but the great famine was very much man(Mao)-made... of course the economic boom was a great achievement, but it's different from what you're suggesting I think.

It was greatly worsened by Mao's policies. But a famine would have happened anyway. There's no alternate history where different government policy in China could have completely averted the famine of 1960. It was a very poor year agriculturally.

There had been famine in China previously in 1942 (1 million dead), 1936 (5 million dead), 1929 (5 million dead), 1906 (25 million dead), 1877 (10 million dead), and millions dead from starvation during the Taiping rebellion of the 1860s.

Arguably, quite a few of them were man-made, or at least man-aggravated from warfare. This is not intended as apologia for Mao. His policies likely resulted in at least a million more deaths than might have otherwise happened. I just want to show that famine was routine in preindustrial agricultural societies.

> His policies likely resulted in several million more deaths than might have otherwise happened.

Perhaps more than several million when estimates are between 15 and 55 million dead.

Just imagine all the coffins / mass burials during COVID and times that by thousands. Must have devastated whole communities and scared them for life.

Mass burials during Covid? I think you might be misremembering.

> which has been used for more than 150 years by city officials as a mass burial site for those with no next-of-kin, or families who cannot afford funerals.

Interesting. Good to know and also not the impression I got from just "mass burials".

> Normally, about 25 bodies a week are interred on the island, according to the Associated Press news agency. But burial operations have increased from one day a week to five days a week, with around 24 burials each day

> It is not clear how many of the dead have no next-of-kin or could not afford a funeral.

That's a pretty important question to answer. Any idea?

And that was early enough in understanding COVID that it would make sense to do this kind of small mass burial with hazmat suits even if the death rate was unchanged.

> The drone footage comes from Hart Island, off the Bronx in Long Island Sound, which has been used for more than 150 years by city officials as a mass burial site for those with no next-of-kin, or families who cannot afford funerals.

> Normally, about 25 bodies a week are interred on the island, according to the Associated Press news agency.

> But burial operations have increased from one day a week to five days a week, with around 24 burials each day, said Department of Correction spokesman Jason Kersten.

They always did mass burials at this site. It just increased velocity during COVID. Mass burials did not start because of COVID.

Has there been any famous industrialized capitalist countries during famines? I'm curious how they fared.

The Great Irish Famine springs to mind, caused by the policies of the United Kingdom, which arguably invented both industrialization (hello, steam engine) and capitalism (hello, Adam Smith).

I think it would be hard to argue that Ireland at that time was a "great, industrialized society" of any sort.

It was run by such a society - the British. Capitalism was even cited as a justification at the time. If the "market" decided to export food while the Irish starved... well, thats ok. Market knows best.

It essentially mirrored the Holodomor - an occupying power exports all the food from an agrarian colony during a bad harvest. Famine happens. Occupying power shrugs. People wonder if it was a covert attempt at ethnic cleansing. Probably it was.

The difference is that the Irish famine was oh, just a big whoopsie while the Holodomor was an evil plot.

Other than the reality of British occupation, I think most of what you said was provably wrong.

For example...

> The difference is that the Irish famine was just a big whoopsie while the Holodomor was an evil plot.

Have you heard of Charles Trevelyan? He was in charge of relief efforts during the famine, but he had a different take on the issue which informed British policy. In his words:

“The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

The Famine was a natural disaster which would have led to some amount of starvation and death, but that natural disaster was GREATLY enhanced by British elites who saw it as a convenient and "natural" solution to Irish overpopulation.

In many ways it shares the hallmarks of the Holodomor, with "we care about trade" used as a cover for genocide.

You seem to be agreeing with everything I wrote apart from the sarcasm.

In 1760 the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, in 1801 Ireland joined with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom, and in 1845 the great famine began in the United Kingdom, specifically in Ireland. I'm afraid this feels like moving the goalposts; famine is always going to hit agricultural areas the hardest in any trade-capable country, because even though everyone else still needs food, everyone else still has things to trade for food (and if the agricultural laborers still had anything to trade, there wouldn't be a famine to begin with). It's a bit like saying that the Dust Bowl didn't happen in the industrialized nation of the United States because it happened in Oklahoma.

