[spodek]

Capitalism is stronger than customs.

If growing them feeds people efficiently, we'll see it here soon enough.

Potatoes didn't exist outside the Americas until after 1492. Then many cultures viewed them as lowly and not worth eating. But you can feed more people per area than any other food and they grow in more types of land than many other edible plants. Cultures would reject them until a famine struck. Then the ruler would eat them out of necessity. Then everyone would eat them. Now potatoes are in more cuisines of the world than any other food.

If cockroaches are efficient, I would expect a few shocks in some commodity markets to put them on a few cultures' dinner plates, then to spread. Like roaches, if you'll pardon the pun.

[Amadou]

Cultures would reject them until a famine struck. Then the ruler would eat them out of necessity.

It is incredibly rare for the "rulers" to have their personal food supply impacted by a famine.

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for (I'm vastly over-simplifying) research that indicates only dictatorships have famines because the rulers are insulated from the effects and so have little motivation to fix the systemic problems that cause famines. The "let them eat cake" syndrome (although that quote itself is historically misleading).

The premise is that in a democracy the rulers still eat well, but there are other mechanisms for them to share in the suffering of famine so it never gets to that point.

http://www.wright.edu/~tdung/sen.htm

[mercurial]

> Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for (I'm vastly over-simplifying) research that indicates only dictatorships have famines because the rulers are insulated from the effects and so have little motivation to fix the systemic problems that cause famines. The "let them eat cake" syndrome (although that quote itself is historically misleading).

Should we deduce that, by electing wealthy people, we ensure that they have no incentive to fix the systemic problems which cause a cycle of economic crises?

[MrZongle2]

I'd say Washington DC is proof of that.

[asgard1024]

Actually, it may be true for other areas as well, I thought about this few days ago in the context of free market and choice.

Maybe free market is harmful for society in the sense that market segmentation creates a choice between high and low quality based on price, and this choice doesn't force people who can afford the more expensive solution to make a fix for everybody.

There is lot of anecdotal evidence about this. For example, there was article about school system in Finland, which is pretty much egalitarian. Still, the quality is great as a side effect probably because if someone improves the system, they improve it for everybody.

Similar things could be said about healthcare system. In fact, probably every successful government-run system is based on belief of participants that it should be egalitarian (and yes, they do exist).

We have negative examples of this as well. Most consumer product have awfully low quality, lower than what we could actually manufacture. The standard response to this is "you have a choice" and indeed, the knowledgeable people can buy quality for much higher price. But in doing so, they won't improve quality for those clueless, leaving them to buy lemons.

Interestingly, even the knowledgeable group is then affected. They have to pay higher price, because they get less market power, because they chose not to extend this power by leaving others to bad choice.

[joshuahedlund]

There are choices between high and low quality based on price, but you're ignoring the effect of changes over time. As Hayek and others have explained, typically something new and experimental will only be available to the rich because it will initially be expensively produced in low quantities, but as it catches on innovation brings the price down to the masses. There are dozens of "low-quality" goods (relative to today's "high-quality" versions) enjoyed by the poor today that would have been considered "high-quality" relative to the versions of those same products enjoyed only by the rich a few decades ago (ex. cell phones, refrigerators, etc). Although these trends may be more easily seen in products than in services/public goods like education.

[asgard1024]

That misses the point. Of course a refrigerator from today has more functionality built to it than refrigerator from 50 years ago. Of course we can build it much cheaper. The question, do we want to?

There is also Akerlof, who also won the "Nobel Prize". When people cannot recognize quality, they cannot buy it. Sure, every fool can compare "features". So when the producer is faced with a choice, build it 10% cheaper for half the quality, what do you think he is going to do? Most people won't know until it breaks.

It's also win for the producer. He can make two lines - one "consumer" line with half the quality, and the other "professional" line with the right quality, but two times as expensive. That's how modern market segmentation works.

[stcredzero]

> Similar things could be said about healthcare system. In fact, probably every successful government-run system is based on belief of participants that it should be egalitarian (and yes, they do exist).

Markets are not a god, an oracle, or a panacea. Markets don't work quite like they should in healthcare.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/why-markets-cant...

Use the right tool for the job. Egalitarian systems work great in some contexts (lifeboat) and not so well in others. (The New England town commons.)

[dTal]

"Historically misleading" as in "never happened" - Rousseau seems to have either invented or adapted the anecdote for his autobiography, which attributed it only to "a great princess":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

[jonnathanson]

Apropos of nothing, we eat a lot of "shellfish," which is a polite euphemism for the critters that are basically the cockroaches of the sea: shrimp, crabs, and lobster. Genetically speaking, these guys aren't too far removed from land-dwelling arthropods, roaches included. They just wound up with stronger branding back in the day. Maybe they had a better agent.

