My first reply to you consisted of a series of questions, asking for more information (which you kindly provided). No, my claim was that the current economic crisis, however severe it becomes, will not make starvation typical in the United States. It is atypical now, it was atypical during the Great Depression, and it will continue to be atypical everywhere where people can trade freely and participate in economic exchange without government interference. The last mass famine in a country that should have had climate and agricultural advantages enough to prevent famine was in China, during the Great Leap Forward (around the time I was born). That famine had such a high death rate that the missing people of certain ages in certain regions were readily apparent when China conducted a census decades later in the 1980s.
What you were agreeing with is the proposition that people might starve, by implicitly claiming that some people in the United States already do starve. Where? Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here? Who? There are people in the United States who cannot buy food out of their own family budgets, and there are children who are not well fed by their neglectful parents, but I don't think there is any adult who actually lacks enough food to live. Where is the example?
It's true that that's mostly phrased as questions. I didn't provide answers to the questions of "who" and "where is the example", but I was (and remain) outraged at your false assertion that "there is [not] any adult who actually lacks enough food to live," and the accompanying questions. The total death rate from undernutrition in the US is somewhere around 20 people per day, if the WHO is to be believed.
I don't think there is any place where people can participate in economic exchange without government "interference". Maybe in Somalia and parts of Afghanistan and São Paulo, but I think it's more a question of the form of government than of its absence.
Amartya Sen argues that there has never been a famine in a democracy, regardless of climate or lack of agricultural advantages. For a while I thought perhaps the 2001 economic collapse in Argentina was a counterexample (read some Economist articles from 2001 and 2002) but since I've moved here, I've heard that although starvation was more widespread than normal, it didn't rise nearly to the level of a famine.
So I agree with your reduced claim: people in the US are not going to suffer a famine unless the country descends into open violence or despotism. Deaths from undernutrition are presumably rising, because the current economic collapse is hitting the poorest people hardest, just as it did here in Argentina. Some people, as pj speculated, will starve. But it's not going to be like the Great Leap Forward, or the regularly scheduled famines under the British Raj, or the famine from Ukrainian collectivization. Cancer and heart disease will probably still be the leading causes of death.
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My first reply to you consisted of a series of questions, asking for more information (which you kindly provided). No, my claim was that the current economic crisis, however severe it becomes, will not make starvation typical in the United States. It is atypical now, it was atypical during the Great Depression, and it will continue to be atypical everywhere where people can trade freely and participate in economic exchange without government interference. The last mass famine in a country that should have had climate and agricultural advantages enough to prevent famine was in China, during the Great Leap Forward (around the time I was born). That famine had such a high death rate that the missing people of certain ages in certain regions were readily apparent when China conducted a census decades later in the 1980s.
Your claim was as follows:
What you were agreeing with is the proposition that people might starve, by implicitly claiming that some people in the United States already do starve. Where? Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here? Who? There are people in the United States who cannot buy food out of their own family budgets, and there are children who are not well fed by their neglectful parents, but I don't think there is any adult who actually lacks enough food to live. Where is the example?
It's true that that's mostly phrased as questions. I didn't provide answers to the questions of "who" and "where is the example", but I was (and remain) outraged at your false assertion that "there is [not] any adult who actually lacks enough food to live," and the accompanying questions. The total death rate from undernutrition in the US is somewhere around 20 people per day, if the WHO is to be believed.
I don't think there is any place where people can participate in economic exchange without government "interference". Maybe in Somalia and parts of Afghanistan and São Paulo, but I think it's more a question of the form of government than of its absence.
Amartya Sen argues that there has never been a famine in a democracy, regardless of climate or lack of agricultural advantages. For a while I thought perhaps the 2001 economic collapse in Argentina was a counterexample (read some Economist articles from 2001 and 2002) but since I've moved here, I've heard that although starvation was more widespread than normal, it didn't rise nearly to the level of a famine.
So I agree with your reduced claim: people in the US are not going to suffer a famine unless the country descends into open violence or despotism. Deaths from undernutrition are presumably rising, because the current economic collapse is hitting the poorest people hardest, just as it did here in Argentina. Some people, as pj speculated, will starve. But it's not going to be like the Great Leap Forward, or the regularly scheduled famines under the British Raj, or the famine from Ukrainian collectivization. Cancer and heart disease will probably still be the leading causes of death.