Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does. • Hacker News Board

Re: Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.

#91

Post by kragen » Thu, Jul 23, 2009, 6:48 AM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #89

kragen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyesti... is the spreadsheet I got the numbers from; I downloaded it years ago, which is why I didn't know where it was linked from. Unfortunately it doesn't cite sources. It's linked from http://www.who.int/research/en/ as "Causes of death [xls 3.03Mb]". The NationMaster number is 0.056 per 100 000 population per year. I don't see how to square that with the 50×…

Thanks. I learned something about finding WHO statistics with your help. I think the conclusion here is that people in the United States who die of severe malnourishment do so mostly because they have diseases that impair their eating (something I didn't consider at all in my first reply). So I learned something else today. In the overall context of this thread, I am not particularly worried that the economic crisis…

On the other hand, it's still totally implausible that the answer to "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?" is "No," even if you modify the question to exclude not only starvation due to insanity, but also starvation due to the powerlessness of children and starvation that's secondary to some other illness. The odds ratios would have to be hundreds of thousands to one.

Re: Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.

#92

Post by tokenadult » Thu, Jul 23, 2009, 1:22 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #91

tokenadult wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I learned something about finding WHO statistics with your help. I think the conclusion here is that people in the United States who die of severe malnourishment do so mostly because they have diseases that impair their eating (something I didn't consider at all in my first reply). So I learned something else today. In the overall context of this thread, I am not particularly worried that the economic crisis…

On the other hand, it's still totally implausible that the answer to "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?" is "No," even if you modify the question to exclude not only starvation due to insanity, but also starvation due to the powerlessness of children and starva…

On the contrary, thinking about the figures some more, I'm sure that by far the typical case of a United States person who is reported to the WHO as having starved to death is an old person with other severe medical issues who couldn't digest food, or who ordered his physicians to cease tube-feeding as a way to die "naturally." (I know of cases of each, upon further reflection.) Such deaths are an individual phenomenon, regrettable to be sure, but not a societal phenomenon in a country where eating without paying out of pocket is a charitable service enjoyed by millions each day.

Re: Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.

#93

Post by kragen » Fri, Jul 24, 2009, 2:14 AM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #92

kragen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it's still totally implausible that the answer to "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?" is "No," even if you modify the question to exclude not only starvation due to insanity, but also starvation due to the powerlessness of children and starva…

On the contrary, thinking about the figures some more, I'm sure that by far the typical case of a United States person who is reported to the WHO as having starved to death is an old person with other severe medical issues who couldn't digest food, or who ordered his physicians to cease tube-feeding as a way to die "naturally." (I know of cases of each, upon further reflection.) Such deaths are an individual phenomen…

If we were talking about typical cases, we wouldn't be talking about starvation at all, or about the US; we'd be talking about people in India dying of heart attacks and pneumonia. I don't know enough about how cause-of-death coding works in the US to know whether you're right about the cause-in-fact of typical deaths coded as due to nutritional deficiency.

But your claim wasn't that starving to death was atypical. Surely we can all agree that it's atypical. Your claim was that it hadn't happened even once in our lifetimes, except due to mental illness. That's the claim that outraged me.

It's true that there are a lot of charitable services in the US. There are people they don't reach, as I'm sure you know.

Re: Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.

#94

Post by tokenadult » Fri, Jul 24, 2009, 2:52 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #93

tokenadult wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, thinking about the figures some more, I'm sure that by far the typical case of a United States person who is reported to the WHO as having starved to death is an old person with other severe medical issues who couldn't digest food, or who ordered his physicians to cease tube-feeding as a way to die "naturally." (I know of cases of each, upon further reflection.) Such deaths are an individual phenomen…

If we were talking about typical cases, we wouldn't be talking about starvation at all, or about the US; we'd be talking about people in India dying of heart attacks and pneumonia. I don't know enough about how cause-of-death coding works in the US to know whether you're right about the cause-in-fact of typical deaths coded as due to nutritional deficiency. But your claim wasn't that starving to death was atypical .…

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.

Re: Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.

#95

Post by kragen » Fri, Jul 24, 2009, 11:54 PM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #94

kragen wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we were talking about typical cases, we wouldn't be talking about starvation at all, or about the US; we'd be talking about people in India dying of heart attacks and pneumonia. I don't know enough about how cause-of-death coding works in the US to know whether you're right about the cause-in-fact of typical deaths coded as due to nutritional deficiency. But your claim wasn't that starving to death was atypical .…

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 ex…

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.