"being stolen before they get it" - nonsense!

1) There is an X amount of food and Y number of people in India. 2) Someone is eating that food (let's assume nothing gets thrown out/rots because of corruption: someone who steals food eventually sells it and it gets eaten, not trashed)

Meaning: corruption does not change the supply and demand, so it doesn't impact the prices (total money that is charged for the food in the country). It only changes the hands which get the money. Nobody starves because of the food getting stolen unless, again, the stolen food is either trashed or ends up exported.

>. 2) Someone is eating that food (let's assume nothing gets thrown out/rots because of corruption: someone who steals food eventually sells it and it gets eaten, not trashed)

That is a simplification. It is both being stolen and it is rotting.

Even the article states that there is tons of food that is rotting/wasting away. If it doesn't mention it, I can give examples of food stock being wasted from as long back as, I think 1970-1980.

Also - Corruption DOES shift the supply curve so "corruption does not change supply and demand" is only true in the land of platonic ideals.

I think his point is stealing food redirects it those who need it and can afford it.

So the problem shifts from corruption to affordability. The free food program exists because they can't afford it. If we can fix the affordability problem, there won't be a need for a free food program and there by corruption related to it won't exist.

These people need to get jobs. But since they don't have it. You may by all means fix corruption and give them free food, but they will hungry again in the next six months. Where will you get free food from, then and till when?

It redirects food to people who have the buying power.

IIRC Mr. A. Sen won the nobel for showing that people starved not because of lack of food, but because of lack of purchasing power.

The wiki page suggests that his findings are being debated though, to be fair.

My google foo is also a bit literal at the moment, and I wasn't able to produce a result which explained what he won his nobel for.

How does it shift the supply curve? The food is getting bought from farmers anyways, for cash, they don't give a damn about if it is going to be sold to people in shops, distributed for free, or stolen.

Hmm.

The subsidy/pds is supposed to shift the price of goods down, so corruption does affect the intended price of goods by making them unavailable at the subsidized rate.

That's why I chose the supply curve. Correct me if I got it wrong.

There is no relation to the supply curve. Because there is no change in the price at which the product is purchased from producers.

Demand shifts of course (the overall price of the product drops because the stuff that wasn't supposed to make it to the market gets there, but free stuff disappears -> structure changes).

Ah yes, got it, you are correct. Thank you.

The supply curve is the amount of goods produced at x price.

Since x isn't being changed here for sellers, it doesn't move.

The demand curve does move because of the distorting effects of the subsidy/PDS, and then again because of corruption.

Your assumptions and your logic are faulty.

Assumption: Food isn't rotting in India. Google: 'Rotting Food India'

Your logic: Corruption/Theft doesn't change the price of a commodity. You are forgetting that the government has already bought the commodity. Now it is being sold again. This drops the price (still too expensive for the poor) which means that those who can afford food buy at a lower price.

Lower Price = Less Supply

This is elementary because the rice is being supplied once but sold twice. Therefore the farmers are being paid half of what they deserve.

Free stuff is considered as doing a favor.

Besides India is such a big country that monitoring these things is nearly impossible. With corruption rampant and lack of accountability, these schemes are designed to fail from their very inception.

What these people need is not food, may be they need it at the moment. But what these people need is a way to make a decent living, which nobody shows them how to- And often we come back and talk about hunger.

"Besides India is such a big country that monitoring these things is nearly impossible."

I disagree very strongly. Monitoring food distribution scales really well. You add monitors. That's it. If you want concrete examples of effectively monitoring things over large areas I can provide some.

If the monitors themselves are corrupt then the problem is not that somehow monitoring big things is impossible. The problem is corruption.

Edit: For sillysaurus, because he asked. Walmart effectively monitors food distribution over the US. Power companies effectively monitor the power grids over large areas. Electoral commissions (in some countries) effectively monitor elections over large areas.

What are some concrete examples of effectively monitoring things over large areas?

I am not convinced that this makes a useful point. "The problem is corruption" - sure. But adding monitors doesn't seem to address that issue; actually, adding bureaucrats and regulators (which India has in abundance) seems to exacerbate the problem by establishing petty fiefdoms. How many bribes do you have to pay to open a business?

Short of a massive cultural shift (the kind that only happens when millions of people get murdered), Indian society is what it is. Think of this as a game theory problem - you can't change the players, you can only change the rules of the game, and even that with only limited authority. What approach will accomplish the desired goals?