Regardless, plenty of cultures around the world eat insects, and our North American cousins south of the border eat crickets by the barrel. They're fantastic, once you get over what they are. So are silkworms, which I've scarfed down at Korean restaurants. I imagine roaches, properly prepared, eat like popcorn.

If there's a palatable and efficient way to harvest them, someone will figure out how to make it work. The concept of sushi was once considered exotic and borderline repugnant in the US, and now it's a lunchtime staple. To that effect, I could see the rebranding of the roach beginning at the high end of the market, rather than the bottom. Fancy restaurateurs will experiment with them, perhaps as much for shock value as for culinary effect. This will start a trend, and pretty soon, they'll be the hot new thing at hipster food trucks, expensive gastropubs, and boutique coffee shops.

Then again, maybe not. People have been trying to make insect-based cuisine happen in the US for many years now, and it's been very slow to attract any real attention or adoption. The humble cockroach probably suffers from the worst stigmatization of all the insects, though. So it's got a tough path to navigate to respectability. Others will probably have to pave the way before the roach can gain any appeal. Crickets, which are very closely related and can be a similar domestic nuisance, strike people as cute and charming for whatever reason (these people probably haven't seen the bigger ones). They will probably come first.

[coldtea]

>Capitalism is stronger than customs.

What you describe below, besides inaccurate (lots of very efficient food sources never made much dent to other cultures, potatoes are more of an exception than an example), is not capitalism, but hunger.

In a famine people will even eat rats (or fellow men).

That's not really about capitalism. It worked that way under every kind of economic system, including ones predating capitalism by milenia.

[nate_meurer]

Not sure what your point is. Production of products that solve our hunger problems (i.e., food) are driven by market forces to some extent regardless of economic system. Just because the same forces apply when the state controls the means of production, for example, doesn't make the OP any less accurate.

And exactly which economic systems predate capitalism by milenia?

[haiduc]

We may thank Antoine-Augustin Parmentier for his efforts convincing people to eat potatoes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine-Augustin_Parmentier

""" Parmentier therefore began a series of publicity stunts for which he remains notable today, hosting dinners at which potato dishes featured prominently and guests included luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, giving bouquets of potato blossoms to the King and Queen, and surrounding his potato patch at Sablons with armed guards to suggest valuable goods — then instructed them to accept any and all bribes from civilians and withdrawing them at night so the greedy crowd could "steal" the potatoes. (These 54 arpents of impoverished ground near Neuilly, west of Paris, had been allotted him by order of Louis XVI in 1787.[3]) """

[thaumasiotes]

> Cultures would reject them [potatoes] until a famine struck. Then the ruler would eat them out of necessity. Then everyone would eat them.

I'd love to read more about this. Can you point me to a particular episode? The ruler is pretty much the last person I'd expect to eat something out of necessity.

[imarg]

There is an interesting story (that probably is just a myth) of how potatoes were introduced in Greece.

The then head of state, Kapodistrias:

"Having ordered a shipment of potatoes, at first he ordered that they be offered to anyone interested. However the potatoes were met with indifference by the population and the whole scheme seemed to be failing. Therefore Kapodistrias, knowing of the contemporary Greek attitudes, ordered that the whole shipment of potatoes be unloaded in public display on the docks of Nafplion, and placed with severe-looking guards guarding it. Soon, rumours circulated that for the potatoes to be so well guarded they had to be of great importance. People would gather to look at the so-important potatoes and soon some tried to steal them. The guards had been ordered in advance to turn a blind eye to such behaviour, and soon the potatoes had all been "stolen" and Kapodistrias' plan to introduce them to Greece had succeeded."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioannis_Kapodistrias#Administra... (2nd paragraph)

[Xylakant]

They tell a similar version about prussia (germany). Friedrich der Große would have his soldiers guard his potato fields and turn a blind eye to peasants stealing them. So yes, probably a myth, but indeed a nice one.

[farnsworth]

Maybe not out of necessity for the ruler, but to convince the people to eat them out of necessity. (I'm just guessing, would also be interested in learning more.)

[k-mcgrady]

>> "Cultures would reject them until a famine struck."

Ironic considering the devastating effects of the reliance on potatoes during the Irish potato famine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

[seanmcdirmid]

Not ironic. The Irish lower class became overly dependent on cheap/easy potatoes b/c the English had taken their land so they couldn't do better. The famine then forced many of them to migrate to America, and Ireland's population hasn't recovered since.

[thaumasiotes]

> and Ireland's population hasn't recovered since.

This is a somewhat amazing claim. It's bizarre for a population bottleneck in 1852 to have lasting effects (on the size of the population) over 150 years after the cause of the bottleneck ended, much as I don't expect the number of mosquitoes in 2014 to go down no matter how many I manage to kill in 2013.

