Bishop Hill Boudreaux says no
Nov 4, 2013 Bureaucrats Climate: WG3 Greens The economist Don Boudreaux writes to the New York Times about the latest scare doing the rounds of the left-wing media.
You report that "Climate change will pose sharp risks to the world’s food supply in coming decades" ("Climate Change Seen Posing Risk to Food Supplies," Nov. 2) - with the premise that this impending calamity requires aggressive government curtailment or modification of industrial capitalist activities.
Color me skeptical. Wherever industrial capitalism has flourished over the past three centuries it has eliminated for the first time in human history the millennia-long curse of recurrent famines. Today, food is in short supply only in societies without market institutions and cut off from global trade. (The people suffering the greatest risk now of fatal shortages of food are true locavores, such as the North Koreans and the Somalis.) Relatedly, some of the worst famines in modern times - most notably, in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China - have been caused by the hubris of government officials curtailing market forces with command-and-control regulations.The greatest risk to the world's food supply is not the industrial capitalist activities that environmentalists are keen to curtail. Rather, the greatest risk is the trust that many currently well-fed westerners blithely put in government to rein in the only force in human history that has proven successful at eliminating starvation: market-driven capitalism.
Looking at what government planning has done to the energy market in the UK, you can see his point.
Reader Comments (53)
Oxford PPE students presently in government were indoctrinated in the fake CAGW meme before the main publicity in 1988. Clearly the likes of Porritt were setting up today's destruction of the UK economy 27 - 28 years ago. For an analysis of the fraud's origins, see the first few posts here: http://judithcurry.com/2013/11/01/cagw-memeplex/#more-13547
It is good to see Boudreaux challenge the myths about climate change which are peddled by the alarmists, but capitalism is not always so innocent, e.g. the starvation of thousands of Irish when the potato crops were decimated by blight in the 18th century was not helped by ships exporting unaffected tubers to England, the cash crop effectively being used to pay the rents to the predominantly absentee landlords. Profit was also the prime motive for the Highland Clearances, another shameful example of free market capitalism gone wrong (and the profits were very short term, as once the people were removed the land soon lost its fertility). For capitalism to work there has to be some degree of social responsibility, as Adam Smith argued in the Wealth of Nations. And sometimes more than that - look what happened in California when the energy companies were unregulated - none built any power stations despite increasing demand, because they liked the increased profit margins they could make at times of peak demand. It ended in blackouts.
It has to be said that, in the days of the CEGB, the UK electricity supply was adequate to guarantee that the electricity supply could meet consumer demand in winter, with a significant margin. The cost of electricity was also reasonable, notwithstanding how hugely inefficient the CEGB was (akin to British Leyland in those days). Although there was a lot of Government interference, the Ministry of Energy (or Power) did contain competent power engineers, as did the CEGB.
Nothing could be further from sensible today, with neither the Government nor DECC having any competence and the electricity providers not responsible for, nor interested in security of supply. In fact nobody seems to take responsibility, and current policy, based on targets and 5 year plans reminiscent of the Soviet and Mao eras, is guaranteed to end in a disaster for the UK economy and its citizens.
Boudreaux forgot to mention that the projected decline due to climate change, up to 2% per decade, is small relative to the projected increase in yield due to better crops and better crop management.
Thanks AlecM. Judith Curry's analysis of Human psychology is light-years ahead of Lewandowski's infantile scribblings.
As Phillip Bratby pointed out Britain's energy policy was more rational in the days when we depended on inefficient nationalised industries. Today our energy policies seem to be a toxic mix of the very worst aspects of government (or EU) control and short-termist capitalism.
"The greatest risk to the world's food supply is not the industrial capitalist activities that environmentalists are keen to curtail. Rather, the greatest risk is the trust that many CURRENTLY well-fed westerners blithely put in government"
Philip,
The reason DECC doesn't have the competency of the old board is that DECCs remote isn't to worry about supplying energy to the public but implementing thecEU's Mann Made Global Warming dictates!
