To call it gluttony is insulting to those who work 50+ hours a week, can barely get by, and yet are still overweight. Food is not a significant part of cost of living in the US, especially if you eat poorly. The paradox is that eating poorly actually ends up being gluttonous if we're looking at it from a health standpoint.
But many of the people you're insulting do not have the luxury of eating healthy meals and going for 30 minute runs every other day.
Assuming that the people who are food insecure are also poor (i.e., below the US poverty line), they do not work 50+ hours/week. 80% of the poor don't work at all, and are not even looking for work.
Although, good luck finding 50 hours a week of work in this economy.
And that only applies to US citizens. Never mind undocumented immigrants. (Though many do earn minimum wage and pay taxes.) Restaurants will often split low-income workers to avoid either restaurant giving them more than 40 hours a week, so they can avoid overtime and benefits.
...good luck finding 50 hours a week of work in this economy.
First, I cited statistics from 2007, before the economy went down. Second, the statistics show that 80% of the poor are not looking for a job and that only 10% of them work more than 35 hours a week. Third, only 3.5% of the poor want to work more than 35 hours/week but are unable to find work.
Lastly, minimum wage is more or less irrelevant. Only 1.7 million workers (373k of whom were under 19) earned minimum wage or less in 2007. Assuming everyone earning min wage or less is poor [1], that's only 4.5% of the poor.
Also, to respond to a statement you made in your previous post: I work more than 50 hours/week, yet I still manage to find time to exercise and to cook healthy food. (Yesterday: work from 9 to 7, 3 hours of martial arts, dinner, work from 12-1.) If I can do it, why can't the poor?
[1] Teenagers earning min wage, but living in a non-poor household are not counted as part of the poor.
Also, to respond to a statement you made in your previous post: I work more than 50 hours/week, yet I still manage to find time to exercise and to cook healthy food. (Yesterday: work from 9 to 7, 3 hours of martial arts, dinner, work from 12-1.) If I can do it, why can't the poor?
Let me start off by saying that I don't disagree with the statistics you quoted or your interpretation of statistics. I'm only disagreeing with what I quoted.
Cooking healthy food and practicing martial arts both come at a cost. This cost can be a cost in money, in time or effort spent, etc. In my experience, poor people usually can't afford that cost easily.
The monetary cost of running is about $100/year, biking considerably less. As for the cost in time, the average person in the bottom 25% of earnings spends 30 minutes/day more watching TV than the average person in the top 25% (2 hours, 6 minutes total). (No breakdown for "poverty" vs "non-poverty" is given.)
I think the poor could manage some exercise or preparation of healthier food if they wanted to.
Do you care for a family on your own? I'm talking about a specific class of people - primarily unwed single mothers - who do not have time for themselves. Their time is eaten up by making money for their families and caring for them.
Simply making the declarations that poor people don't want to work, and poor people are generally fat, even if true, ignore sizable quantities of people for whom exercise and healthy eating are not feasible.
The original data is mostly government statistics and the original sources are all cited. Are you asserting that heritage lied about the contents of the reports they cite?
Or are you simply saying "people I don't like wrote the report, therefore it must be invalid"?
I'm saying obesity among America's poor is a real problem and there are studies that support that claim that come from somewhere other than a conservative think tank dedicated to keeping the rich rich and keeping the government from helping the poor.
This essay from the right-wing thinktank Heritage Foundation is flawed. It attempts to argue that while food insecurity exists, it isn't a problem; those who suffer from it actually have too much to eat, and just don't know how to eat healthily.
It correctly points out that the USDA doesn't associate "food insecurity" with hunger. However, what it doesn't point out is this was a recent controversial renaming. This Washington Post editorial dissects the "Orwellian" 2006 renaming.
In 2008, nearly 15% of US households experienced "food insecurity." Not only that, but this number explicitly excludes the homeless, as they weren't surveyed. (It may be also the case that it excluded those without phones and little free time, though I have to look more closely.)
The CDC points out many reasons why prisoners of war and others whose food is restricted may end up showing obesity; and that cheaper, lower quality food is high in fat. Those who wish to pursue this further can google for "food insecurity obesity".
That analysis is ridiculous. They begin by explaining that "food insecurity" means periodic reduction in quality and variety of food, then several paragraphs later they're accusing "food insecure" people of going hungry in one part of the month because they gorged in another part of the month.
The reduction in quality and variety is the key to the bad health outcomes of diet anyway. When a daily Big Mac is cheaper and more readily available than a variety of healthy and well-prepared foods, health problems ensue.
