> Same as getting through the energy crisis, we can overcome the food crisis, one obstacle at a time.

Aboriginal Tasmanians survived crisis after crisis for tens of thousands of years, until one arrived they weren't equipped to deal with.

Iain Banks would call it an Excession or "out of context problem".

For any past-3-years timespan currently, you'll get the right picture only by looking at the numbers in light of consideration from the pandemic.

It's not that rates are low now, it's that they were temporarily high for three years, during the pandemic shutdowns and backlogged demand from that.

(Same goes for the apparent recession in 2022. That was mostly an artifact of the pandemic numbers, comparing 2022 to a 2021 that was artificially high from time-shifted backlogged demand from 2020.)

>I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit.

Standing nuclear armies 600K+ soldiers strong enforcing blockades, embargoes, price caps, bans, sanctions etc are not the most shining indicator of a free market that will correct shortages to equilibrium...

How can you price gouge something like Sri-Lakha, that has no currency to trade with? This whole mental model just has no grasp for the moment when the rear of the car falls off..

Hire its citizens. No money means you'd benefit by sending them money.

But inequality is a different problem than getting through crises. It should be addressed while leaving the production incentives intact. For example, progressive and/or negative income taxes.

I'm not sure i follow. How exactly will the people "awarded with outsized profit for addressing the shortages" help those starving due to lack of affordable food? "The market" doesn't work for goods whose demand is inelastic, such as food and medicine. Letting people starve "to allow the market to function" is cold blooded greed.

the market does work for goods whose demand is inelastic

at the cme wheat costs 8.38 dollars per bushel, 31¢ per kg, and 1 kg of wheat is roughly two person-days' worth of food, 57 dollars per person-year

(of course an actual diet needs to be more varied and therefore slightly more expensive, but even just cooked wheat will extend your survival time under famine conditions by quite a lot)

let's start by dividing the cases to consider into ① cases where people have substantially more than 57 dollars per year to spend on food, whether in the form of production, money savings, foreign aid, or salable goods, and ② cases where they don't

we can subdivide case ① into case ①ⓐ where there are price controls, so that people who sell wheat at substantially higher prices than, say, 50¢ per kg, are subject to criminal prosecution, and case ①ⓑ where they are not

in case ①ⓑ you do not have a famine, and people do not starve, because even if delivering the food is very difficult and dangerous (①ⓑⅰ), due to pirates and collapsing currencies and whatnot, it will be profitable (for somebody anyway); maybe you'll have one merchant selling wheat at 2 dollars per kilogram and making an outsized profit, while another made worse choices and would need 3 dollars per kilogram and therefore has to take a loss from competing with the first merchant. and if it is not difficult and dangerous (case ①ⓑⅱ) then someone will sell wheat at 60¢ a kilogram in the supermarkets and there will be no outsized profits but still nobody will starve

in case ①ⓐ you might get lucky, maybe getting wheat into the country and distributed will not be difficult and dangerous (①ⓑⅱ), and so there's no shortages even though there are price controls. but if shipping costs go up, or bandits steal half the wheat in transit, or supermarkets can't open because of rioting, (①ⓑⅰ) selling wheat will be unprofitable at the legal price, and so merchants will do it as little as possible, and people will starve due to lack of not only affordable food but any food. wheat will rot in silos or be fed to livestock in order to avoid prosecution

in case ②, where people have less than 100 dollars per year and so can't afford to pay for the food they need to stay alive through voluntary exchange, their only hope for survival is to seize it by force, price controls or no price controls. this is a frequent occurrence throughout human history, and of course there's a whole continuum from a hypothetical state of perfect liberty, through transparent flat tax rates, through mafia protection rackets, all the way to raiding bands of thuggees and the holodomor.

systems that are closer to the totalitarian end of this spectrum tend to have frequent famines because, again, people starve due to lack of not only affordable food but any food at all; the holodomor is one example, but other examples are the irish potato famine, the ethiopian famine caused by the derg, the frequent famines in india under the british raj, and the greatest famine in human history, the great leap forward

because the cold-blooded-greed-powered market is, generally speaking, how people get fed in the first place, if you want to reduce the number of people who starve, you will let it function

i mean, unless you have a better replacement for the cold-blooded market, already debugged and working, but the track record of the proposed alternatives so far includes many of the worst atrocities in human history

And while the demand for food in general might be somewhat inelastic, the demand for wheat is very elastic, because you can substitute.

