-----Original Message-----
From: James Rogers [mailto:jamesr@best.com]
Sent: Saturday, August 29, 1998 12:38 AM
To: extropians@extropy.com
Subject: Re: Hollywood Economics
At 02:40 PM 8/29/98 +1100, Avatar Polymorph wrote:
>Doubtless the 50 million Americans living in poverty appreciate having
>some power, food and answering machines, while 80% of the wealth lies
>with the top 10%. Ever do a graph of what that looks like? Perhaps you
>could debate it with the starving millions across the world. Doesn't
>America store enough grain to feed the world for a decade in the event
>of a nuclear war? Now it's asking other countries to do that for it.
The United States is responsible for roughly 1/3 of the world's food production and virtually every country in the world relies on US agriculture for part of their food supply. The US stores very little for emergency purposes (and for most scenarios, doesn't need to). Your "50 million Americans living in poverty" is a highly suspect figure. I grew up among the lowest strata of the "poverty" segment in the US population (i.e. I lived in a shack on an Indian reservation with marginal utilities access and none of the luxuries that most "poor" people have, such as TV), but nonetheless we never starved. Food is abundant in this country, even for the poorest of the "poor". The truly starving in this country are starving because of reasons completely outside the socio-economic realm.
<<major snip>>
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com