Census records [1] tell a very interesting story:

Ireland's population apparently peaked in the 1840s at 8.2 million people. By 1851, that had crashed to 6.6 million, and by 1861, 5.8 million. By then it seems safe to assume that the famine was over (for one thing, it's supposed to have ended in 1852), but Ireland's population kept declining into the 1920s and then stayed flat for another 30-40 years (population in 1961: 4.2 million), whereafter it started growing at a fairly quick (indeed, accelerating) pace. The 2011 census shows 6.4 million people.

I can't think of a reason for a famine in the 1840s to cause the population to fall from 4.7 million in 1891 to 4.2 million in 1926. I have to wonder if what drove the numbers wasn't the famine but the demographic transition. Any idea when that took hold in Ireland?

My other guess would be that the mass emigration of the 1840s-50s created a long-lasting easy pathway for Irish to emigrate to the US, and that this proved so attractive that the population stayed low even in the face of high birthrates. But I wouldn't call that a misfortune for the people of Ireland.

[1] http://www.nisra.gov.uk/Census/Historic_Population_Trends_%2...

EDIT:

It's probably worth noting here that 30 million people recorded their ethnicity as "Irish" in the 2000 US census.

[simias]

This is a very interesting comment but I feel the need to point out that your comparing the Irish population to mosquitoes could be perceived as a bit harsh!

Not to mention that if you actually manage to reduce the mosquito population by 20 to 25% (as the Great Famine did in ireland) I'm sure you'll see an impact on the following years.

[thaumasiotes]

Harshness is definitely not intended. I was hoping to evoke people's direct lived experience of (1) killing lots and lots of mosquitoes, and then (2) failing to notice any impact at all on the prevalence of mosquitoes. Unfortunately, choosing something with a reproductive cycle that humans can have gut-feeling level experience with restricted my analogical options to, um, "undesirables". The point I'm trying to make is that they're both living systems, and living systems of all types grow incredibly quickly.

Look at this another way: over the last 50 years, the population of Ireland grew by 50%. Over the 50 years before that, it grew by negative three percent. And the famine happened 50 years before that. It seems very difficult to explain the 1911-1961 performance in terms of the famine.

> Not to mention that if you actually manage to reduce the mosquito population by 20 to 25% (as the Great Famine did in ireland) I'm sure you'll see an impact on the following years.

I honestly wouldn't expect that impact to last more than two years, if that. But that's a guess. (Consider again: in 50 years (roughly 2 human generations), Ireland's population grew 50%. If the mosquito generation length is one year, then at the same rate they could recover fully from losing 33% of their population in... two years. But insects generally follow a strategy of laying many, many more eggs than the environment can ever support as adults, so I'd kind of expect the effects to wash out in a single generation.)

[simias]

Maybe because mosquitoes don't have a culture? The trauma of the famine spreads across generations, it can have changed the mentality of the Irish people durably, made them have fewer children on average.

[barrkel]

The effects of the Famine are still felt in Ireland today. It changed the way survivors thought, and altered the culture IMO. Though it's hard to say what Ireland would be like today without it having happened.

[smoyer]

African mosquitoes or European mosquitoes?

[coldtea]

>It's bizarre for a population bottleneck in 1852 to have lasting effects (on the size of the population) over 150 years after the cause of the bottleneck ended, much as I don't expect the number of mosquitoes in 2014 to go down no matter how many I manage to kill in 2013.

A bizarre claim. Unless you factor in your inability to kill that many mosquitoes.

Else, if you kill enough of them (or all), their 2014 number WILL go down.

After all, there are species made extinct, as well as lots of species that had their populations shrink significantly as a result of human action (sometimes temporary).

[thaumasiotes]

If you kill all the mosquitoes (at any stage of life) in 2013, their 2014 population will remain zero, yes.

If you kill less than that, then the 2014 population will be determined by the environment of 2014, mostly without reference to 2013. I pointed out below your comment that if mosquitoes could reproduce merely as fast as the Irish between 1961 and 2011 (and in reality they do it much faster; a female human can't have more than about 15 children, whereas a female mosquito can easily lay several hundred eggs), and their generation length were one year, then they would recover fully from a blow much larger than the potato famine two years after such a blow occurred.

Having looked into it, I see that the actual generation length of mosquitoes ranges from several days (!) to one month. So with very high confidence, I can say that the effects of a raging mosquito genocide will not be felt by one year after it has concluded, unless ALL the mosquitoes in the area were successfully killed.

You might find http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/21/if-i-hadnt-kille... to be of interest.

[mathattack]

From the wiki, perhaps it wasn't as much of a general food shortage as popularly claimed.

The usage of the word famine is a misnomer. Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. Records show during the period Ireland was exporting approximately thirty to fifty shiploads per day of food produce. As a consequence of these exports and a number other factors such as land acquisition, absentee landlords and the effect of the 1690 penal laws, the Great Famine today is viewed by a number of historical academics as a form of either direct or indirect genocide.

[sliverstorm]

Now potatoes are in more cuisines of the world than any other food.

Oh? Not even onions?