Regards
Mailman
Mailman: Absolutely.
lapogus (9:03 AM)
Social responsibility in the 19th C when Malthus was hot stuff (still is for some people!) was complicated. Those who believed in Mr Malthus' simple-minded theory, could do things they may not otherwise have done. They believed the poor were doomed to multiply beyond any resources available to them, and that any help given to them would only spread catastrophe. This is not so very different from today, with the simple-minded 'global warming catastrophe because of our CO2' theory providing the justification for making the lives of poor people even worse. Can't have them increasing their carbon footprint and all that. This is not so much capitalism or socialism, as it is blind faith at work in minds willing to take such theories as gospel.
lapogus
Couldn't have said it better.
The Irish potato problem wasn't helped by growing a single variety and also exporting the grain which would have alleviated the problem.
The clearances were also an own goal, as there were no men left to recruit for the latest war.
“In Sutherland not one single soldier can be raised . . . The men told the parson ‘We have no country to fight for. You robbed us of our country and gave it to the sheep. Therefore, since you have preferred sheep to men, let sheep defend you.’ “
The economist Don Boudreaux has, it would seem, either not heard of the Bengal Famine of 1943 or chooses to turn a blind eye to it. Given that it caused between 1.5 and four million deaths and widespread destitution, it merits a mention even if it does undermine his somewhat trite premise.
DaveS
I don't know a great deal about it either.
Presumably the fact that there was a war going on had nothing to do with making the situation worse. At that time I suspect the British in India were a bit preoccupied by the Japanese in Burma. Also importing food to India would hve been affected by the shipping losses during the Battle of The Atlantic; 1st Happy Time 1940–41 2nd Happy Time January 1942 to August 1942*, outside these times losses were just normal and Britain never had much leeway in terms of shipping.
* Johann Mohr reported thus
The moon night is as black as ink
Off Hatteras the tankers sink
While sadly Roosevelt counts the score
some fifty thousand tons by Mohr
So a famine in the middle of a worldwide conflict might not be that surprising. It was a region where there had been famines in the 18th and 19th centuries which doesn't actually prove anything but is an interesting aside.
lapogus,
The California Electricity Crisis: Lessons for the Future
California’s disastrous experience with electricity deregulation cast a pall on movements towards deregulation throughout the United States. Some have said that the California experience shows that deregulation cannot and does not work, which is patently untrue, as an examination of energy, price, and demand data collected before and after the California electricity crisis shows. In this paper, I will describe what happened in California and the lessons to be learned from that experience.
http://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/OurEnergyFuture/TheCaliforniaElectricityCrisisLessonsfortheFuture.aspx
@DaveB - the Wikipedia piece on the Bengal famine doesn't support your assertion. There were a number of significent external factors adversely affecting the both supply and demand sides including; war, burmese refugees, crop failure and tidal flooding*.
The Government should have intervened but didn't and so millions died.
* Tidal flooding in the 1940's. Huh ? But I thought this was only possible as a direct cause of CAGW and not because of people living in tidal areas without adequate sea defences?
DaveB,
From Wikipedia ...
The proximate cause of the famine was a reduction in supply with some increase in demand. The winter 1942 ‘aman’ rice crop which was already expected to be poor or indifferent was hit by a cyclone and three tidal waves in October. 450 square miles were swept by tidal waves, 400 square miles affected by floods and 3200 square miles damaged by wind and torrential rain. Reserve stocks in the hands of cultivators, consumers and dealers were destroyed. This killed 14,500 people and 190,000 cattle. ‘The homes, livlihood and property of nearly 2.5 million Bengalis were ruined or damaged.’ A fungus causing the disease known as "brown spot", hit the rice crop and this was reported to have had an even greater effect on yield than the cyclone. The fungus, Helminthosporium oryzae, destroyed 50% to 90% of some rice varieties.
(references omitted)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
YES! An Irish potato famine caused by nature was obviously the evil doings of capitalism, because only force and regimentation can save people from themselves, like the glorious workings of Marxism in Africa (1.7 million dead), North Korea (2 million dead), the Soviet Union (20 million dead) Mao's China (65 million dead)...mostly through planned and willful - unnatural - famines. (But Marxism and the planned economies had nothing to do with that, so Marxism can't be to blame, only capitalism.)
