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this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2024
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I mean, the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers, and they're not doing it, despite the fact that they would still be wealthy beyond comprehension if they did.
We're asking them to do the bare minimum and utilize their wealth in a responsible manner, and they're not even doing that much.
I'm reminded of this line Citizen Kane:
Bullshit.
World hunger, which has in fact decreased drastically over the past century, is not a problem that money can solve, because cost is not the reason it persists where it does.
One major issue: food donations to poor areas tend to be hoarded and distributed unequally by the most powerful people in those poor areas.
So we’re one sentence in, and already we need to fundamentally understand local political dynamics and either use force to ensure equal distribution, or to change local leadership structures. This is already out of control.
You can't just throw money at the problem and expect it to just be solved. There are real underlying societal and infrastructure issues in a lot of impoverished countries that need to be solved in order for hunger to be solved. You could ship a billion tons of food to a single starving region and there would still be millions of starving people.
Additionally, simply handing out food would kill the domestic food industry (because who would buy food when billionaires are giving it away for free) and would make the country even more problematic.
You should know what you're taking about when you make ridiculous claims like this.
That's a strawman. No-one said "they should just, like, buy enough food to feed the hungry".
When people say it would cost x to solve world hunger, they are talking about those "underlying societal and infrastructure issues".
So, yes. Everything can be solved with money. You can hire people to "fundamentally understand local political dynamics", invest in research, pay to fund the programs that will enable impoverished regions to develop the means to build the infrastructure to feed themselves.
Just because this is the idea you have in mind for how to solve hunger, and it is, as you rightly stated, a fucking stupid idea, doesn't make it the only idea.
And those issues cannot be fixed simply by throwing money at them, making "the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers" a deeply ignorant statement.
And then the warlords steal the food and redistribute it as they see fit.
You're deeply naive about the reality of the circumstances in places where hunger is still a major problem.
The bottom line is, you can't truly solve world hunger until you solve world peace, and you can't solve world peace with money.
There are still places in the world where slavery is legal, for fuck's sake. Do you really, truly think things like this could still be true in 2024 if money and what/who you can buy/hire were actually the solution?
No, you are willfully misunderstanding my point.
Absolutely.
Throwing money at solving the surface layer issues / symptoms is moot, but yes, for every new layer of problem you uncover you can ask "so what are the causes for that" until you reach something that can be fixed wit money.
Og, and I do not believe that this has anything to do with world peace. The nations on earth without hunger problems aren't peaceful utopias either, after all. But on the other hand, hunger does seem to cause a lot of instability...
This is just a naive assumption.
The statement that a single billionaire's wealth can not only solve world hunger, but do it so easily as to compare it to a snap of the fingers, is frankly, comically absurd, and exposes not only a massive ignorance of the root causes of the starvation that is still occurring in the modern day, but even for those issues which CAN be solved with an injection of funds, a massive ignorance of just how MUCH funding it would take.
As one tiny example, the US, a single country, spends over 1 TRILLION on welfare, not once or in total, but annually. And a mere FOUR percent of Earth's population lives there.
Even the wealthiest human being on the planet's net worth is nothing compared to what it would take to solve even the small minority of issues cold hard cash can solve. You have no sense of perspective and scale on this.