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> We believe in abundance because of millennia of life experience incorrectly or not. It's only not been near-universal to experience at least one severe famin

• WalterBright 3y ago
  The US was the first country to eliminate the specter of famine around 1800. Thanks to free markets.
  • viewtransform 3y ago
    Free markets and the labour of 1/5th the population working in slavery.
    • User23 3y ago
      Slavery is a great evil, then, now, and forever. Nevertheless, antebellum American plantation slavery, where the overwhelming majority of persons in chattel bondage were held, was focused on cash crops like tobacco and cotton, and not on feeding the populace.
      • viewtransform 3y ago
        Slaves were used to grow rice (South Carolina, Georgia), sugarcane (Louisiana), corn (Virginia, to Mississipi), wheat, and vegetables (sweet potatoes, beans, okra, collard greens, squash, cabbage etc) They were used in cattle ranching and hog husbandry. They worked as butchers and meat processors. In places like the Chesapeake Bay region enslaved individuals were involved in oyster harvesting and processing.
        • WalterBright 3y ago
          The division of the US into slave and free states produced an increasingly stark prosperity contrast between the two. That disparity underlay the friction between the two groups.
          • cryptonector 3y ago
            Quite. It was very noticeable, and it was one of the reasons that people in the South resented the North and so were keen on secession. It's that pride that keeps one from admitting to making mistakes. I think many in the South understood unconsciously that industrialization was the future, not slavery, but they couldn't bring themselves to admit it, and the local slave-holding interests were culturally powerful. It took a long time to break that culture.
            • User23 3y ago
              I find the Albion's Seed[1] hypothesis to be considerably more convincing for explaining the Southern resentment of the North. The England that colonized the New World was far from a united front. I'm not going to attempt to summarize because it's a complex issue that I won't be able to do justice to in a few sentences. Nevertheless I recommend anyone who is interested to read that book or find a summary from someone more confident of his ability than me. The short version though is that the English immigrants to the new world were neither culturally or even racially[2] homogenous. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion's_Seed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion's_Seed [2] This is why the framers fabricated a notion of "White" identity, to create solidarity where none had really existed. To understand what they meant by race one must look at contemporary dictionaries. Needless to say the word meant something very different over 200 years ago than it does today.
              • cryptonector 3y ago
                I've not read it. Certainly the colonies were made of different sub-cultures, and that would and did have a major impact in self-identity in the colonies. But even in the South there were large differences from one State to the next, and that leaves slavery- and climate-caused industrialization disparities between North and South as the main drivers of that resentment of the North, and that chip on their shoulder almost certainly exacerbated the South's cultural attachment to slavery. By 1861 the people of the South definitely saw themselves as quite apart from the people of the North, and even quite apart from each other (organizing as a confederacy was not just to be starkly different from the federal North, but also because they had and wanted to maintain very strong national identities in each Southern State).
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      The Union soldiers were far better fed and equipped than the Confederates.
    • cryptonector 3y ago
      In the South, which lagged way behind the North for the simple reason that slavery was a disincentive to innovation and industrialization. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this. The difference between slave-holding South and mostly-/entirely-slave-free North was stark. Slavery didn't build the U.S. The mostly-slavery-free North built the U.S.
      • dredmorbius 3y ago
        The "mostly-slavery-free North" was where the industrialised (that is, high-value-add) cotton-processing factories and mills were located. It may not have harboured slaves, but it was definitely profiting by them. And early stages of industrialisation, most notably the cotton gin, extended the viability of slave-based plantation labour by several more decades, according to extensive accounts. <https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3narr6.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3narr6.html>
        • WalterBright 3y ago
          The North certainly did trade with the South, and thereby make money. But when the Southern economy was cut off from them, they continued to prosper, which the Southern economy ground to a halt. The Southerners had expected that they had a trump card with cotton exports to the North, but oops.