One of the greatest ideas in the OPs article was the deal the government made with farmers: we give you affordable access to prime real estate in the city, but in exchange you regularly take your better-quality food into poor neighborhoods that otherwise lack access. Obviously it takes more than just showing up with good food to get people to eat it, but it's a start.
They begin by explaining that "food insecurity" means periodic reduction in quality and variety of food, then several paragraphs later they're accusing "food insecure" people of going hungry in one part of the month because they gorged in another part of the month.
Unless you believe fat people are perpetual motion machines, this is obviously a true statement.
Regarding healthier food, anyone with access to a Big Mac also has access to a "Premium Southwest Salad", or a number of other fairly healthy options. If they choose to eat so many big macs that they get fat, and ignore the "Premium Caesar Salad", that's the very definition of gluttony.
In paragraph two, the article explains that the USDA defines "low food security" as a episodic reduction in the _variety_, not the quantity of food. 5 paragraphs later, the article says these same people are going hungry during parts of the month. Which one is true? They can't both be.
As for "meeting your daily calorie requirements", we are discussing people who are already exceeding them. Such people can either a) consume less and save money or b) consume the same dollar quantity of food, but substitute low calorie items for high calorie items. I.e., a person getting 2500 cals/day who needs 2000 can either go from 5 to 4 big macs + more money, or go from 5 big macs to 4 big macs + 1 salad.
Alright, fair enough. I think the article also conflated the two in service of its hyper-focus on individual responsibility to the exclusion of factors like food accessibility. But it does suggest policies to help people make better-informed choices about their food consumption instead of simply throwing more aid money at them. That sounds reasonable.
Would you agree with the premise that the government has had huge impacts on the quality and variety of food available (I'm talking subsidies of commodity crops here), and therefore shares some of the blame for the fact that the American version of "hungry" is "overweight and under-nourished"?
In response to your question, your post currently has 9 points, and virtually all it offers is an ad-hominem implication (people who are merely interested in this article aren't "critical thinkers", presumably unlike you) and an unsupported claim (a right to food will be disastrous).
Please re-read HN's approach to comments. Not only is the linked article potentially "deeply interesting", your comment appears to be "empty and negative". You could easily fix that by offering a persuasive argument.
Since you are such a critical thinker, care to back that assertion up with any evidence or statistical data? Clearly you've done your research since you are a HN member but for some reason I don't see any links in your post.
At least expand on why you think it would be a disaster. Would it be a disaster like the right to health care? Or a disaster because of changes to our farming system
> Since you are such a critical thinker, care to back that assertion up with any evidence or statistical data? Clearly you've done your research since you are a HN member but for some reason I don't see any links in your post.
Okay, I'll jump in and play. First, you could be a little more civil if you want to stimulate discussion - something like, "Since you are such a critical thinker... but for some reason I don't see any links in your post" is just unnecessary, makes him less likely to respond civilly. You can just ask him why he thanks that way and he'll be more likely to respond. But I'll jump in and give my take if the OP doesn't mind. Here's what he originally said:
> "Making food a right in the US would be a disaster."
Now, after that, you asked for "evidence or statistical data" - the problem is, you can't run controlled experiments on government programs because every nation has different conditions and you can't run and re-run experiments. So, judging whether a new policy would be good governance or bad governance is largely based on looking at historically similar examples and extrapolating that you're likely to get a similar result.
Now, "disaster" is subjective. What's a disaster? You need a criteria for disaster. One criteria could be someone's views of how a government should run, which is somewhat opinion. If he believes larger government would be a disaster, full stop, then there's no discussion - he can say, "This will make the government larger, and that's bad full stop in my eyes." But that's a boring argument, there's really nothing to discuss there, it's just his opinion.
There's much, much more interesting standards to measure disasters by. One would be - "Does the policy fulfill its own stated objectives?"
I think we can agree that if a policy costs money, uses people's time, takes energy away from other areas of concern, and then doesn't even fulfill its own stated objectives, then you can call it a disaster. Actually, you could go further - you could call it an unmitigated disaster - completely and entirely bad.
Now, for evidence and statistical data, I would refer you to the United States' recent track record over the last... well, over the last whatever timeframe you think is relevant. USG's domestic programs are just ridiculously incompetent as of late. Now, if you diagree with this and are seriously open to changing your mind, I might go put in 30 minutes to find statistics and make a case for you. I say if you're open to changing your mind because many people aren't, and I've only been sleeping five hours/night lately while doing crazy amounts of work - and Hacker News is entertaining, but digging through USG reports is less so at my current energy levels.