So, lapogus and SandyS - do you care to restate your arguments against Boudreaux's common sense capitalism that has lifted teaming billions of people out of our natural-born grinding poverty (ironically enough, using computers and the internet that no alternative economic system could have imagined, much less produced) - practically doubling peoples' natural lifespans - given those inconvenient facts?
(More ironically, given our hosts web site's subject, Don't YOU grasp what the word "falsification" means?)
-Orson, Boulder, Colorado (USA)
PS well, what's a few orders of magnitude difference? It "worked" good enough for today's government funded climate science. (Sarc/ off)
PPS DaveB blithely asserts that the fact of the Bengal famine undermines Bordeau's premise, and therefore he neglects to mention it.
As I learned it, British war planners deliberately kept foodstocks there low, in order to keep the advancing enemy Japanese from getting it themselves. You mean to say that (1) no government has done this before in wartime? Or (2) that free market capitalism bears the blame for wartime starvation under government coercion? In either case, you are incoherent.
Apparently too few are aware of the lateNobel Laureate Robert Fogel's brief book The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100, which is a quantitative and longitudinal synthesis of the available facts pertinent to Boudreaux's claim. He finds that over nearly two centuries since 1790, improved nutrition contributed to one-third of the increasing wealth for Britain.
Mind you, Capitalism achieved all this WITHOUT direct scientific knowledge of diet, nutrition, or caloric intake, but simply through meeting people's natural wants and human basic needs - such that anti-capitalists have also blamed capitalism for creating obesity for over half-a-century. (Hey - logically speaking, you can't have it both ways, yet anti-capitalists keep trying - or else we wouldn't keep having this ridiculous debate.)
lapogus also trivializes the causes of the Great Famine (Ireland) and the Highland Clearances by ascribing them solely to capitalism and profit. Ireland has a rich and interesting history and trivializing these two great events is an insult to those that suffered and died. It also ignores the many lessons learned about the abuse of power by government and private entities, individually and in concert.
Readers interested in data and the world may want to spend some time at humanprogress.org.
Evidence from academic institutions and international organizations shows dramatic improvements in human well-being. These improvements are especially striking in the developing world.
Unfortunately, there is often a wide gap between the reality and public perception, including that of many policymakers, scholars in unrelated fields, and intelligent lay persons. To make matters worse, the media emphasizes bad news, while ignoring many positive long-term trends.
We hope to help in correcting misperceptions regarding the state of humanity through the presentation of empirical data that focuses on long-term developments. All of our wide-ranging data comes from third parties, including the World Bank, the OECD, the Eurostat, and the United Nations. By putting together this comprehensive data in an accessible way, our goal is to provide a useful resource for scholars, journalists, students, and the general public.
http://humanprogress.org/
SandyS:
"I don't know a great deal about it either."
Thanks for your comment. Neither did I until I read Bayly & Harper's excellent "The Forgotten Armies" a few years back though I've read a bit more since, enough to see that there is merit in the comment at the top of the pertinent Wiki entry that "The neutrality of this article is disputed".
FarleyS on the other hand claims that the entry "doesn't support [my] assertion". I'm baffled by that because I made no assertion, I simply pointed out that Boudreaux's letter didn't mention the Bengal Famine.
The British civil administration does not come out of the story well to put it mildly - Boudreaux's comment that the famines he does mention were caused "by the hubris of government officials curtailing market forces with command-and-control regulations" might well also be said of the Bengal Famine. (Incidentally, many historians argue convincingly that the Ukraine famine of 1932-33 wasn't just bureaucratic hubris, it was deliberate policy.)
Of course the Bengal famine was a result of the war but my point is that the polity of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with it. The war in question was a war between two "free market" powers defending or seeking to capture imperial possessions.
Boudreaux's argument is also circular. "Wherever industrial capitalism has flourished . . . it has eliminated . . . recurrent famines". Hmmmmm. So how do you know industrial capitalism is flourishing? "Well, there's no famines for a start." Or Dust Bowls come to that.
