[miohtama]

> Capitalism has done more to overcome hunger and poverty than any other system in world history. The most devastating man-made famines over the past 100 years all occurred under socialism – in the 1930s alone, according to a range of estimates, between five and nine million people died in the Soviet Union from famines caused by the socialist collectivisation of agriculture.

> The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017.

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hu...

[mrguyorama]

adamsmith.org/blog

Is that really what passes for a "You can't blame capitalism" source on this damn site?

[ToucanLoucan]

It's impossible to say with any certainty that was down to an economic system change and not the myriad of other issues plaguing the Soviet states.

And maybe on balance hunger went down, but in particular for a whole lot of those Soviet states, the transitions from the failing "communist" state and the market-based alternatives was incredibly harsh and involved a whole lot of starving as the prices of food and other critical goods soared out of reach of Soviet citizens, not even going into the psychological effects.

Also also, insofar as "communism" "failed" (the USSR was incredibly authoritarian and corrupt, many communists and socialists take big issues with them or China for that matter being called communist but I digress), it "failed" alongside a host of economic sanctions brought upon it by it's Capitalist neighbors, utterly terrified at it's very existence. I mean Christ calling someone communist is still an insult in the United States, and an attack on a politician here too, decades after the Red Scare supposedly ended.

[nradov]

What sanctions? The USA and Canada literally sold huge quantities of grain to the USSR even during the height of the Cold War. Without those food sales even more Soviet citizens would have gone hungry.

[storus]

> The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017.

This sounds like a complete BS. There were no starving people in the Soviet Union and its satellites after a brief post-war period. They had no luxuries all year round like exotic fruits, but the basics were covered. They had also vastly more educated population than the US. Just their governance and understanding of economics didn't consider the innate selfishness of humans and the need to dominate and outdo others so supply-demand laws didn't work well. China fixed that part later by allowing private corporate ownership and throwing its population into a Darwinian environment while keeping minimal social standards for the unlucky ones. North Korea, Cambodia and Laos would be the only "communist" countries where famines were still present.