Do you believe there are many hungry children in the world? If so, the New York Times thinks you may be suffering from confirmation bias. (cc photo: FMSC)
Last month, the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt posted an interesting interactive feature on confirmation bias. It’s a fun little game that illustrates something about how our minds selectively process information. (For what’s it’s worth, I correctly figured out the rule behind the game.)
Not so fun, I thought, were Leonhardt’s examples of confirmation bias in real life.
Most of us can quickly come up with other forms of confirmation bias — and yet the examples we prefer tend to be, themselves, examples of confirmation bias. If you’re politically liberal, maybe you’re thinking of the way that many conservatives ignore strong evidence of global warming and its consequences and instead glom onto weaker contrary evidence. Liberals are less likely to recall the many incorrect predictions over the decades, often strident and often from the left, that population growth would create widespread food shortages. It hasn’t.
Is rejecting climate science, though, really like having believed that unchecked population growth would lead to food shortages? Contrary to Leonhardt’s glib “it hasn’t,” food shortages are a serious problem in the world right now. According to the UN World Food Programme, “Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life…about one in nine people on Earth.” The WFP notes that about 3.1 million children die from malnutrition a year—and that one in four children on Earth are stunted by lack of food. That seems fairly widespread.
Unlike climate change denial, which if anything has exacerbated the problem of global warming, warnings about overpopulation may have had the intended effect of curbing population growth. China’s draconian one-child policy was directly inspired by the warnings of limits-to-growth advocates like the Club of Rome, along with numerous less-coercive family planning initiatives. Partially as a result of these programs, the global population growth rate declined from above 2 percent in the 1960s and early ’70s to close to 1 percent and falling today. Without this reduction in growth, the population would be about 2 billion higher today than its current 7.3 billion.
Would the world now be providing enough food for 9.3 billion people? That seems unlikely, given that it’s currently not providing enough food for 7.3 billion.
Of course, world hunger could be greatly reduced if not eliminated with a fairer distribution of global income and a shift in developed countries to a more plant-based diet. But how likely is this to happen when “widespread food shortages” are tossed off by the New York Times as the go-to example of the kind of thing liberals mistakenly thought would happen?
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
Who are these people that deny that the Earth has warmed? I’ve never heard of any. There are people like myself who know that the Earth has been warming for over 10,000 years & that Man has nothing to do with it, but no one is denying the warming.
From the UN Health site on stats:
“Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That’s about one in nine people on earth.”
From the UN Health site on stats:
“The vast majority of the world’s hungry people live in developing countries, where 13.5 percent of the population is undernourished.”
If you have data showing that food scarcity became more common as the population increased, I’d love to see it. The FAO data indicates that it’s become less common over the last 25 years, with undernourishment falling by more than 35% during a period in which the population increased by 35%.
http://faostat3.fao.org/browse/D/*/E
Contrary to the predictions of the 1970s, the world’s food production has increased faster than its population. Over the last 50 years, food production per capita has increased by 40%.
http://faostat3.fao.org/browse/Q/QI/E
Given the massive increase in agricultural productivity, it seems that population growth didn’t cause contemporary food scarcity — instead, it’s a result of economics: global wealth inequality, neoliberal market policies, ethanol and biofuel programs, increasing meat consumption, etc.
The important thing is issues of distribution, not population, which should have been focused on more directly.
As the saying goes: Capitalism: The unsettling belief that someone, somewhere, may still have enough to eat.
Bill, it sure isn’t capitalism that’s causing people to go hungry in places like Zimbabwe & Venezuela, is it, comrade?
Darren — stats show that undernourishment in Venezuela has fallen by around two thirds since the “Bolivarian Revolution” brought Chávez to power in 1998.
http://faostat3.fao.org/browse/D/*/E
If a 6% undernourishment rate in socialist Venezuela is an indictment of socialism, shouldn’t we read the 12% rate in Honduras as an even worse embarrassment to capitalism?
To get back to the original point of the blog post, it sounds like we’re in agreement that food shortages are primarily a result of politics and economics, and that the Malthusian predictions of the 1970s turned out to be misguided.
The term “food shortages” is misleading, as well as a common misconception. There is more than enough food to feed the world. The REAL problem (that mainstream media avoids like the plague) is *access* to that food, with *poverty* being the main obstacle to that access, as the last paragraph touches on.
The following paper is an excellent analysis of the global food “problem”: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/greenrevolution.pdf
@Darren- you would do well to read it, as you are woefully misinformed on this topic.
Darren – You know that man has nothing to do with global warming? Wow! I happen to own a bridge in lower Manhattan, and I can sell it to you for a really low price.
@ Matthew Cavalletto
Thank you for that site! Easy to read, accessible, objective.
Oh — and the silence it brought from “Darren” (standing on a United Nations banner, seriously, Dar?) is lovely.
Well done, sir, well done.
Matthew, scenes like this https://youtu.be/CEElyPpvBoQ or this https://youtu.be/pr2u4On4ZAI are the reality of Venezuela today. With oil prices dropping the days when Venezuela could import food to make up for falling domestic production are over. BTW, no comment on Zimbabwe?
John Q, I’m sure you do own a bridge in lower Manhattan, you’re the fool that bought the lie. Keep ’em coming pal.
Unless you guys are going to deny the last ice age or claim that cave men drove SUVs you can’t make a case for anthropogenic global warming. Here’s some real science for you. The Holocene is divided into 5 periods:
Preboreal (10.3–9 ka)
Boreal (9–7.5 ka)
Atlantic (7.5–5 ka)
Subboreal (5–2.5 ka)
Subatlantic (2.5 ka–present)
Of these the Atlantic was the warmest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_%28period%29 We’re past peak warming for this interglacial, the Earth is overall in a cooling trend. The warming of recent centuries hasn’t reversed that trend.
Darren 1 day ago: “Who are these people that deny that the Earth has warmed? I’ve never heard of any.”
Darren today: “We’re past peak warming for this interglacial, the Earth is overall in a cooling trend.”
Uh… By stating that the Earth is cooling, it would appear that these people who are saying that the Earth has warmed– the ones you’ve never heard of– are you.
EDIT: … it would appear that these people who are DENYING that the Earth has warmed…
The only reason you haven’t heard from me is that the moderator blocked my comment.
I take it back i didn’t see that it posted. Anyway, John, don’t ignore that I wrote “The warming of recent centuries hasn’t reversed that trend.” No one is denying that there has been recent warming.