Poverty and famines
by Amartya Sen · first published 1981
7mentions
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5HN commenters
2012–2019first – last mentioned
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…problem. What they really mean is that it's an economic problem. Markets are entirely compatible with the notion of an underclass that cannot put food on the table, even amid abundance. Refer to the (e)book "Poverty and Famines" by Amartya Sen for examples and analysis. Exporting food while part of the populace starves isn't a stunt reserved for communist countries. Thought experiment: there's a village with 100 peasants and…
on “Job destruction by robots could outweigh creation” ↗…Thomas Picketty, which has produced an abundance of material on the subject. FWIW Picketty seems to be much better at managing the internet battlefront, so it might be better to start with Sen's book "Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation" ($10 on kindle) and then judge what you see on the internet after having read Sen's argument. Sen was originally motivated to study economics when, as a boy,…
on “Building Better Bananas (2012)” ↗Analysis of the famines in Bangladesh and the role of speculation in them has been done by Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen, and the examples I've given are taken from his work Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation(1982). Regarding economics as a science, it is widely accepted by economists that it is not a precise science, and has no inviolable axioms like math, or anywhere…
on “Ask HN: Will capitalism survive the robot revolution?” ↗++ for Amartya Sen. I think he first covered this in the book Poverty and Famines, where he drives home the point that famines can happen even if food is available and even if food prices have not been driven up sharply. Modern famine is a failure of government (war is an obvious cause,…
on “China's Great Famine (2013)” ↗…Quoting Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen (sorry so long a quote but his work is fascinating and I'm interested to read other thoughts from this community )-- In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), a book in which he argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen also…
on “As crops rot, millions go hungry in India” ↗My reference for this is "Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation" (Sen, 1981), based on analysis of historical famines and the author's own experience in Bengal. It contributed to him being awarded a "economics Nobel". The…
on “Why a Free Society Needs a Free Money” ↗…in the case of the great Bengal famine but also modern famines generally are not due to a lack of food in the world but are a result of government mismanagement or war. [edit] I believe the book is Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation.
on “Churchill's policies to blame for millions of Indian famine deaths, study says” ↗