everyone has a right to food and the UN should work to eliminate world hunger. It passed 186 for and 2 against. The two countries that disagreed were the United States and Isreal.
Not to defend them, but that only makes them less hypocritical than others. Talk (and UN resolutions) are cheap, and most countries don't guarantee food or shelter in practice. Finland is the only one that comes to mind as actually achieving this.
Edit: perhaps the downvoters would like to prove me wrong by providing their own examples?
There is a very logical progression of basic human needs. Without oxygen, a human will die in less than an hour. We need clean breathable air. Without water, a human a will die in less than a month. We need clean drinkable water. Without food a human will die in less than a year. Shelter is trickier because people can die of exposure and hypothermia in a matter of hours, but may be able to survive without it.
- Air for profit
- Water for profit <- This exists
- Food for profit <- We are here
- Shelter for profit
Minor correction: You're technically right, but you will die in less than a week without water and less than a month without food.
There is an issue with that approach.
When they say free speech is a right, life is a right, freedom of conscience is a right and so on, they mean that others can't take away from you what's already yours. Our world, eh, is still that bad that this requires clarification and most people disagree with some or all of these.
I'd say in the situation where there are no white spots on the map, and growing food requires land and other such resources, and those have already been shared, - yes, these are rights. But a different kind by different logic.
A bit like the first part is reactive, while the second part is active. I'm bad with words.
During the Great Depression the federal government literally paid farmers to not harvest crops because allowing that much food to be produced would dilute the market and bring down crop prices.
During the Great Depression.
A time when people were starving and there were virtually no forms of welfare.
When millions were thrust into poverty for reasons entirely out of their control.
The federal government paid farmers to create less food to protect profit margins.
Nowadays they largely pay for the food and give it to to people. We got gallons of eggs at one point from that.
Farmers have bills to pay, too. If the price of growing food doesn't cover the cost to make it they'll go out of business. Then there will be one less farm to grow food. If there's no farms and we're totally reliant on imports, that's a strategic weakness.
It's the same reason we prop up carmakers when they go out of business: Manufacturing capacity is a strategic asset just like farmland.
"During the Great Depression" could have been Hoover or Roosevelt.
It was FDR
Are you sure you aren't thinking of crop rotation? Have 4 fields, have one fallow every 4 years to recharge the soil. Keep farming without doing so causes the topsoil to blow and that caused the great dustbowl which preceded the great depression.
The reasons behind it are quite simple:
- Food spoils very quickly, so mostly if you don't consume it locally you need to quickly export which is quite expensive. Very often it's simply cheaper to utilize it for example as fertilizer.
- Storing food is costly.
- The best option would be not to produce an excess of food but 1) demand is hard to predict 2) crops output is hard to predict 3) for legal reasons like contractual obligations it's better to produce more than less.
- Current markets are hardly free: see https://www.history.com/news/government-cheese-dairy-farmers-reagan
In today's world every person who starves, who does without, who suffers unnecessarily..
Does so only because someone wants it so . Not because there is not enough
It was rather radicalizing finding out that the world makes three times as many calories per person than is necessary to feed every person on this planet, but because we're idiots living in a class society in the year 12024 HE, luxury restaurants regularly dump slightly subprime ingredients in the trash while thousands starve.
Does this statistic include calories fed to livestock or not?
This specifically talks about food.
According to health.com, the average person needs between 1600 to 3000 kilocalories a day depending on sex and age.
According to Our World In Data, even Africa, the continent with the least food reserves, has enough to give everyone roughly 2500 kcal, which ought to be more or less enough given how people with higher and lower caloric needs balance out. Seeing as how developed countries have more than enough, if a portion of that went to Africa and Asia, everyone could eat.
Calories are a rough measure, and according to Bahadur et al. we are overproducing grains but underproducing fruits, but the wretched of the Earth and the prisoners of starvation are not even getting that grain.
Edit: I have been informed that "calories" in nutrition are in fact "large-C calories", A.K.A. kilocalories. On the other hand, the OWiD numbers, which document the number of kcal available per day, still suggest that we have enough to feed everyone. I have altered the comment accordingly.