Whatever, I'm happy to see anyone biff all that misanthropic "climate change = famines" crap and appreciate that the NYT's letters page is not necessarily the ideal place to do it.
Orson/Speed - I did not say the Irish potato famine was caused by capitalism, but the plight of the starving people clearly wasn't helped by it much considering that ships were leaving Dublin loaded with food. I did not trivialise the famine or the Highland clearances, or the people who died or were evicted, and I am not an anti-capitalist. But if profit / greed by landowners was not the prime motive for the Highland Clearances, please enlighten me as to what was. No don't bother, I have work to do.
With increased CO2 the one thing alarmists cannot honestly believe is that we will get reduced crop growth.
The GWPF has an amusing quote from Arrhenus that when CO2 has gone up 2 1/2times (not quite but close) we will be 8-9 C warmer and Siberia the world's breadbasket.
What Yuri Besmenov called the de-moralisation of the West has been thoroughly achieved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g
Ironic that the Soviet Union didn't last long enough to witness the full flowering of the auto-idiotic strangulation.
Philip Bratby - your summary of the CEGB is pretty close to the truth.
As a Boy Engineer, I worked for the CEGB (known to us wags as the Church of England Gas Board) at Hinkley Point 'A' - but despite huge inefficiencies its driving principle was Predict and Provide. The nearest that we came to power cuts in the 1960's was the odd chilly snap in August, when there was so much generating capacity out on routine maintenance, and people were resorting to electric fires to keep warm.
On the general subject - us engineers are a pretty sceptical bunch too - because we deal in the realities of materials, energy, costs etc...
When we were obligate locavores, malnutrition was the norm by Spring. And God forbid the witches bring a bad harvest.
====================
lapogus wrote, “I did not say the Irish potato famine was caused by capitalism, but the plight of the starving people clearly wasn't helped by it much considering that ships were leaving Dublin loaded with food.”
Lapogus also wrote, “ … but capitalism is not always so innocent, e.g. the starvation of thousands of Irish when the potato crops were decimated by blight in the 18th century was not helped by ships exporting unaffected tubers to England, the cash crop effectively being used to pay the rents to the predominantly absentee landlords. Profit was also the prime motive for the Highland Clearances, another shameful example of free market capitalism gone wrong … “
Capitalism is not “profit” or as some prefer to say, “greed.” In 2003, Joseph Bast and Herbert J. Walberg summarized the basic truths about capitalism writing, “Three institutions stand at the center of a capitalist economy: private property, markets, and the Rule of Law.” Those were not much in evidence in the decades leading up the Irish potato famine or the Highland Clearances.
http://heartland.org/policy-documents/what-capitalism
Orson
Speaking for myself I wasn't arguing that capitalism is bad and evil; but that it hasn't got a track record that is blemish free. I don't think, and you may well disagree, that the road to a wealthy and free society is not victim free. The prime reasons for the The Clearances was profit, and putting the highlanders themselves in their place and securing the UK for the Hanoverians after the Jacobite risings which didn't finally finish until 1759, within 25 years of George Granville Leveson-Gower* becoming Duke of Sutherland. Sheep were more profitable than men, subsistence farming. Unfortunately capitalism being what it is the Australian sheep farmers soon were able to supply wool and mutton cheaper than the highland land owners could.
I think that Don Boudreaux is talking sense, but we do our ancestors a dis-service to ignore the fact that mistakes were made in the development capitism and that a lot pf people suffered as a result. Yeo and Gummer are just as much part of the Unacceptable Face of Capitalism as was the Duke of Sutherland, although I suspect all three reckon that they have done/did no wrong and the lot of the people of the UK improved as a result.
The choice of an early death through poverty and a slightly delayed death whilst feeding your children working in 19th century conditions isn't really a good choice nor does it reflect well on western consumers. So now a question for you. Do you think that capitalism is working well for those making clothes for UK consumers in Bangladesh factories or could things be improved for the workers?
