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Category: Policy

Published January 29, 2013

Hunger and Malnutrition: Data and Statistics

Last week, The Guardian‘s Poverty Matters blog had a great post linking to a number of hunger and malnutrition datasets.

There you can find a link that will allow you to download the entirety of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ food security indicators. Those are great data for anyone looking to write a term paper on food security, as the country-level annual data roughly span 1990 to 2012.

When I tweeted a link to the Guardian‘s post, Filip Spagnoli, a Brussels-based writer and philosopher, linked me to a post on his blog where he has a bunch of statistics on hunger.

Published January 29, 2013

Hunger

This week’s theme in my food policy seminar is hunger — hunger in the developing world, but also hunger historically in the US — which is a huge topic to cover in roughly 60 minutes of lecturing and 90 minutes of class discussion.

Fortuitously, the last week has been very fertile in terms of (discussions of) hunger online. A coalition of about 100 British charities has launched the If campaign, whose theme is “Enough Food for Everyone If” and is arranged around the four themes of foreign aid, corporate taxes, land grabs, and transparency.

A major point in favor of the If campaign is that it recognizes that the world produces enough food, but that not everyone has enough food because of distributional issues. In other words, the If campaign has taken Sen seriously by not suggesting that the world should produce more food as a solution to the hunger problem.

Continue readingHunger
Published January 28, 2013

Chronocentrism and the “End of History” Illusion

We measured the personalities, values, and preferences of more than 19,000 people who ranged in age from 18 to 68 and asked them to report how much they had changed in the past decade and/or to predict how much they would change in the next decade. Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future. People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. This “end of history illusion” had practical consequences, leading people to overpay for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences.

That’s the abstract from a new article in Science by Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert (yes, that Daniel Gilbert), and Timothy D. Wilson. The emphasis is mine.

I love it when science Science provides strong evidence in favor of a relationship I have posited on this blog.

Continue readingChronocentrism and the “End of History” Illusion