(Also keep in mind that we have huge buffers because of animal husbandry. If plant matter becomes too expensive, people can switch to eating it directly instead of feeding it to livestock first.)

I absolutely agree, and admire your comprehensive explanation.

While the market may sound greedy, you can't legislate away human nature. People just won't work for free.

If you also want to address inequality, then by all means implement progressive/negative income taxes. But mess with production and distribution incentives (like implementing price controls) and you have a recipe for disaster.

yes, and even more intrusive ways of addressing inequality such as subsidizing food prices with tax money can be effective without creating a perverse incentive to restrict the food supply precisely when it's most needed

Just a heads up, your usages of unicode circled characters (eg. ①) makes the comment hard to read. At least on my computer, the circled characters are the same approximate size as regular characters, but due to the circle the actual number/letter ends up being so small that they're unreadable without additional zoom.

i appreciate the heads up

what platform are you using

Firefox on windows. I also checked chrome and it's better, but deciphering the glyphs is still hard due to low dpi.

hmm, do you have a hidpi display

i wonder if it's using a bitmap fallback font that it ought to blow up by 2× or 3× because of hidpi, but isn't

> hmm, do you have a hidpi display

nope, standard DPI (ie. 100% scaling). On my phone it looks perfectly fine.

> I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit

This is dangerous, fantasy thinking detached fromt the real world.v

If there is shortage of food today, you plant wheat today, it will be ready to eat in 7 months.

If it's not the right time to plant, it could be a year. By that time, people will be dead already.

Now, we don't even have idle land ready to plant, and if you have to invest in greenhouses or similar to increate productivity, farmers don't have that kind of money and even if they did capacity would take years to come online.

How is my thinking dangerous? Not allowing profit is dangerous, because it won't attract suppliers.

High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to reduce their consumption, in favor of ones more in need.

You can address some of the future price uncertainties with a futures market. That way, you can see what the price you'll get in 7 months' time, and decide what you should plant.

But if a place has no means of growing food and no money, why stay there?

> High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to reduce their consumption

By dying. There is a famine in madagascar right now.v

> in favor of ones more in need.

Do you need 1 kg of bacon more than a poor family in madagascar needs 10kg of wheat that was used to feed your bacon?

> How is my thinking dangerous?

Because men than need to feed their children might grab torches and pitchforks

Free market does not store food hust in case of a. once in a decade famine. Free market has never been effective at disaster responce in any country on earth.

there is a famine in madagascar right now because the government imposed price ceilings on rice, flour, sugar, cooking oil, gas and cement last april

http://country.eiu.com/article.aspx?articleid=662033449&Coun...

predictably this resulted in widespread food shortages

by contrast, all other poor countries are not experiencing famines right now

> by contrast, all other poor countries are not experiencing famines right now

Well, apart from basket cases like North Korea perhaps. But that fits right into your explanation.

In Romania, there is a wave of people installing their own electricity production in response to the higher prices.

This will reduce electricity demand, and therefore prices, including for other countries.

This is an example of government getting out of the way (and deciding against the former oligopoly of energy suppliers).

https://www.energynomics.ro/en/anre-the-number-of-prosumers-...

Let's examine this claim - currently there are 20,000 people and there is projection that it will eventually reach 100,000. Am I correct in understanding that we are talking about 0.1% of the population today and 0.5% of the population in two years?

A greater percentage of population in Britain own and ride horses - so I could write about a great opportunity of having transportation independent of governments, fuels, etc.