That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.
It will be, or, it's slowly happening already. Climate change is triggering water and food shortages, both abroad and on your doorstep (California wildfires), which in turn trigger mass migrations. If a richer and/or more militarily equipped country decides they want another country's resources to survive, we'll see wars erupt everywhere.
Then again, it's more of a logistics challenge, and if e.g. California were to invade Canada for its water supply, how are they going to get it all the way down there?
I can see it happening in Africa though, a long string of countries rely on the Nile, but large hydropower dams built in Sudan and Ethiopia are reducing the water flow, which Egypt is really not happy about as it's costing them water supply and irrigated land. I wouldn't be surprised if Egypt and its allies declares war on those countries and aims to have the dams broken. Then again, that's been going on for some years now and nothing has happened yet as far as I'm aware.
(the above is armchair theorycrafting from thousands of miles away based on superficial information and a lively imagination at best)
I was in Egypt a while and there's no talk of them invading Sudan or Ethiopia. A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar.
The main military thing going on there - I was in Dahab where there are endless military checkpoints - is Hamas like guys trying to come over and overthrow the fairly moderate Egyptian government and replace it with a hardline Hamas type islamic dictatorship for the glorification of Allah etc. Again it's not about reducing scarcity - more about increasing scarcity in return for political control. Dahab and Cairo are both a few hours drive from Gaza.
> A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar.
The rest is fees from the Panama (EDIT: Suez) Canal and tourism. Getting into a war, particularly with a country on the Red Sea, is suicide. (Also, the main flash point between Egypt and Ethipia has receded since the GERD finished filling.)
and a bureaucratic one as well. in Germany, they want to trim bureaucratic necessities while (not) expecting multiple millions of climate refugees.
lot's of undocumented STUFF (undocumented have nowhere to go so they don't get vaccines, proper help when sick, injured, mentally unstable, threatened, abused) incoming which means more disease, crime, theft, money for security firms and insurance companies, which means more smuggle, more fear-mongering via media, more polarization, more hard-coding of subservience into the young, more financial fascism overall, less art, zero authenticity, and a spawn of VR worlds where the old rules apply forever.
plus more STDs and micro-pandemics due to viral mutations because people will be even more careless when partying under second-semester light-shows in metropolitan city clubs and festivals and when selling out for an "adventurous" quick potent buck and bug, which of course means more money pouring into pharma who won't be able to test their drugs thoroughly (and won't have to, not requiring platforms to fact check will transfer somewhat into the pharma industry) because the population will be more diverse in terms of their bio-chemical reactions towards ingredients in context of their "fluid" habitats chemical and psycho-social make-ups.
but it's cool, let's not solve the biggest problems before pseudo-transcending into the AGI era. will make for a really great impression, especially those who had the means, brains, skills, (past) careers, opportunity and peace of mind.
Your first link says "With a score under 5, Russian Federation has a level of hunger that is low."
The current situation with Russia and China seems caused by them becoming prosperous. In the 1960s in China and 1990s in Russia they were broke. Now they have money they can afford to put it into their militaries and try to attack the neighbours.
Russia is a massive grain producer and exporter. One of their biggest health issues right now is obesity (from those cheap grains) with 60% of the adult population overweight, and growing. Furthermore, obesity has actually been an issue for their recruiting effort (there's a lot of running in war).
I would wager that states such as Russia and others misallocate resources, which in turn reduces productivity. Worse yet, some of the policy prescriptions stated above would further misallocate scarce resources and reduce productivity. Scarcity doom becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. This outcome is used to rationalize further economic intervention and the cycle compounds upon itself.
To be explicitly clear, the US granting largess to tech companies for datacenters also counts as a misallocation in my view.
Have you tried opening the links? They show Russia at developed country level in terms of food insecurity (score <5, they don't differentiate at those levels; this is a level mostly shown for EU countries); and a percentage of population below the international poverty line of 0.0% (vs, as an example, 1.8 % in Romania). This isn't great — being in the poverty briefs at all is not indicative of prosperity — but your terrification should probably come from elsewhere.
- They export a lot of natural resources but don’t have a strong manufacturing base. They don’t have high tech, they don’t export many manufactured items to developed countries. It’s a mob run country, resources are easy to extract.
Russia has quite large tech companies (compared to EU, which is dominated by US tech). For software think Yandex, VK, Playrix, Kaspersky, etc in addition to lots of software talent. With hardware, don't nuclear reactors, rockets, aircraft still count as high tech?
And they are out manufacturing the combined west on pretty complex stuff like missiles, air defense systems, drones, artillery. Plus, due to sanctions, their civilian industrial sector has grown so much that's theres a shortage of facilities (not to mention labor).
