The idiom of "doesn't grow on trees" as a metaphor for scarcity falls apart when you realize that food does grow on trees yet is still very scarce. - eviltoast

Extremely not-fun fact: collectively, humanity currently produces more than enough food for every person. But a huge part of it is either wasted or inaccessible by people that need them, which usually results in them not going to anyone and being wasted, which is why we still have food scarcity.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
    11·
    1 year ago

    If the world economic system is as you claim, how is it that people in the southern hemisphere are getting steadily more wealthy?

    The problem with people who criticize the free market is they’re so focused on distribution they don’t think about production. The answer is that as wealth is funneled north it is also generated at an even higher rate resulting in all humanity getting more wealthy as a result of the system that “concentrates” wealth.

    Like if I had air in a bottle and concentrated it all to one corner, that would result in no air everywhere else.

    But if I were to create an incredibly sense section of air while increasing the density of air throughout the bottle, it would be misleading to use the word “concentrate” for the action generating that air distribution.

    As for big rich countries causing conflict I agree 100%. In fact as far as I know al qaida isn’t causing nearly as much hunger as the House of Saud, which is the richest organization in human history.

    And I’m not talking about “there’s war and that makes the market break down” as the men with guns thing. I’m talking about “armies are actively blockading food”.

    So “poorly distributed” is really better described as “actively withheld”. It’s like putting a plastic bag over a prisoner’s head then claiming their suffocation was due to “poor distribution of air”, then trying to criticize the building’s HVAC system.

    There’s no HVAC system in the world that can solve the problem of a person being suffocated by a plastic bag, and there’s no economic system in the world that can solve the problem of armies actively blockading food from populations. That’s not an indication the economic system has failed; it’s an indication the political system has failed.