But if we wanted to go through stats, the first one I'd look for is what percent of funding in government programs goes to admin and what goes to benefits. I forget the number at the federal level, but I remember it's fucking brutal. In California, 80% of benefits and entitlements go to paying administrators and civil servants, not to the people receiving the benefits. On the federal level it's slightly better, but still more than half. IIRC, the complete amounts spent on welfare, benefits, etc, etc came up to something like $20,000 PER PERSON in the USA, and obviously that money ain't getting to the poor people.
Next I'd look at stated objectives on programs and see if there's any measurable gains. Now, if you're really inclined, you can find a ton of killer stats easy to find on USG actively breaking things they were trying to solve. War on Drugs is the easiest with increasing drug and violence rates. Then there's the Clinton-era reduce-executive-compensation law that prompted the shift to stock options and increased executive compensation. Then there's FDA holding off beta blockers from the market 10,000 people per year were dying that they could've saved.
But maybe the two most similar examples I can think of are the food subsidies and the Nixon era nutrition campaigns. The food subsidies in corn wanted to make it affordable for everyone - instead, it led to huge rises of corn syrup in everything and Americans got increasingly more sick, diabetic, and obese as a result.
Second, I'd point at the Nixon recommended daily guidelines that pushed towards simple carbs and away from healthy fats. Which is totally backwards, and also led to declining USA nutrition. Actually, you can look up the talk "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" for all sorts of stats and analysis on how and why that happened and there's lots of stats in there. All sorts of discussion and stats here:
Man, USG quite sucks. What they touch tends to break far more often than not. There's many, many examples of this, and very few examples of significant successes. Especially in terms of making Americans healthier and eating well.
It's very hard to respond to a piece like this - there are some fallacies in the article, but it's such a feel good piece that responding with logic and historical examples is generally unpalatable to people. After reading such a nice story with no downsides, who wants to hear that maybe the author missed some very important points?
Literally every point in the article is not just positive, but overwhelmingly positive. It shows that there are no downsides, no secondary effects, and no one is losing. The author paints beautiful pictures of happy people, like how the program even helps a young military policeman get married and buy a house -
> “It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.
I'm really tempted to just pick and choose my battles and leave this article alone. If I was going to respond, I'd post some history of how measures like this start off viable because they only move the equilibrium a tiny bit, but slowly the bureaucracy and entropy sets in and you've got stuff like the corn-in-frigging-everything effect in the USA. Or certain kinds of food don't get grown, because a rival staple is at half price due to subsidies - but then if a pestilence hits, you've got no backup crop. Or I'd point out that every attempt to nationalize farms in history - literally every single one without except that I know of - has decreased food yields and led to famines (Soviets, Nazis, various empires in states of emergencies all tried to take over farming - it always leads to lower production, because politicians don't actually know much about farming)... and the tendency after some successes with a program like this is to expand it, with many potential dangers.
If I were going to take on this article, despite all the overwhelming positive emotions, I'd point out a statement like this is pure Orwell:
> The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.)
A right to food doesn't mean public handouts? Let me get this straight - the city government gives money and free rent to farmers and businesses and people to fund the program, but that's not necessarily a public handout? WTF?
> It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate.
Can we redefine the "social" in "socialism" to mean you only exchange with your friends who you know when you choose to? Can we redefine the "commune" in "communism" to mean that it's all about letting people in communities make their own decisions?
If I was going to say anything about this article, I'd try to highlight the propaganda and inherent dishonesty - every point is positive. It doesn't acknowledge any downsides. It uses blatant doublespeak - "public handouts don't necessarily have to be public handouts" - it tries to redefine words to leave the opposition without any way to explain they dislike the position.
If I was going to take on this article, I'd point all this out and ask the users here - even ones who believe in progressivism - to please tune out and criticize articles like this, because it's not much better than Fox News. It's dishonest. It's propaganda and designed to mislead people.
But - I'd be crazy to take on this article which is filled with all these positive emotions, so I will refrain from doing so and not make any of those arguments.
Actually, it's different from what the Nazis and Soviets were doing (forcing farmers to make whatever they tell them to), and more like what Vietnam and China do. Their governments deed tracts of land to farmers and say "have at it, you keep most of the profit, but you're contracted to this township or hamlet for x amount of produce. Whatever is leftover you charge whatever you want to whomever you want."
The incentivization of ownership empowered the Chinese agrarian economy out from subsistence or "the starving farmer" to one where the farmer owned the means of production but were sharing profit and produce with the state.
I think similar principles apply here, but on the distribution and marketing side rather than the production side. The Belo gov't allots public space for private vending of produce direct from the farm, saving the middleman markups associated. They also have the ABC markets that the farmers bid on for selling their goods at prices set by the state. I'm also sure that the Belo gov't also gets a substantial deal on produce in order to run the "people's" restaurants.