I seriously encourage everyone to read this book, even if you read it back in school and found it boring. It's incredibly topical to this day.
I also just read In Dubious Battle for the first time and recommend it. A great illustration on why it's so hard to get together and organize when it seems like it should be easy.
I seriously encourage everyone to read this book, even if you read it back in school and found it boring. It’s incredibly topical to this day.
I haven't. But I may at some point.
My English teacher would look at me with that demonizing look because I knew how economics work and wanted some explanation of various leftist views with logic in it, not that emotion of hate and envy and indignation and "you stupid capitalism bad meat good stick bad strawberry good mushroom strange", it got especially absurd when I got accused of not watching TV as if that made me dumber. Without such explanations being given, I naturally felt closer towards anarcho-capitalism, because I love freedom and the logic of economics and morals known to me supported it. And they also very clearly didn't love freedom (it takes away the feeling of authority of a certain kind of cowardly people), so I would be kinda hated.
Bad memories, in short.
I wrote a long clumsy text, tldr - one should be very careful with regulations, since in some sense they are what led us here. Strong anti-monopoly regulations - yes, splitting big companies and even franchises - yes, corporate death penalty - yes, reforming (or abolishing) patent and trademark and IP laws - yes, labor regulations - yes, some quality control (not selling "dairy products" completely from palm oil or something) - yes. But any regulatory apparatus is a target for bribes and regulations working in the opposite direction.
You win Lemmy today. Yesterday? I need to read this book.
Existence is pain.
Schopenhauer was right even before the internet came :-)
It, unfortunately, is an efficient distribution of labor, at least relative to other systems. Not because wasting food for profit isn't fucking heinous, but because the mobility of investor capital and responsiveness of market prices is less inefficient than reciprocal economies or central planning.
However, we are at a point in human society where raw efficiency is no longer the bottleneck for our quality of life. Capitalism was an ugly solution to a real problem, but we can probably bid it farewell at this point, if only we can dislodge the elites who benefit from perpetuating it.
The owner class will never willingly give up power, their actions are why capitalism is a religion.
It, unfortunately, is an efficient distribution of labor
Uh... No. I feel like half the fucking western world works on finance, which is quite literally just maximizing the revalorization of capital for the few at the top. Besides, how can be the only system in history to have millions of people unemployed, be efficient at distributing labor?
responsiveness of market prices is less inefficient than reciprocal economies or central planning
This is empirically false. You can't provide a scientific source for this because it's wrong. Central planning is the most efficient tool, that's why Amazon and Walmart (extremely centrally planned systems which have power to control their supply chains at will) systematically outcompete all other businesses. Amazon doesn't outcompete other stores being "a competitive market of warehouses", it's a digitalised, centrally-planned behemoth that can so much as smell when a customer is going to conceive making a purchase, and generate all the immediate responses in the supply chain from manufacturing to distribution to optimise the whole thing.
If you wanna talk about countries, please explain how the transition from planned economies to free markets plunged the entirety of Eastern Europe into a deep crisis that killed millions and ruined millions more of lives, to the point of many countries like Belarus, Russia or Ukraine not really having recovered from the impact in 30+ years. So much for the efficiency of capitalism, amirite? A centrally planned economy is what brought the USSR from being a poor, backwards-ass agrarian country in 1917, to defeating the Nazis and being the second power of the world by the 60s.
Postcapitalist systems can use market prices and, in principle, be Pareto optimal on non-institutionally described states of affair
As I said, we can probably bid capitalism farewell at this point.
Capitalism was an ugly solution to a real problem
Not really, though. I mean, if you want to stick to looking at the last 2000 years, we still have cities that were fed in a feudal rather than capitalist system. Not that those systems were better or more efficient mobilizing labor, but the problem you're referring to wasn't really there.
That's not to mention at least several examples in the anthropological and archaeological record of large scale societies that did not rely on what we define as capitalism to feed their people.
I think it's a pretty crazy oversimplification to say capitalism just popped up as a solution to a problem.