When I looked through their major exports it was mostly centered around natural resources. You are right there are some spots like developing reactors in other countries but in net not much is going well for Russia economically. Yeah they had to start making more things internally due to their invasion but they are not exporting those goods.
But again, I don’t see them out manufacturing the west on military equipment when some of that equipment is getting overrun easily by 40 year old western equipment. It’s still a poor nation being run by the mob with some shining spots.
That doesn't mean much on its own. Their per capita GDP is still low.
Also arguably their GDP figures are worth even less than Ireland's. A huge proportion of Russia's economy is tied in military production (and huge proportion of that is funded through debt).
If you make a rocket worth $1 million and then blow it up the next month that cost is obviously included in GDP but it's literally the equivalent of burning money/productivity.
Their debt to GDP ratio was 14.6% at the end of 2024, a decrease from 2023. US is 123.1% of GDP while Ireland is at 42.7%. And PPP is the number that matters - its one of the big factors which governs quality of life, at which price you can produce and sell widgets, bushels, etc. And btw, that guns/butter calculus also applies to the US, etc.
> Their debt to GDP ratio was 14.6% at the end of 2024, a decrease from 2023
Allegedly almost half of their defense budget since the war began was funded through private forced loans issues by banks directly to (effectively state owned?) military contractors. So that's not reflected in their military budget.
Also I doubt Russia could borrow a lot on the international markets even if they wanted to. Certainly not cheaply (like the US or especially Eurozone countries)
> And PPP is the number that matters - its one of the big factors which governs quality of life
Again... Russia's GDP per capita is still quite low (even if significantly higher than nominal).
Also if your nominal GDP is inflated by defence spending and energy exports and you multiply it with PPP (i.e. consumer price index) what exactly do you get?
Generally low prices indicate that the country is poor overall.
> its one of the big factors which governs quality of life,
PPP adjusted GDP per capita? Really? That's certainly not the best indicator of those things (even if there is strong correlation overall).
Do you think a median person in Ireland is 30% better off than the average Swiss or 2x better off than the average German?
Anyway, going back to Russia. If e.g. $100 comes in into the country through energy exports and is spent making bombs and other equipment what fraction do you think trickles down to the local economy?
No, no, just no. I don't care what the website says. People in Russia are quite economically depressed. You might want to visit and talk to real people instead of web pages. Visit the Far East.
Yes, and anyone saying Russia isn’t poor either has not done those things or is blind/deaf or unable to comprehend what those people are saying, or possibly not interested in the truth.
"Global warming may not have caused the Arab Spring, but it may have made it come earlier... In 2010, droughts in Russia, Ukraine, China and Argentina and torrential storms in Canada, Australia and Brazil considerably diminished global crops, driving commodity prices up. The region was already dealing with internal sociopolitical, economic and climatic tensions, and the 2010 global food crisis helped drive it over the edge."
Gaza seems mostly to be about who controls Israel/Palestine politically. Gaza was reasonably ok for food and housing and is now predictably trashed as a result of Hamas wanting to control Palestine from the river to the sea as they say.
South Sudan is some ridiculous thing where two rival generals are fighting for control. Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at the moment?
No, not really... the origin of Gaza conflict is in Zionists confiscating the most fertile land and water resources.
That's why Israelis gladly handed back the Sinai desert to Egypt, but have kept Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, Shaba Farms, and continuously confiscate Palestinian farmlands in the West Bank.
There is nothing arbitrary or religious about which lands Zionists are occupying and which they're leaving to arabs.
Completely false and simplifying a complicated history to present a very one sided view.
The most fertile lands are in the west bank. They were under Jordanian control and could have been turned into an independent Palestinian state, but weren't. Israel "accidentally" got them in the 6 days war, and were happy to give them to Jordan back to "take care" of the Palestinian problem, but they refused.
The places that Israel have the majority of the population in Petah Tiqwah, Tel Aviv and the region were swamp lands, filled with mosquitos, that were dried over many years and many deaths by Jewish farmers.
So you are saying Hamas would have same domestic support if Gaza was economically at the level of e.g. Slovenia? People who complained about "open air prison" caused by Israeli "occupation" even before Oct 7 would disagree with you I think.
Even in Europe extremists are propped up by promise of "cheap energies" from Russia.
I guess if you dont see the link this is not the place to explain it.
Also the "open air prison" effect was a result of trying to reduce attacks from Gaza. For example before the 2008 war there were more than 2000 rockets launched from Gaza into Israel.
That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.