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.
This fact makes me viscerally angry
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?
Cuba pretty much manages to eliminate hunger and homelessness, as did the USSR and the entire soviet block
I'm sorry if you truly believe that.
I'm sorry you haven't read a single article with reliable numbers and statistics, and rely on bullshit anti-communist propaganda.
Want some sources on that? Go read "Human rights in the soviet union" by Albert Szymanski, it's an extremely well-sourced book with hundreds of references. Please tell me how many homeless people there were in a country that outlawed unemployment and where housing costed to the average family 3-5% of the monthly income. Please tell me how there could be hungry people in the USSR when the agricultural output of contemporary Russia still hasn't reached the levels of Soviet Russia, and food prices were maintained basically constant since 1940 to 1980.
Hmm, that's weird, why would you specifically pick 1940 as your starting date? I wonder if anything incredibly bad happened in the 30s?
Genius, the USSR was a preindustrial society before the 40s, there were quite literally no tractors on the fields, and the former Russian Empire that they had just barely left behind had 10 famines a century. Before the advent of industrialization of agriculture, pesticides, fertilizers and tractors, humans would go through easily 3 famines throughout their lives, more so in hard to farm areas like the fucking cold Russia. You quite literally can't eliminate famine until you industrialize, but once they did, they eliminated hunger everywhere they had influence... while imperial England kept murdering Indians of hunger by the millions by not industrializing their country (like Soviets did in Central Asia)
And at what cost? 30 years after the regime was changed, these countries are still significantly behind those who were capitalist in pretty much every single aspect.
You are correct that homelessness way tackled but hunger not at all. Take a look at Romania during Soviet era...
So whilst one problem was solved, many, many new arose. We didn't have oranges (and other foreign goods) , considering our wages, everything was super expensive and personal growth was pretty much impossible - unless you became a member of the communist party, of course.
30 years after the regime was changed, these countries are still significantly behind those who were capitalist
How is that the fault of communism? The fact that half of Eastern-European countries have barely grown since the 90s is precisely the fault of capitalism at failing to raise the living standards and economies of those countries at rates similar to what communism achieved, except possibly in Poland and Czech Republic which have received capital investment in industry (ofc not high tech because that would compete against Germany) and grow at the expense of other countries through unequal exchange by relying on the import of cheap agricultural produce and raw materials.
I don't know much of Romania, but how can you blame communism for the fail of the last 30 years of capitalism?
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.
Minor correction: You're technically right, but you will die in less than a week without water and less than a month without food.
The reasons behind it are quite simple:
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
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.
I knew how economics work
you mean you knew that it is a system of myth making by the preistly class, with no predictive power?
I naturally felt closer towards anarcho-capitalism, because I love freedom and the logic of economics
oh. you're just a religious fanatic.
you mean you knew that it is a system of myth making by the preistly class, with no predictive power?
Basic laws of supply and demand and subjective equivalence and so on work and have predictive power.
oh. you’re just a religious fantastic.
Where I live socialists are like US Republicans in, well, US. You may disagree or agree or play some emotion like you just did, thinking that makes for an argument, this doesn't change the fact that you will go fuck yourself.
You present yourself as above emotional displays, then tell a stranger to go fuck themselves over some mildly worded casual internet debate, presumptivly displaying your anger at the inconsequential judgement of your words.
Moreover, you reference "basic laws of supply and demand", as if reciting words without adding any substance to your argument proves your point and displays your intellect/knowledge. Well, it certainly does one of those things. Probably not in the way you think it does.
The point I'm making is; you are clearly lacking in self-awareness, which is understandable given that you seem to be fresh out of high school (you reference English class, which is something typically only done by kids/young adults). You may want to work on your critical thinking skills and your ability to formulate logically structured arguments if you want to engage in good faith debate while presenting yourself as some sort of expert. Just a suggestion. Take it or leave it.
You win Lemmy today. Yesterday? I need to read this book.
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.
Small nitpick: When we talk about calories in food we actually mean kcal
When I was into gym and building muscle mass this confused the hell out of me at first.
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.
Of course. Hence "dislodge" rather than "ask nicely".
I tend to lean more towards 'consume' and 'mulch', myself. Though I understand why others would find that distasteful.
Has to happen every few hundred years it seems, slave uprisings. When the owner class gets too fat and cruel towards the hands that make their wealth, those hands have to pick up some stones sometimes to remind them why noblesse oblige was once not considered optional.
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
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.
Damn it, ~~Bobby~~ Capitalism.
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?
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