*Part of the reason why "The English" are blamed by many for The Clearances despite many Clan Chiefs were just as deeply involved.
Boudreaux argues from history. Sadly, no one on the Left is understands what history is. That is, no one understands history apart from the need to update old photographs and news stories.
Guys, I think we need to distinguish here between free market capitalism and crony capitalism -
CAPITALISM VS CRONY CAPITALISM
"Free market capitalism can be defined as "a system wherein individuals are free to pursue their own interests, make voluntary exchanges, and hold private property rights in goods and services." Allowing consumers and producers to trade at mutually agreed upon prices, free market capitalism is a system characterized by voluntary rather than coercive exchange. In such a system, the role of government is limited: protecting individuals' basic rights to life, liberty, property, and association; providing a legal system for the enforcement of contracts; and defending individuals against internal and external threats of physical force.
By contrast, whether referred to as cronyism, corporatism, mercantilism, liberal fascism, or venture socialism, crony capitalism is simply the cooperation of government and business. While this cooperation benefits the involved business and politician(s), it generally hurts the politically and corporately unconnected. Furthermore, the power and benefits of crony capitalism can often lead to corruption, a fact which James Madison recognized when he stated, "Wherever there is an interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done, and not less readily by a powerful & interested party than by a powerful and interested prince."
The mechanisms of crony capitalism are numerous: Bailouts, stimulus, special loans, too-big-to-fail, favors, mandates, barriers to entry, political appointments, tax breaks, campaign contributions, 'sole-source' procurement, connections, grants, government-union cooperation, exemptions, government sponsored enterprises, political insider trading, and legal bribery.
Unlike in a free market capitalist system, under crony capitalism it is often more profitable for businesses to spend resources lobbying legislators for handouts in the form of grants, loans, or tax advantages, and protections against competition in order to increase their profits. In turn, the government's willingness to hand out special privileges promotes the politically well-connected rather than those who seek to earn the preference of investors and consumers based on merit. The gains of such activities usually accrue to the businesses and politicians involved at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. Consumers have to pay higher prices due to decreased competition, and taxpayers have to foot the bill for loans, grants, bailouts, and tax breaks. Thus, crony capitalism creates a system of privatized gains and "socialized losses." "
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/business-and-economics/free-market-capitalism-vs-crony-capitalism
It is crony capitalism that is causing the problems!!
Boudreaux argues from history.
Maybe he does at that but in this case at least, as I demonstrated, it's a partial history and thus inadequate.
Sadly, no one on the Left is understands what history is.
Thank you for the insight.
The food supply under threat
At least that will stop then worrying about the obesity epidemic.
Nov 4, 2013 at 5:40 PM | DaveB
Go on then, list all of the centrally controlled economies whose citizens were provided with more than they needed.
I believe that was the argument put forward.
lapogus at 9.03am wrote
The reason crop failure turned into a famine that lead to the deaths of one million people was the Corn Laws. Imports of corn were into the UK (which then included Ireland)were banned until the price reached a threshold level. That is why there were exports of potatoes from Ireland during the famine. Repeal of the Corn Laws not only ensured that famine never returned to Britain, but also ensured that the full benefits of rising agricultural productivity were passed onto the poorest.
DaveB at 9.58am wrote
Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, who saw the famine first hand, has explained what turned a minor food shortage into a famine. There were the twin factors of the British buying food to feed the forces fighting in neighbouring Burma AND wartime restrictions on trade between the Indian States. This created food price inflation, with the poorest unable to afford the food, whilst food producers made extraordinary profits.
In both cases a rigged market had the unintended consequence of enabling a few to profit at the expense of the lives of many.
I believe that was the argument put forward.
Then you believe wrong. I said only that Don Boudreaux omitted to mention the Bengal Famine of 1943 in the course of a letter in which that tragedy was IMO pertinent. If you wish to view that as a panegyric to Stalin or Mao or whoever, such is, of course, your right. But I'd recommend you do not exercise it too often.
Unfortunately, Bordreaux has missed one of the underlying factors which made large-scale food production possible.
High intensity food production requires large amounts of fossil fuels.