Fact is that the famine could have easily be averted or at least reduced to a huge extent by the government.

Post-WW2 Germany comes to mind.

Also post WW1 Germany or rather post armistice pre-Versailles when hundreds of thousands died and millions suffered from malnutrition due to the allied blockade (which they maintained “just in case” Germany decided to restart the war..)

I'm not an agronomist, but even back then, couldn't grain be stored for a year or two to buffer a disaster?

China had, since the 1860's, been referred to as the "sick man of the far east", a play on words from a common monicker for I think one of the tzars.

Mostly, this referred to the Qing government, in terms of the extensive corruption, pervasive opium addiction (thanks in part to Britain and the opium wars), etc.

Poor people rarely had much to eat to begin with, and bad years would often mean normally thin meals would be stretched too far. Until the communist revolution, farmers were serfs. After, they operated in collectives, but still were under orders. In both cases, they had little incentive to work, as they didn't keep the food they grew. It belonged to someone else. 1 in 3 children nationwide had stunted growth from malnourishment, almost certainly worse in the countryside. Farmers simply didn't have a surplus of food to store through an entire bad season.

After the 1970s, a combination of infrastructure projects which improved irrigation, some new cultivars of plants that had better yields, and changes to the operations of the farming communes to operate a bit more capitalistically, farmers were able to generate actual surpluses of food.

The original "sick man of the East" was Ottoman Turkey.

>There's no alternate history where different government policy in China could have completely averted the famine of 1960. It was a very poor year agriculturally.

Except the one where China hasn't destroyed much of its industry, or alienated much of the world, and thus can trade for food.

Your examples are illustrative as well, inspite of your intention - the next three famines you list (1942, 1936, 1929) all occurred during a civil war in which Mao was a major player on one side, and at a time when part of the country was at war with/under occupation of imperial Japan.

Also loosely related, the Homo Deus book has a chapter about humans conquered technically what it classifies as the major challenges that we attributed to gods, including hunger, plagues and war. It mentions that nowadays, if any of these things cause human destruction it is a political thing and someone somewhere wants that to happen.

Technologically, what do we have that stops famines from happening?

Like, are we really immune from some mega drought occuring somewhere that mostly depends on rainfall? Or is that just extremely unlikely to happen, especially at a large scale?

We can move food around. Famines historically tended to be regional; bad climate, or natural or man-made disaster, devastating food production in an area. Before the 19th century moving enough food from another region, or even from another continent to address that local shortfall, was much more challenging.

If the 1930s American dustbowl had happened to a densely populated non-industrial society, it would probably have been one of the worst famines in history. Agricultural yields fell by like 50% for several years in the affected region. But they just brought in food from California and Saskatchewan. It was still a disaster, of course.

The Russian famine of 1921 was one of the first times industrial societies really mobilized in that way. At the peak grain grown in the USA and donated to the USSR was feeding about 1 in 10 Russians during the famine. One of the largest logistics operations in history up to that point. It's why Herbert Hoover was nominated for the Nobel peace prize five times.

There are theories which say that nuclear war, due to firestorms in cities transporting soot into the upper atmosphere, would lead to nuclear winter, which would lead to a global famine:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pMsnCieusmYqGW26W/...

However, the papers which predict such scenarios have been criticized as being too pessimistic:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jnDibtfvWNHLucf4D/actually-a...

A lot of this probably depends on who "we" refers to. I would imagine that many regions are not immune to a mega drought.

For the West specifically, wealthier nations can kind of just export the shortage by paying more for supplies that would go elsewhere.

The West also feeds most of its crops to animals, so that is an area for relatively easy reduction in an emergency. 67% of what is grown in the USA is animal food. But that proportion is dramatically lower in places like India.

