Musings
First, a new[1] word for the day: Omniism, the belief that everything has a meaning and the opposite of nihilism. Also, it has a double i; how cool is that?
[1]new as in we made it up. I doubt it is a "real" word.
In a more serious vain, I was thinking about world hunger, because there were posters about it. One of the things the poster said was that there is sufficient food production capability to feed everyone on Earth. Now I've heard this before and my usual response is, so the problem isn't in production but in distribution: it's a logistics problem. But tonight, I thought, "well if this is a logistics problem, how would we go about solving it?" and I came up with the following plan.
If it is too expensive to move food from production centers to hungry people, logistically the solution is to move the people. This would be a one time cost, easily less than the cost of shipping food the same distance of any reasonable length of time. Even if you factor in the cost of building housing, moving people is a cheaper solution than moving food. And there is also the fact that most people can help produce food with proper training, so the local labor cost of producing the food would be offset by the workforce productivity of the moved people.
I don't believe this plan could ever work, and to make it a bit clearer why, let me present with one specific hypothetical implementation of it. Consider a parcel of land, probably somewhere the Midwest, that the government is currently paying farmers not to grow crops on. The government states that it will no longer paying for the field to lie fallow, but will instead buy any food produced from it for the same price. Collect donations from charitable individuals and organizations, to buy some land near this now food producing land, construct cheap pre-fab housing on it, and get plane tickets for hungry people, probably from Africa or India, to come live and eat, and work in providing say construction services for the next set of housing. Politically, I just can't see this happening. I see farmers screaming about immigrants, and hungry folks, saying in some foriegn language, "you want me to move... where?!?". I see legislators saying, "it would be bad for the economy if we gave away food instead of paying people to not grow it".
Which suggest to me, that the problem here isn't logistics at all, but actually human nature, which is a much more sticky problem. Attempts to change human nature have generally been unsuccessful, and good intended policies that ignore or deny human nature tend to turn out rather badly. And we humans really don't know all that much about human nature or how to work with it to produce beneficial results all around. Hmmm... I think further research is warranted, preferably by someone less distractable than me.
[1]new as in we made it up. I doubt it is a "real" word.
In a more serious vain, I was thinking about world hunger, because there were posters about it. One of the things the poster said was that there is sufficient food production capability to feed everyone on Earth. Now I've heard this before and my usual response is, so the problem isn't in production but in distribution: it's a logistics problem. But tonight, I thought, "well if this is a logistics problem, how would we go about solving it?" and I came up with the following plan.
If it is too expensive to move food from production centers to hungry people, logistically the solution is to move the people. This would be a one time cost, easily less than the cost of shipping food the same distance of any reasonable length of time. Even if you factor in the cost of building housing, moving people is a cheaper solution than moving food. And there is also the fact that most people can help produce food with proper training, so the local labor cost of producing the food would be offset by the workforce productivity of the moved people.
I don't believe this plan could ever work, and to make it a bit clearer why, let me present with one specific hypothetical implementation of it. Consider a parcel of land, probably somewhere the Midwest, that the government is currently paying farmers not to grow crops on. The government states that it will no longer paying for the field to lie fallow, but will instead buy any food produced from it for the same price. Collect donations from charitable individuals and organizations, to buy some land near this now food producing land, construct cheap pre-fab housing on it, and get plane tickets for hungry people, probably from Africa or India, to come live and eat, and work in providing say construction services for the next set of housing. Politically, I just can't see this happening. I see farmers screaming about immigrants, and hungry folks, saying in some foriegn language, "you want me to move... where?!?". I see legislators saying, "it would be bad for the economy if we gave away food instead of paying people to not grow it".
Which suggest to me, that the problem here isn't logistics at all, but actually human nature, which is a much more sticky problem. Attempts to change human nature have generally been unsuccessful, and good intended policies that ignore or deny human nature tend to turn out rather badly. And we humans really don't know all that much about human nature or how to work with it to produce beneficial results all around. Hmmm... I think further research is warranted, preferably by someone less distractable than me.