Mechanisation allows industrial scale agriculture, with the work carried out by tractors and various harvesters, all of which run on oil fuel.
The second factor is nitrogen. You can only get large harvests with intensive nitrogen fertiliser application. This is made by the Haber process, which fixes nitrogen from the air using a high temperature reaction with hydrogen . The hydrogen comes from methane. The world's nitrogen fertiliser production uses 5% of world natural gas production and 2% of our total energy usage.
Together, these mean that intensive agriculture grew with the rise of the fossil fuel economy in the early 20th century, and will not outlast the fossil fuel supply.
The problem is already starting to show as third world countries can no longer afford subsidised bread prices. You may not have noticed that the unrest in the Middle East started with food riots in Egypt.
Wonders never cease...EM outdoes himself. The bread prices in Egypt were subsidised. So when governmental subsidies were reduced, bread suppliers decided to exit the game. If the subsidies had not existed, producers would have switched to other types of grain, which give better yields in those conditions. Sooner or later, EM will complain that he never got the DeLorean that Thatcher promised him - because of global warming.
diogenes
Egypt is a command economy. The government bought the grain on world market and then passed it on to the bakers. They were then required to sell it at a fixed price.
In 2008 world grain prices began to rise faster than economic growth and countries such as Egypt found that they could no longer afford to buy grain dear and pass it on to their people cheap. Bread prices to the masses rose and by 2010 those unable to afford the rising bread price began to protest. The subsequent political turmoil then collapsed two governments and brought in the Army. The Army is stuck with the same economic realities as its predecessors, so the poor still cannot afford bread.
I include this link. It's a newspaper article, but with useful hyperlinks to more detailed reports.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2013/mar/06/food-riots-new-normal
diogenes
You might also find this of interest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/friedman-the-scary-hidden-stressor.html?ref=thomaslfriedman&_r=0
Nov 4, 2013 at 8:54 PM | Unregistered CommenterDaveB
I couldn't find your list.
More than anything else I feel disgusted and bored by the need to begin another phase of deconstruction of this madness.
This is pure guesswork and had no basis in fact even there was warming. If these Green dip-shits paid attention to anything in school other than dope and getting laid they would know that CO2 promotes plant growth, and of course there is NO warming happening.
They are ignorant and mad and my patience is giving out.
Grüss, omb
Re: Nov 4, 2013 at 11:49 PM | Entropic man
"In 2008 world grain prices began to rise faster than economic growth and countries such as Egypt found that they could no longer afford to buy grain dear and pass it on to their people cheap."
And do you know the real reason why that was, EM?
"Summary: The rapid rise in food prices has been a burden on the poor in developing countries, who spend roughly half of their household incomes on food. This paper examines the factors behind the rapid increase in internationally traded food prices since 2002 and estimates the contribution of various factors such as the increased production of biofuels from food grains and oilseeds, the weak dollar, and the increase in food production costs due to higher energy prices. It concludes that the most important factor was the large increase in biofuels production in the U.S. and the EU. Without these increases, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably, oilseed prices would not have tripled, and price increases due to other factors, such as droughts, would have been more moderate. Recent export bans and speculative activities would probably not have occurred because they were largely responses to rising prices. While it is difficult to compare the results of this study with those of other studies due to differences in methodologies, time periods and prices considered, many other studies have also recognized biofuels production as a major driver of food prices. The contribution of biofuels to the rise in food prices raises an important policy issue, since much of the increase was due to EU and U.S. government policies that provided incentives to biofuels production, and biofuels policies which subsidize production need to be reconsidered in light of their impact on food prices."
http://econ.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64165259&piPK=64165421&theSitePK=469372&menuPK=64166093&entityID=000020439_20080728103002
So govt. intervention has not only been massively driving up energy prices but also food prices.
And incidentally bio-fuels was originally a UN policy.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/7/21/drought-in-the-horn-of-africa.html#comment18752170
Steve Jones:
I couldn't find your list.