Does it work? Well, agrarian-dominant economies don't stand a chance when every citizen wants to put down the shovel and pick up a laptop to do their work. But, eventually, there is a happy medium.
> Actually, it's different from what the Nazis and Soviets were doing (forcing farmers to make whatever they tell them to), and more like what Vietnam and China do. Their governments deed tracts of land to farmers and say "have at it, you keep most of the profit, but you're contracted to this township or hamlet for x amount of produce. Whatever is leftover you charge whatever you want to whomever you want."
The difference is that the Nazis and Soviets (supposedly)took it all and these folks take an absolute amount X.
What happens when a farm produces less than its X? (To be fair, Nazis and Soviets may have minimum "all" as well.)
> saving the middleman markups associated.
And also forcing the farmer to do sales and distribution in addition to farming. That's time she can't spend farming, relaxing, etc. Note that other people are probably better at sales and distribution, so it's economically inefficient to force the farmer to do those things.
What I found interesting about the article was that the government intervention it’s describing is fairly lightweight: e.g., instead of nationalizing farms, the government is making it easier for farmers to sell directly to urban residents.
Clearly you understand the article as did I. Minimal help from government can be positive without always dissolving in to socialism (the horror) or some Orwellian nightmare.
If I was to respond to lionhearted (which I won't) I would say he's missing the point and overreacting to the message. But that's only if I responded to lionhearted which I won't because his comment was so well written and thoughtful.
That comment uses an odd rhetorical technique -- the poster claims that the article uses "blatant doublespeak"... while ironically writing a long response claiming that he's refusing to write the response that he's writing.
Ok, interesting use of sarcasm (at least I hope that's sarcasm), but I'm not sure why someone would write a counter-argument, when even the post you're responding to is inviting him to make his argument in the first place. ;)
> That comment uses an odd rhetorical technique... writing a long response claiming that he's refusing to write the response that he's writing.
> Ok, interesting use of sarcasm (at least I hope that's sarcasm)
Not quite sarcasm - well, the last line I was joking yes, but there's a reason I wrote like that. After finishing that article, most people will be feeling really good - it's a feel good story. So there's a serious risk that any criticism of the argument is written off without being considered.
So I put it that I would say that stuff if I wasn't afraid of knee jerk reactions which ideally makes people do two things - first, consider the arguments without knee-jerk dismissing them. Second and more importantly, I want people to think: Would I knee jerk dismiss arguments here?
That response was actually geared more at progressives and people that would favor those policies than people who don't like them or neutrals. If I was going to write to someone that already thought those policies were bad ideas, I wouldn't have to be delicate. But I really wanted to engage people who care about the world, who are kind hearted, and have them think critically about the effects of this sort of policy.
To do so, I needed to avoid being written off immediately, so I wrote in a way that hopefully gets people to consider the arguments, yes, but also to consider whether they'd have written them off immediately without thinking. Hopefully a reader thinks, "Huh, he did make some good points. Would I write him off as crazy for trying to say those points or would I consider them?" If people can think, "Would I consider those arguments honestly?" we can get into a good discussion and hopefully get at good governance.
Does it end hunger any better than the U.S. has ended hunger?
* Children neglected by their parents: still hungry.
* Mentally ill or drug-addicted people who are unable to care for themselves (e.g., the homeless): still hungry.
* People who remain persistently unaware of government programs available to them, despite outreach, or who fail to take advantage of them for whatever reason: still hungry (or at least paying more elsewhere.)
* People who spend their food dollars on soda, chips, and pizza rolls, regardless of the availability of cheaper and more nutritious foods: still malnourished.
Giving people easy access to nutritious food only solves the EASY cases. This program is to ending hunger as driving an RC car across an empty parking lot is to the Darpa challenge.
Not sure why I was downvoted, but maybe I was unclear. My point is that they're just providing access to cheap nutritious food, which
1) is not something that has "never been done before"
2) punts on all the hard social problems that make hunger a difficult problem to solve: neglect, ignorance, mental illness, drug addiction, stigma attached to social services, and a kind of general incompetence (not meant to be insulting; nobody is born knowing anything) that prevents people from taking advantage of existing resources.
it's so absurd to read these comments here. it's just so laughable... such an amount of nitpicking... let them do it their way... and don't dare to interfere... and if you want to hear a reason: any market, even a "political market" will evolve the best possible way when there is great diversity.
> With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps
That's a pretty silly way to state it. Food stamps are how we publicly address hunger in the US, so a statistic about their usage has little to do with the prevalence of unaddressed hunger.
Plus, who uses food stamps has more to do with who qualifies and who's willing to than who's going hungry.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2007/11/Hunger-Hyst...