Comments | ultimatepsi: Musings

ultimatepsi

Musings

Nov 05, 2007 22:23

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.

( cut for discussion of world hunger and human nature )

thoughts, theory, omniism, world hunger isn't just logistics, words

Comments 19

perpetualponder November 6 2007, 14:55:36 UTC

Your solution assumes that if you feed the hungry, there won't be any hungry any more. This is of course true in the short term, but the number of people in the world is not a fixed quantity. Feeding the hungry would only eliminate hunger if you also solved the problem of runaway population growth.

ultimatepsi November 6 2007, 16:16:56 UTC

This is true. Note, that my "solution" isn't actually a solution, it's a thought experiment. Also, there is significant evidence that wealthier people have fewer children, so increasing base line wealth is likely to reduce population growth.

East Africa, for example... happyfunpaul November 7 2007, 02:09:13 UTC

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.

Actually, it's usually a politics problem. A great many of the starving people live in places where the local "authorities" (government, or warlords, or whomever) don't actually want to get food to the hungry, because the starving folks are a hated group and/or they would support rivals and/or controlling the food supply is how those in power maintain their power and/or those in power just don't care).

I see, of course, that your discussion gets political also; I'm just opining that it's an intrinsically political problem from the start.

amalcon November 8 2007, 02:01:26 UTC

There's actually another potential solution -- more of a compromise, as it were. The point of moving the people is to get the people and the farms together: therefore, moving the farms will also work. This turns it from moving people, to moving equipment and supplies -- that's a lot more plausible on the face of it, though it will tend to be somewhere in between the two extremes in terms of cost ( ... )