          • dredmorbius 3y ago
            That occurred as the North was transitioning from an agricultural-based economy to one more grounded in transportation (railroads), industry (steelmaking), oil (petroleum, first exploited in the US in Pennsylvania and New York), electrical products (motors, generators, telephones, etc.), and more, all in the period 1850--1880. The real take-off of the North was largely post-1900 with automobile manufacture and the rise of New York City as a global financial and trading centre. The South languished in part due to Reconstruction and being politically repressed by the North following the Civil War, but also for geographic and climatic reasons: it was hot and humid, and would remain hot and humid until electrification and air conditioning arrived ~1930--1950, the oil booms of Texas, Oklahoman, and Louisiana (~1900 -- 1940), and arrival of petrochemical industry (1950--). Agreed that cotton was a ... weaker thread ... binding South and North than the South would have hoped for. And whilst we're talking regional economic development, though an unrelated territory: I found it interesting a while back to find that Los Angeles in the mid-20th century was often the second-largest manufacuturing centre across a whole slew of industries: oil, automobiles, aircraft, tyres, among them. I've yet to find a good explanation of this, though my own hunch is that it was a combination of factors: - Local petroleum sources, that is, a tremendous energy supply. - Far enough from East Coast manufacturing that a local industry made sense. - A sufficiently large local population to feed that demand. This pattern emerged after the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 in San Francisco which greatly dampened development of Northern California, as well as the Bay Area's geographic limitations (a small peninsula, poor cross-bay transport until the creation of the Golden Gate and SF-Oakland Bay bridges in the 1930s), as well as a largely agricultural / timber orientation of Northern California's economy, with secondary strengths in transportation (ports, railroads) and finance.
  • jychang 3y ago
    American famines existed long after the year 1800. You ever heard of the Dust Bowl? The Grapes of Wrath?
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      There wasn't a famine. http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/daybyday/event/august-23-1933/ http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/daybyday/event/august-23-19... The Grapes of Wrath is a novel.
      • webnrrd2k 3y ago
        You need to do better than that link -- Several history classes I have had all discussed the dust bowl as an ecological catastrophe and a famine. I think that's a broadly accepted and uncontroversial definition. Tge link you provided discusses raising crop prices and, at least the on the first page, doesn't refute the dust bowl. The reason that prices needed to be raised was because the dust bowl had cause a famine and the collapse of food prices. Even where crops had been successful, the prices were too low for farmers to make a profit so they destroyed their crops rather than sending them to market. It was largely a failure of unrestricted free markets. Again, all this is a fairly uncontroversial interpretation. > The Grapes of Wrath is a novel. Yes, a novel about the dust bowl and it's consequences.
        • WalterBright 3y ago
          I did not deny the dust bowl. Think about what low crop prices means. It means FOOD IS CHEAP. That's utterly inconsistent with famine. And Roosevelt destroying zillions of pigs and letting their carcasses rot in ditches is famine? It beggars belief. > It was largely a failure of unrestricted free markets. The dust bowl was caused by unsustainable farming practices, which were changed as a result. The Depression was caused by the Fed (read "Monetary History of the United States" by Milton Friedman. Not a novelist.) > Yes, a novel about the dust bowl and it's consequences. Novels are fictional, and historical proof of nothing at all. Steinbeck was not a historian, and was known to exaggerate for dramatic effect. There are plenty of history books on the Depression written by professional historians. Any credible claims have no reason to rely on fiction. P.S. My dad went to public school in Long Beach in the Depression. He sat next to Oakies. They weren't starving. Times were hard, yes. But it wasn't famine.
  • bamfly 3y ago
    Free markets do a fine job of justifying their value with straight facts, no need to reach like that. Apply whatever you're considering free markets to other places & times, and it wouldn't have had the same outcome. It took a lot of things coming together, but most of them were scientific advances or just luck (new world plants exist and are awesome, was a really big one)
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      > it wouldn't have had the same outcome It's had the same outcome every time. Take a look at Lenin's collectivization of agriculture. Production collapsed, and famine resulted. He then instituted the New Economic Program, and production was restored. Collectivization was applied again, and it collapsed again. Finally, the Soviet Union allowed farmers to farm certain parcels and keep the profits, which staved off famine, supplemented with wheat shipped from Kansas (known as "the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union"). Pretty sad, as before 1917 Ukraine was known as the Breadbasket of Europe. Did you know that the Pilgrims tried communism for their first year? They starved. Then they switched to private ownership, and fed themselves.
