What you were agreeing with is the proposition that people might starve, by implicitly claiming that some people in the United States already do starve. Where? Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here? Who? There are people in the United States who cannot buy food out of their own family budgets, and there are children who are not well fed by their neglectful parents, but I don't think there is any adult who actually lacks enough food to live. Where is the example?
The WHO's figures are that in 2002, in the US, about 7400 people died of "nutritional deficiencies", broken down into 4300 deaths from "protein-energy malnutrition" and 2500 deaths from "iron-deficiency anaemia". That's a total death rate of 2.5 per 100 000 population that year. It's not one of the major causes of death, it's less common than suicide and far less common than diabetes, and it is indeed much more common in many other countries (the rate in Cameroon, for example, is five times higher) but it's a little higher than the estimates for more socialist countries like Canada, Sweden, Japan, and especially Finland. (But not France.)
If that rate were typical over our lifetimes, which seems optimistic (surely the rate was much higher in 1932, and for that matter in 2009) that would add up to a few hundred thousand deaths by starvation over the last 80 years.
These rates don't include deaths in which malnutrition was only a contributing factor. Malnutrition grossly increases the risk of death from infectious diseases, for example.
If you think that out of those hundreds of thousands of deaths, not a single one was caused by anything other than mental illness, you are the one with the mental illness. In fact, I think that just by posting your comment, you have demonstrated that you are really out of touch with the reality of what's happening in what I assume is your own country. You need to adjust your estimates of your own competence downward by a few orders of magnitude in order to have a chance of having an opinion that is worth something. Right now you're living in a dream world.
Figures from the World Health Organization Global Burden of Disease report from 2004:
I was looking for the same WHO statistics you refer to while you were writing your reply. I see we both found the same landing page, but you are referring to figures that thus far neither of us can find on a specific webpage giving figures for the United States. Where did you get them?
Using some of the keywords you kindly provided, I Google and see lower mortality figures for the United States, by more than an order of magnitude, I think. It also appears that most cases of malnourishment in the United States are secondary to disease states. Remembering that my dad was paralyzed and unable to swallow for the last six years of his life (he was fed by a gastric tube, with the help of a relative) brings to mind examples of people who could starve to death in the United States, although they wouldn't be able-bodied people who were not eating because they can't afford to get a meal.
(The numbers I am finding on the above site, which claims to be based on WHO statistics, don't back up the numbers in your reply, which evokes my curiosity about how we can a primary source for the official figures.)
Let's keep following up on this. I'll ignore your invidious personal criticism [smile] in the interest of getting the facts on the issue. What magnitude of problem are we talking about in the United States by the standard WHO definitions, which I accept as an authoritative count of deaths by malnutrition in each country? How many of the United States deaths are secondary to neglectful caregivers of minors (a problem I acknowledged in my first reply) and how many are secondary to adult medical complications (an issue we both forgot in previous replies)? How do the United States figures compare to specific countries elsewhere in the world?
It sure ought to be possible to get the WHO figures directly from the Web, but I'm still searching. The keywords in your reply were helpful for finding other sources.
The NationMaster number is 0.056 per 100 000 population per year. I don't see how to square that with the 50× higher numbers from the WHO spreadsheet.
Thanks for the reminder of adult medical complications.
The US figures seem to be in the normal range for OECD countries, although maybe toward the high end, and they are much lower than the worst countries (typically those in the middle of a war).
Thanks. I learned something about finding WHO statistics with your help.
I think the conclusion here is that people in the United States who die of severe malnourishment do so mostly because they have diseases that impair their eating (something I didn't consider at all in my first reply). So I learned something else today.
In the overall context of this thread, I am not particularly worried that the economic crisis we are now in is going to push my family, or even much poorer families, into starvation. People will still buy and sell and trade and (in North America) mostly eat very adequately.
On the other hand, it's still totally implausible that the answer to "Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here?" is "No," even if you modify the question to exclude not only starvation due to insanity, but also starvation due to the powerlessness of children and starvation that's secondary to some other illness. The odds ratios would have to be hundreds of thousands to one.
On the contrary, thinking about the figures some more, I'm sure that by far the typical case of a United States person who is reported to the WHO as having starved to death is an old person with other severe medical issues who couldn't digest food, or who ordered his physicians to cease tube-feeding as a way to die "naturally." (I know of cases of each, upon further reflection.) Such deaths are an individual phenomenon, regrettable to be sure, but not a societal phenomenon in a country where eating without paying out of pocket is a charitable service enjoyed by millions each day.
If we were talking about typical cases, we wouldn't be talking about starvation at all, or about the US; we'd be talking about people in India dying of heart attacks and pneumonia. I don't know enough about how cause-of-death coding works in the US to know whether you're right about the cause-in-fact of typical deaths coded as due to nutritional deficiency.
But your claim wasn't that starving to death was atypical. Surely we can all agree that it's atypical. Your claim was that it hadn't happened even once in our lifetimes, except due to mental illness. That's the claim that outraged me.
It's true that there are a lot of charitable services in the US. There are people they don't reach, as I'm sure you know.
My first reply to you consisted of a series of questions, asking for more information (which you kindly provided). No, my claim was that the current economic crisis, however severe it becomes, will not make starvation typical in the United States. It is atypical now, it was atypical during the Great Depression, and it will continue to be atypical everywhere where people can trade freely and participate in economic exchange without government interference. The last mass famine in a country that should have had climate and agricultural advantages enough to prevent famine was in China, during the Great Leap Forward (around the time I was born). That famine had such a high death rate that the missing people of certain ages in certain regions were readily apparent when China conducted a census decades later in the 1980s.
What you were agreeing with is the proposition that people might starve, by implicitly claiming that some people in the United States already do starve. Where? Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here? Who? There are people in the United States who cannot buy food out of their own family budgets, and there are children who are not well fed by their neglectful parents, but I don't think there is any adult who actually lacks enough food to live. Where is the example?
It's true that that's mostly phrased as questions. I didn't provide answers to the questions of "who" and "where is the example", but I was (and remain) outraged at your false assertion that "there is [not] any adult who actually lacks enough food to live," and the accompanying questions. The total death rate from undernutrition in the US is somewhere around 20 people per day, if the WHO is to be believed.
I don't think there is any place where people can participate in economic exchange without government "interference". Maybe in Somalia and parts of Afghanistan and São Paulo, but I think it's more a question of the form of government than of its absence.
Amartya Sen argues that there has never been a famine in a democracy, regardless of climate or lack of agricultural advantages. For a while I thought perhaps the 2001 economic collapse in Argentina was a counterexample (read some Economist articles from 2001 and 2002) but since I've moved here, I've heard that although starvation was more widespread than normal, it didn't rise nearly to the level of a famine.
So I agree with your reduced claim: people in the US are not going to suffer a famine unless the country descends into open violence or despotism. Deaths from undernutrition are presumably rising, because the current economic collapse is hitting the poorest people hardest, just as it did here in Argentina. Some people, as pj speculated, will starve. But it's not going to be like the Great Leap Forward, or the regularly scheduled famines under the British Raj, or the famine from Ukrainian collectivization. Cancer and heart disease will probably still be the leading causes of death.
What you were agreeing with is the proposition that people might starve, by implicitly claiming that some people in the United States already do starve. Where? Has anyone in the United States, and I mean anyone, actually died of a cause attributable to undernutrition caused by anything other than mental illness in the lifetime of anyone posting here? Who? There are people in the United States who cannot buy food out of their own family budgets, and there are children who are not well fed by their neglectful parents, but I don't think there is any adult who actually lacks enough food to live. Where is the example?