Economics Questions

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

tunk — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 03:39:16 GMT

claudius:
If cutting the budget of the dod by 11 percent saves 80 billion dollars, that's an empirical fact.

Except that wasn't the only claim being made. According to the paragraph, "the US alone could accomplish" the feat of moving all the food to the people who need it every year simply by cutting the defense budget. Solving world hunger is as simple as that!

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

Aristippus — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:33:48 GMT

@LogisticEarth

We're not talking about everyone becoming vastly wealthier overall (which is what happened in the West), but merely having enough to survive.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

nirgrahamUK — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:44:46 GMT

The US government should cut spending on defence.
Yet it should not increase foreign aid.

Give private charity a chance.

Do you have any idea what global annual spend by private charity is even under present conditions?

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

Autolykos — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:42:37 GMT

Bert:
Meat is not a neccassary source of protein as you can get protein from many sources, and a lot of people (especially in this country) intake more protein than they need daily because they eat meat.

I did say that, in the real world, protein comes from a variety of sources, didn't I? That is, it doesn't have to come from meat at all.

Do you happen to know what happens to excess protein that's taken in? I ask because I'm not sure myself.

Bert:
In terms of production, the grain fed to cattle could be fed to people and could help more starving people than it would take if you bred cattle for food. The overall energy used to produce a pound of beef is higher than that of grain.

Here, here, and here.

Cattle are hardly the only food animals around. There are also pigs, sheep, chicken, turkey, many different species of fish and crustaceans, etc. - and that's hardly exhaustive.

Bert:
The fallacy in this is that humans need to eat meat to be healthy, the meat itself is the want, not the need. Outside of the OP, if people did not eat meat you could feed the world with the grain and water that would have been fed to cattle for meat.

Strictly speaking, you're right - humans don't need meat per se to be healthy. What humans need to be healthy are certain amounts of certain macro- and micronutrients. Many of those happen to exist in many different kinds of meat.

Here's some additional information on how much grains cattle typically consume. According to this, it's recommended to feed a cow no more than 1-3% of its body weight in grains per day. Making a conservative assumption that all cows on Earth are fully grown (roughly 455 kilograms), then no more than 14 kilograms of grains should be fed to it per day. Multiplying that times 365 days per year and by the total number of cows in my thought experiment (two billion), we arrive at a figure of 1.022 *10^16 grams of grain each year being fed to all cattle. This is well under the total amount of corn and wheat produced by the world in 2009 - according to the Oklahoma State University link I provided earlier, that figure is about 1.5 * 10^18 grams. There's a roughly two-order-of-magnitude (or 100-to-1) difference between this figure and what two billion fully-grown cows would need for a year. In other words, the grain needed to feed those cows would constitute only 1% of the total corn and wheat grown by the entire world. So it seems like the issue of grazing land would be more important here.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

Groucho — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:36:30 GMT

tunk:
There's enough food grown to give every single human alive enough to eat every day. Know how much it would cost to move all that (already existing) food to where it needs to be to feed everyone? $80 billion a year. The world spends more than that on the military EVERY WEEK. The US alone could accomplish it with a 11.7% cut in Defense spending.

I know there's a fallacy here, but I can't quite put my tongue on it. Help me out?

I'm not sure which specific fallacy it is called, but there seems to be a presumption that the United States government ought to be spending $80 billion on providing food transportation. This of course ignores the question of whether anything in the quote is true, other than 80 billion being equal to 11.7% of "Defense" spending.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

Neodoxy — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:22:59 GMT

I'm sure that you could feed that many people with, perhaps not that little money, but at least something fairly close to it. It would be negligible compared to world GDP. At the same time this would keep these people in poverty and continually increase the weight of the utlra poor on the world as their numbers would rise exponentially as events would unfold which would be like malthusianism without the essential food check.

This is all assuming that there's no resistance from local governments, which there could well be in the hungriest of nations in Africa where they can use food as power against other areas.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

LogisticEarth — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:52:50 GMT

RE: Malachi - population is a function of food supply. Of course there is enough food to feed everyone on the planet. But people are growing. If you feed them so they are satiated, they will want to have sex. This is what happens to people who are productive enough to have a caloric surplus and attract a mate.

BS, you're sounding like Malthus there. Perhaps in ancient agrarian societies or animal populations, but in our contemporary world, the richer the poplation gets, the LESS they reproduce. Why? Because people are acting agents with goals. In developed societies, children are expensive; they require food, housing, education, etc. With cheap and effective birth control available, it makes economic sense to have fewer children. This is why you see developed nations fall down to replacement birth rate or less. The only area that's really lagging behind in this is Africa, because it's had next to no capital accumulation, although it's slowly getting there.

Check out this TED talk by Hans Rosling concerning economic development and population growth rates:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

(I think that's the right link, I can't confirm it right now)

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

Smiling Dave — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:30:30 GMT

I find it hard to believe that all that needs to happen in order for world hunger to be cured forever is a budget cut for the DoD.