      • bamfly 3y ago
        Failure to embrace/invent capitalism sooner isn't the main reason basically all graphs measuring anything related to humans start to shoot up in 19th century. Lots of factors contributed. There must be (given it happened) reasons that, while doing very well in some ways, more-free-market approaches didn't wildly outcompete everything else much sooner, though some efforts were made that way well before the 19th century (and, again, did sometimes experience notable, but not categorically-different, levels of success)
        • WalterBright 3y ago
          > Failure to embrace/invent capitalism sooner isn't the main reason basically all graphs measuring anything related to humans start to shoot up in 19th century. All? Nope. Only the ones that were more free market, and the more free market the more things "shot up". Evidence? The millions of poor leaving everything behind and coming from Europe to the US.
  • User23 3y ago
    Are you sure it wasn't thanks to an absolutely huge amount of arable land?
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      Yes, because bone evidence shows the pre-Columbian Indians suffered periods of starvation, as did the pre-Revolution colonists. Then there's the evidence that the average height of Americans shot up from 1800 to WW2. See Eugene Weber's "The Western Tradition".
      • User23 3y ago
        Which pre-Columbian Indians? There'a a big difference between the Iroquois, Navajo, and the Lakota ways of life, and that's just naming a few very well known tribes in the territory of the present day USA. And for what it's worth, none of those societies had anything remotely like a big government, so they were closer to a free market than any industrialized state. Also just because arable land is there doesn't mean it's being farmed effectively. The Iroquois were a relatively sophisticated agrarian society, but the Lakota were essentially fire hunter gatherers by comparison. And of course the Navajo worked wonders feeding themselves in an extremely arid environment. Don't get me wrong I'm a big fan of free markets. On the other hand all the successful farmers who are personally known to me either established their business on the back of generous government loans in the latter half of the 20th century, or inherited or otherwise acquired a concern that did. I'm a big fan of small government, but I'm an even bigger fan of food security, so not starving is definitely an area where I'm open to big government intervention. That's not to downplay the creation of perverse incentives that come out of those policies, but the fact of the matter is nothing is perfect and maybe it's worth accepting a little inefficiency to avoid famine. So yeah I'd say it's more the US federal government's interventionist policies that have caused this country to make such effective use of its arable land and not the invisible hand at work.
        • WalterBright 3y ago
          > Which pre-Columbian Indians? From what I read, all of them that were investigated. > so they were closer to a free market than any industrialized state. The Indian economies were pretty basic, as far as I can tell. They did engage in trade, but also raiding and slavery. They did not appear to have much of a conception of inalienable rights, or of individuals owning plots of land, although there was certainly the concept of tribal land. Frankly, not a whole lot is known about pre-Columbian Indian societies. Even estimates of their numbers vary by over an order of magnitude. Much of what we do know comes from random accounts and letters written by Europeans, such as how the Cheyenne lived and operated. Farming in colonial times and in the US got its start with giving away land to settlers who promised to farm it. > maybe it's worth accepting a little inefficiency to avoid famine The famines ended in the US around 1800 and never reappeared. We're doing fine.
  • sharemywin 3y ago
    too bad we're headed back to feudalism and based on the above comments mass famine too.
  • webnrrd2k 3y ago
    I don't think free markets are the ultimate solution. For example, the Irish Potato Famine was made worse by absentee landlords selling potatoes as a cash export crop, contributing to the single-crop dependence and the overall famine. Similar dynamics occur in bananna republics, the congo, etc... Free markets are great for wealthy countries with lots of functioning social and political institutions. Free markets have been great at lifting many, many people out of poverty. However, unrestricted free markets can have horrible consequences. Just google for a few examples. Free markets work with functioning legal and social systems. I don't think it's fair to characterize the elimination of poverty as solely due to free markets.
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      > Irish Potato Famine I'm no expert on 19th century Ireland, but the economic system there appears to be a vestige of feudalism rather than a free market. There was no free market for land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Tenants_and_subdivisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Tenants... > Just google for a few examples Cite what you want.
• brightlancer 3y ago
  > It's only not been near-universal to experience at least one severe famine that kills many people you know, in a full human lifespan, in the Western and (relatively—this goes back a while) developed world, since like 1600 (thanks, potatoes and corn!). That's phrased that kinda weird, so am I correct that it means: "Before circa 1600, it was near universal that in one's life they would experience severe famine that kills many people you know" ? I think that's too strong of a claim. If someone survived infancy and childhood, they often lived a decent lifespan (though childbirth and war killed many adult women and men, respectively). I don't think "severe famine" was so common that almost everyone would experience it at least once. This isn't something I've studied so I'm going off the small bits I've read; is there anything to support that claim?