Not really, though. I mean, if you want to stick to looking at the last 2000 years, we still have cities that were fed in a feudal rather than capitalist system. Not that those systems were better or more efficient mobilizing labor, but the problem you’re referring to wasn’t really there.
Feudal societies are notably horrendous at efficient resource distribution, and don't get me started on the weird fetishization of reciprocity economies.
There's a reason that capitalist economies exploded in growth once the main features of modern capitalism took root, and it sure as shit ain't because capitalists are just that eager to contribute to the national good.
That’s not to mention at least several examples in the anthropological and archaeological record of large scale societies that did not rely on what we define as capitalism to feed their people.
And those societies, much like any pre-modern societies, did not feed their people particularly reliably. Notably, when the Roman Empire united the Mediterranean under a unified proto-capitalist market, famine conditions drastically reduced (though very much were not completely eliminated, mind you). Not because the Roman Empire was particularly concerned about the plight of the poor - it very much was not. But because market economies and capitalist (or proto-capitalist) investment behaviors can redirect excess resources from Region A, to Region B which lacks them, with astounding speed and responsiveness, and with minimal additional labor or material investment (at least compared to alternative methods).
I think it’s a pretty crazy oversimplification to say capitalism just popped up as a solution to a problem.
The problem was inefficient methods of resource distribution. Capitalism was the solution. Modern technology, both material and organizational, allows us other choices now, but capitalism didn't spread because it was just the chic aesthetic of the time. Capitalism spread because it is significantly more efficient than feudal or guild/mercantilist economies.
Damn it,
BobbyCapitalism.Couldve made the point just as well without the nekkid blue bobby
That goes beyond capitalism. People are just selfish. The hoarding of wealth was a thing way before capitalism. I think the left sort of shoots itself in the foot by obsessing over capitalism and ignoring the much deeper cause of a lot of societal ills. Being evil is part of human nature, just as much as being benevolent is.
Not really.
There have been extensive sociological studies over this. Condition in a capitalist society and the promotion of the “homo economicus” model continually reinforces “greediness” and leads to people in capitalist societies being far “greedier” on average.
It isn’t a natural thing, it is conditioned. Obviously everyone is greedy to an extent. But in anthropological examinations of different forms of societies, altruism scored far higher than greediness in non-capitalistic societies.
Kate Raworth, Oxford Economist, wrote an excellent chapter about this in her book called “doughnut economics”. The chapter is “Nurture Human Nature”.
The view that all humans are greedy and rational was promoted by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and is the precursing foundation of capitalism. But modern economics have rejected this view as it has been proven to be inaccurate, and increasingly rely on theoretical models built within behavioural economics.
Of all the meme images to use, Dr Manhattan would know that it isn't Capitalism manufacturing scarcity, Capitalism is just indifferent to scarcity.
What has the MTV done to you, boy?
Yeah I don't think talking about food production and distribution is a good method to promote socialism given how many people starved in socialist countries.
Seems to me this would be a subject socialists would want to avoid.
Critical of capitalism ≠ Socialist
There’s a lot of nuance you’re missing out on in this simplistic statement.
I obviously oppose any authoritarian regime regardless of the economic system.
The post doesn't mention socialism at all.
Which countries?
All hunger in the origins communist countries happened in preindustrial societies. Once agriculture was mechanised, hunger disappeared forever in USSR/China (countries that I assume you refer to). That's not the case in industrialized capitalist countries or their colonies. To quote Chomsky:
"in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed … experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone"
Not quite true. Lysenkoism was a completely unforced error all on its own whose failures couldn't have been conquered by more tractors, but that was ultimately a failing of authoritarianism, not socialism. A mad king or fascist dictator whose advisors feared to tell him the truth, that his ideas were shit and didn't work, would have resulted in the same thing.
Except from gulags where they were starving to death. I come from the " behind the iron curtain" countries. Gulags are not myths and the prisoners not punished with death pebalty should be fed with at least minimal provisions making them able to survive ( I am not against either death penalty or work in prisons )
