[bamfly]

> 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 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!).

Even then, wasting away hungry for entire seasons was still something you were pretty likely experience a few times. Only industrial nitrogen production mostly ended that. Luckily, malaria and cholera and such kept the number of mouths to feed in check, LOL.

The past was horrible.

[brightlancer]

> 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?

[WalterBright]

The US was the first country to eliminate the specter of famine around 1800. Thanks to free markets.

[bamfly]

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]

> 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.

[teamonkey]

There were some notable historical events in early 20th Century Eastern Europe that quite famously had an impact on how many farmers were around to farm.

[WalterBright]

The Israeli Kibbutzen cannot feed themselves, either. They rely on state subsidy.

If you can cite a collective farm system that didn't result in famine, feel free.

[cryptonector]

The Ukrainian famine of the 30s was not caused by either world war. It was caused by forced collectivization. It was caused by Stalin. It was peacetime at that time.

[bamfly]

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]

> 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.

[cryptonector]

Wear these downvotes as a badge of honor for truth-telling.

[WalterBright]

I don't think it's an honor, but I couldn't care less about my karma points. I just enjoy telling the truth, whether it's popular or not.

I'm genuinely puzzled why so many people believe in collectivism, despite no historical evidence of its success anywhere. And, on the flip side, the consistent success of free markets.

My favorite excuse for the prosperity of the US free market was the fact(!) that the millions of Europeans who migrated here were the wealthy(!) of Europe.

[bamfly]

> I'm genuinely puzzled why so many people believe in collectivism

The topic wasn't collectivism. You keep trying to make it about that, I suppose because that's what you wanted to argue about.

[cryptonector]

> I'm genuinely puzzled why so many people believe in collectivism, despite no historical evidence of its success anywhere. And, on the flip side, the consistent success of free markets.

Indoctrination.

> My favorite excuse for the prosperity of the US free market was the fact(!) that the millions of Europeans who migrated here were the wealthy(!) of Europe.

I hadn't heard that one.

[webnrrd2k]

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]

> 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...

> Just google for a few examples

Cite what you want.

[viewtransform]

Free markets and the labour of 1/5th the population working in slavery.

[User23]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[cryptonector]

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]

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>

[WalterBright]

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]

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.

[WalterBright]

The Union soldiers were far better fed and equipped than the Confederates.

[User23]

Are you sure it wasn't thanks to an absolutely huge amount of arable land?

[WalterBright]

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]

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]

> 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.

[Mmalowt]

This may also be attributed to untapped resources that major companies are exploring and even already exploiting some of them perfect example is Moon and Mars

[jychang]

American famines existed long after the year 1800. You ever heard of the Dust Bowl? The Grapes of Wrath?

[WalterBright]

There wasn't a famine.

http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/daybyday/event/august-23-19...

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel.

[webnrrd2k]

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]

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.

[webnrrd2k]

Your original comment was how free markets, seemingly alone, had fixed hunger in America. The response was: "American famines existed long after the year 1800. You ever heard of the Dust Bowl? The Grapes of Wrath?"

During the great Depression, food was, in general, both cheap and largely unavailable. The prices that farmers could get for many of their crops had fallen to a level that the cost of getting their crops to market would result in them losing money. So they destroyed a lot of their crops. Again, this is some basic American history, easily found in text books for High School and college classes. Essentially, it was an economic problem. There was physical food and crops. However, the price farmers could get for food had fallen to below the level that they could profit from it. The government had decided to implement price supports. It might be hard to believe, but that's what happened.

People here at HN know what novels and history books -- there is no need to insult anyone by explaining it. The book, Grapes of Wrath, was clearly brought up to illustrate a point, not as a proof.

I'm willing to go along with characterizing The Dust Bowl as a time of famine in America, and one that happened after your claim, that free markets eliminated the specter of famine in the US.

[sharemywin]

too bad we're headed back to feudalism and based on the above comments mass famine too.