It didn't say forever.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

claudius — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:06:52 GMT

I don't think you understand the structure of arguments. If cutting the budget of the dod by 11 percent saves 80 billion dollars, that's an empirical fact.

Read the paragraph again. There is no argument being made.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

Malachi — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:41:56 GMT

@thread

population is a function of food supply. Of course there is enough food to feed everyone on the planet. But people are growing. If you feed them so they are satiated, they will want to have sex. This is what happens to people who are productive enough to have a caloric surplus and attract a mate.

spending $80 billion or whatever on food and transpo would make food and transpo harder for everyone else to afford. Plus they subsidize their competition.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

Bert — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:24:19 GMT

Autolykos, let me play the vegan advocate.

This protein comes from a variety of sources, but one of the major sources by far is meat from livestock. Now livestock themselves need either grazing land or animal feed. In terms of grazing land, this source indicates that about five acres, or about two hectares (a hectare is 2.47 acres), of land can support one or two full-size cattle (a head of cattle is one cow). The average beef cow weighs about 455 kilograms and produces about 286 kilograms of beef (source). An ounce of beef seems to contain about seven grams of protein on average (source), and an ounce is equal to about 28 grams, so that gives us an average of 0.25 grams of protein per gram of beef. So an average beef cow produces 71,500 grams of usable protein. That's more than one person needs in a year (21,900 grams).

How many beef cows would be needed to support the minimum protein requirements of seven billion "average" people? A little over two billion. Interestingly enough, the number of cows in the world currently seems to be at least 1.5 billion, which is pretty close. Then again, there are many other animals which people can and do eat. But just out of curiosity, if there were two billion cows on Earth, and all of them were grass-fed, how much grazing land would be needed? Given the above, the answer is about 4.34 billion hectares. How much total land is there on Earth? According to this, there's about 14.8 billion hectares. So nearly thirty percent of Earth's land surface would be needed for cattle grazing to support seven billion "average" adults' protein needs - and that's just their needs, not their wants.

Meat is not a neccassary source of protein as you can get protein from many sources, and a lot of people (especially in this country) intake more protein than they need daily because they eat meat.

In terms of production, the grain fed to cattle could be fed to people and could help more starving people than it would take if you bred cattle for food. The overall energy used to produce a pound of beef is higher than that of grain.

Here, here, and here.

The fallacy in this is that humans need to eat meat to be healthy, the meat itself is the want, not the need. Outside of the OP, if people did not eat meat you could feed the world with the grain and water that would have been fed to cattle for meat.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

LogisticEarth — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:17:41 GMT

To LogisticEarth: Well when people say "feeding the world's poor", they're generally referring to Africa, the least developed continent and the one with the poorest people. Considering how harmful the current Western policy of food handouts and subsidies has been to Africa's development, if we actually gave them enough to feed their entire population (and any growth that occurred therein), things could only get worse.

While I don't disagree that the current way that food aid is distrubuted to sub-saharan Africa and other poor regions of the globe is very disruptive, framing your argument in terms of "continents" isn't really helpful. Africa has a huge number of problems, and it's not all about them "sitting around and popping out babies". The food aid exacerbates and helps perpetuate the problem, but it isn't the source. See my above post. This instability is in many ways due to statist colonialism and the creation of artificial nation-states that lead to ongoing instability and warfare.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

MadMiser — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:57:27 GMT

To LogisticEarth: Well when people say "feeding the world's poor", they're generally referring to Africa, the least developed continent and the one with the poorest people. Considering how harmful the current Western policy of food handouts and subsidies has been to Africa's development, if we actually gave them enough to feed their entire population (and any growth that occurred therein), things could only get worse.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

LogisticEarth — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:53:39 GMT

Conditional reasoning from shaky premises to BOOM the $80 billion number pulled out of someone's arse. I'm not sure there is a name for this specificaly but I'm certain whoever wrote this, if pressured, would fail to explain $80 billion.

I've see such figures at $80 billion or $120 billion thrown around as what is needed to "feed everyone on the globe". This includes infrastructure, the food itself, staffing, etc. Someone did sit down and come up with the numbers in some kind of semi-rational way.

There's ONE major problem though: Sure you can buy trucks and build a road to get to starving people in the impoverished areas of the globe. However, that doesn't change the fact that many of these areas are EXTREMELY politically unstable. The problem isn't a lack of food, it's a lack of peace and secure property/human rights. There's a reason many areas have famines and poverty, and it almost always links back to violence, tyranical state, and lack of property rights. This all drives away investment, both for commerce and charity.

Re: Let's play "spot the fallacy"

jmw — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:21:41 GMT

Conditional reasoning from shaky premises to BOOM the $80 billion number pulled out of someone's arse. I'm not sure there is a name for this specificaly but I'm certain whoever wrote this, if pressured, would fail to explain $80 billion.