I have already replied to your comment. If you take the trouble properly to read my first remark, you'll see that it was correcting an error of omission on the part of Don Boudreaux. If you wish to read into that an endorsement of the Soviet Union under Stalin or Mao's China or whatever famine-struck polity takes your fancy, that is your problem, not mine.
Now let's move on. Good lad.
Nov 5, 2013 at 1:53 PM | Unregistered CommenterDaveB
Don't be patronising, there's a good chap. You do know what patronising means, don't you?
DaveB, please forgive my schoolboy humour, you deserve a more considered response. The subject is referring to the mess that centralised economies tend to make of providing their citizens with even the most basic essentials. There will be exceptions, as you rightly point out. However, the central premise stands.
Regards,
SJ
SteveJones:
The subject is referring to the mess that centralised economies tend to make of providing their citizens with even the most basic essentials.
I don't think this is the place to debate that question, on which we probably by and large agree in any case.
For the umpteenth time, my point was that, in a piece discussing 20th century famines, Don Boudreaux mentioned two of the most notorious (Ukraine, China) but not the third (Bengal, 1943) because IMHO it did not suit his argument. That is disingenuous.
He got - gets - away with it because, in part and in the west at least, that appalling tragedy has largely been excised, if not from the record then at least from collective consciousness. The source I cited suggests that responsibility for it rested almost entirely with the administration of the British Raj, which seems to have been appallingly complacent. That said, it exempts the British Army from that responsibility as its leadership did as much as it could despite civilian indifference and at times active opposition.
It matters here because the event discredits the notion that command economies alone lead to famine and the rather banal hypothesis that the "green" movement comprises essentially closet admirers of such polities. The truth is, in my view, both more complex and more sinister. To defeat the "Green" movement, it is first necessary to understand it.
Nov 5, 2013 at 7:43 PM | DaveB
You are correct, by and large we do agree and I think your last paragraph is spot on.
Regards,
SJ
thank you Marion - I hope EM has a proper model within which he can assess the content of these papers.
I have been out of internet range for a couple of days, having been grouped with the command economy supporters earlier I'd just like to say that DaveB has said much of what I'd have contributed. For the record as someone born before the current monarch came to the throne that even in the 60s and 70s I was always out of step with many of my peers in thinking socialism was a dead-end, but I'm also clear that capitalism can have victims too, but is the best way of improving the well being of the human race we can manage at the moment
marion, diogenes.
The trend to biomass fuel is as you describe. That started Egypt's problems. The immediate cause of the rapid rise in prices which triggered the food riots was simultaneous weather-related low harvests in the US, Asia and Russia. This triggered a worldwide grain shortage.
Now, how do you force the US to grow crops to feed Egypt? Indeed, should you do so?
Politicians in the UK are trying to manipulate the price of energy. Should they also be manipulating the price of food? In whose favour? Who pays?
There's a whole can of worms wriggling in the background here, especially with 7 billion mouths to feed and an extra 4 billion due to be born in the next 40 years. If you thought the energy cost debate was interesting, wait till the food cost debate reaches Britain.
"Politicians in the UK are trying to manipulate the price of energy. Should they also be manipulating the price of food? In whose favour? Who pays?"
Simple answers - the government should not manipulate the price of energy or food. if they do so, who pays? Obviously the consumer. Surely even EM knows that. The government should let the price mechanism act as a signal for farmers to grow more food or change crops - provided the EU regs permit them (another distortion) - and also to let energy companies enter the market. The recent decision to declare that future nuclear power will cost twice as much as current nuclear power ought to act as a signal for companies to enter the energy generation market in the UK. but then you get the idiotic soundbites from Milliband to discourage them. EM no doubt approves of trying to micro-mange economies - it works so well in North Korea.
"EM no doubt approves of trying to micro-mange economies - it works so well in North Korea."
Nov 7, 2013 at 12:11 AM | diogenes
No thank you. With both the world energy and food markets unstable and running on decreasing margins, I would regard neither as manageable by UK politicians.
I would be more interested in their contingency plans for a major UK energy shortage or food shortage, both of which are possible at short notice.
I lack your faith that market forces can stabilise the situation.