As an outsider, I get the feeling that an awful lot of Indian public policy starts with the assumption that humans are dutiful and honest. That seems like a problem.

You would be surprised to know, that a majority of the starving people in India are farmers or daily wage laborers doing construction work. The problem is not that people aren't working. It's that their profession doesn't pay enough be able to buy food at the market rates. It's a problem of economic disparity. Food prices fluctuate with the stock market and oil prices, while the poor who have nothing to do with that suddenly have so much lesser purchasing power. While a software developer on the other hand can easily absorb the impact and live without any change in his consumption.

> Because these people are starving? Is that not a good reason?

Probably not.

(1) Many of them aren't starving. (The system covers other people, who tend to crowd-out the actual starving.)

(2) The relevant question is "why are they starving". Feeding them typically solves the wrong problem and guarantees that you continue to have starving people.

(3) Such programs tend to reduce local food production, leading to more starving.

The law of unintended consequences doesn't care how good your intentions are. .

(2)

If you do not feed starving people you then have dead people. This is the end state we wish to avoid. Setting up a system so that you do not need to keep feeding them yourself is a good idea. It does not negate the need to feed them now to avoid them being dead.

> If you do not feed starving people you then have dead people.

There are going to be dead people no matter what you do. However, we can affect how many dead people there are.

My goal is to minimize the number of dead&starving people. Your strategy produces more dead&starving people than my strategy.

What's your goal?

I know that you think that "now" is different, but it isn't. Applying your strategy in the past produced starving people. Why should we keep doing that? ("this time" isn't different.)

I forgot another point, such programs always result in corruption which steals food money from poor people and gives it to rich ones. Why do you support that? (You don't get to point to the good that would supposedly happen if such corruption didn't happen. It does, so if you support the programs, you're willing to accept the corruption and its consequences.)

I don't think that your desire to feel good about yourself justifies policies that are as harmful as yours are.

You have presented a straw man argument.

My idea; feed them now and change the system so they are fed in the future.

Your idea; change the system so they are fed in the future.

You say that your idea creates fewer dead people (or, we should say since every person alive will die, fewer people dying of starvation) than my idea. I disagree.

"I don't think that your desire to feel good about yourself" Please, please, do not project your moralising onto me. I don't give a fuck how I feel.

For what it's worth, I find myself suspecting that you have the particularly Western faith (and it is a faith) in the mythical free-market as a solution to all problems of supply. I say this because I don't know if it's true or not, and given that I suspect it is, it's only fair to voice it so you can correct me (or not).

Late edit: You choose not to address our differing strategies, or correct any misapprehension I might have about yours (which, as above, seems to be the same as mine, except that I also feed people now) and instead spout more airy, unspecified junk about how my strategy (which is the same as yours, with the addition of food now as well) is harmful without explaining how. Fine. I didn't really expect an addressing of the facts. It's HN all over. Every problem simply must have a clever "hacky" solution that would read well in the Freakonomics blog and magically make everything better.

> You have presented a straw man argument.

Not at all. I've described what happens when the different strategies are implemented. Why should we expect anything different this time? If things are going to work out the same....

> "I don't think that your desire to feel good about yourself" Please, please, do not project your moralising onto me. I don't give a fuck how I feel.

You're right. I don't know why you're advocating policies that have such harmful effects. It was wrong for me to attribute to you a positive motive.

I didn't mention the free market and nothing that I wrote depends on a free market.

However, now that you mention it, I'll point out that poor people in the west are fat, not starving.

To quote another post earlier in this thread

> And this is actually a salient point - subsidy and direct-aid programs like this are never meant as a permanent solution to anything. Nobody is dumb enough to believe this. These programs buy time to find a systemic solution - because it's better to keep these people hobbling along while we try to fix the larger systemic issues that perpetuate their poverty, than to simply let them all die while we tinker with the knobs and switches.

> subsidy and direct-aid programs like this are never meant as a permanent solution

How long has this program been in place?

These programs waste resources so they're not available to solve the problem. In addition, their supporters and dependents fight to keep them around and will sabotage efforts to make them unnecessary.

That's why there are few things as long-lasting as temporary govt programs.

> Because these people are starving? Is that not a good reason?

Certainly not, if/when it's true that giving the free food causes more people to starve in the long run. Less misery is better than more misery, as sad as any misery is.

By this logic, the humane thing to do now is to create a super-virus that kills all humanity. No more human misery, ever. Thanks for that. :)

No, that would be more misery. The least amount of misery is the fewest deaths.

+100 for the reason !