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

We can now buy grain in bulk and ship it anywhere through the world.

No we are not immune. At all

Famines are primarily a political problem, not a technological problem. Our technology has improved agricultural productivity and distribution efficiency, but that doesn't matter when men with guns are stealing food from starving people.

is it even that blatant? it's in shipping containers that aren't going to be released to the starving because of this simple concept known as paying for things.

It often is that blatant. Even when international donors send free food it often ends up getting seized by government forces or militant groups.

This was the first thing that popped into my head too as I read Homo Deus a few months ago.

A very accessible book for all. I recommend it. It’s not perfect but it’s a good, easy read compared to other books touching on the same subjects.

That's what modern Chinese politics expert call "the mandate from the heavens". As long as the average (Han) Chinese gets richer, they won't mind the oppressive regime and the collectivist nature of the CCP (welding doors shut for COVID, workers as replaceable cogs).

But should the prosperity slow or stop, the CCP knows it'll lose the "mandate". That's why the Evergrande collapse was such a big deal [0], and the reason the Yuan will never replace the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. The Chinese regime has to "save face" and show progress at all costs. All while having a negative brain drain, gender imbalance and worsening demography.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/24/investing/china-evergrande-gr...

Yup, the real estate market is absolutely insane. If you rent out a place you should be approximately covering the mortgage with it--but over there in many places that's off by an order of magnitude.

Despite that the government is still encouraging real estate.

"mandate from heavens" is the oriental version of "consented of the governed" in the West.

Europe had a world war ending in 1945. It was quite prosperous in a few decades; in part, it never ceased to be.

If you ask me, world war is on the same level of personal danger.

I think Germany is probably the most impressive one. Lost both World wars, had to deal with the East West unification and is now the biggest economy in Europe which is crazy to think about.

Eh almost none of WW1 was fought in German soil so they came out of WW1 with most of their economic capacity intact minus several million young men.

And World War 2 saw a complete leveling of most of the country…

But then massive investment by the US.

Sure but parent comment is blowing off a lot of factors working against Germany’s spectacular recovery lol. “Several million young dead men” is a bit of an understatement too

but, owing to cultural changes, it turns out that women can also perform the work necessary for an economy to function.

Losing millions of your own population isn’t something that can be brushed off.

It’s not like those women were doing nothing before, so something else gets deprioritized.

We also had a mass-hunger event in Eastern Romania in 1947, partly as a result of the war and partly because of a dreadful drought season.

That's a strange way to frame a lack of post war progress. In most countries the experience of anyone born before the war who was starting their own family in 1960 was at a speed that is hard to imagine. China is remarkable for its continuity.

China went into WWII as a pre-industrial barely post-feudal society in the middle of a civil war.

My grandfather died of smallpox and I'm in my 30s. A lot of things we think of as history were really not that long ago.

On the other side of things too, predictions out to 2100 felt like weird sci-fi until I realised my kids could be alive and in their 80s.

I think this is a significant reason why authoritarian figures like Xi and Putin have strong support from the populace.

"strong support from the populous" How do you know when the populous can't even say what is on their mind without their families getting slaughter?

The typical person in china don’t fear that, at least in private conversation. The problems only really appear when you have a broad audience.

> The last famine they had ended around 1961.

That was a manufactured crisis too. Stupid rules and practices were imposed and they cause carnage.

Disagree--the deaths were not remotely evenly distributed. My wife lived through that--to her it was lean times, not starvation. That's because she's from Shanghai, not the countryside.

What are you disagreeing about?

Disagreeing that everyone knew someone who starved.

The very uneven distribution of the deaths means that many of the survivors don't know anyone who died from it. My wife knows it as a time of hunger, not a time of death.

I think the change in circumstances in some Middle Eastern countries has been even more dramatic. Places like Abu Dhabi were small towns with houses made of mud/palm fronds in the 1960s.

Now think of people in so many other countries who have seen the exact opposite in their lifetimes.