Category Archives: Essays

World War II, Food Insecurity, And the Modern Situation.

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The lack of sufficient food and outright famine was widespread problem in World War II although it is not something most Americans are aware of. Typically, the urban areas had it worst. This was partially because those in the countryside were growing their own food and partially because of German policy. Take the “Hunger Plan” for example……

The German “Hunger Plan” called for “the annihilation of what the German régime perceived as a superfluous population (Jews, and the population of Ukrainian large cities such as Kiev, which received no supplies at all); extreme reduction of rations for Ukrainians in the remaining cities; and reduction in foodstuffs consumed by the farming population.”

Now this plan was not fully implemented, but there were massive famines in the Ukraine. And from everything I have read, those in the countryside faired far better than those in urban areas in part because it was impossible for the Germans to get farmers to grow food for them and at the same time prevent the farmers from feeding themselves. Also, disruptions in supply lines from the fighting impacted the urban areas that needed to import their food a lot more then it impacted the rural areas that grew the food. We can see this same dynamic (urban famine, rural areas doing comparatively better) all over Europe.

One example would the be the “Great Famine” in Greece. As Wikipedia puts it (emphasis mine)…..

The nutritional situation became critical in the summer of 1941 and in the autumn turned into a full-blown famine. Especially in the first winter of occupation (1941–42) food shortage was acute and famine struck especially in the urban centers of the country. Food shortage reached a climax and a famine was unavoidable. During that winter the mortality rate reached a peak, while according to British historian, Mark Mazower, this was the worst famine the Greeks experienced from ancient times. Bodies of dead persons were secretly abandoned in cemeteries or at the streets (possibly so their ration cards could continue to be used by surviving relatives). In other cases, bodies were found days after the death had taken place. The sight of emaciated dead bodies was commonplace in the streets of Athens.

The situation in Athens and the wider area with its port, Piraeus, was out of control, the hyperinflation was in full swing and the price of bread was increased 89-fold from April 1941 to June 1942. According to the records of the German army the mortality rate in Athens alone reached 300 deaths per day during December 1941, while the estimates of the Red Cross were much higher, at 400 deaths while in some days the death toll reached 1,000. Apart from the urban areas the population of the islands was also affected by the famine, especially those living in Mykonos, Syros and Chios.

There are no accurate numbers of the famine deaths because civil registration records did not function during the occupation. In general, it is estimated that Greece suffered approximately 300,000 deaths during the Axis occupation as a result of famine and malnutrition. However, not all parts of Greece experienced equal levels of food scarcity. Although comprehensive data on regional famine severity does not exist, the available evidence indicates that the severe movement restrictions, the proximity to agricultural production and the level of urbanization were crucial factors of famine mortality.

We can read similar things about the Dutch famine during World War II. Again, going by Wikipedia (emphasis mine) …..

Food stocks in the cities in the western Netherlands rapidly ran out. The adult rations in cities such as Amsterdam dropped to below 1000 calories (4,200 kilojoules) a day by the end of November 1944 and to 580 calories in the west by the end of February 1945. Over this Hongerwinter (“Hunger winter”), a number of factors combined to cause starvation in especially the large cities in the West of the Netherlands. The winter in the month of January 1945 itself was unusually harsh prohibiting transport by boat for roughly a month between early January 1945 and early February 1945. Also, the German army destroyed docks and bridges to flood the country and impede the Allied advance. Thirdly, Allied bombing made it extremely difficult to transport food in bulk, since Allied bombers could not distinguish German military and civilian shipments. As the south-eastern (the Maas valley) and the south-western part of the Netherlands (Walcheren and Beveland) became one of the main western battlefields, these conditions combined to make the transport of existing food stocks in large enough quantities nearly impossible.

The areas affected were home to 4.5 million people. Butter disappeared after October 1944, shortly after railway transport to the western parts of the Netherlands had stopped in September due to the railway strike. The supply of vegetable fats dwindled to a minuscule seven-month supply of 1.3 liters per person. At first 100 grams of cheese were allotted every two weeks; the meat coupons became worthless. The bread ration had already dropped from 2,200 to 1,800 and then to 1,400 grams per week. Then it fell to 1,000 grams in October, and by April 1945 to 400 grams a week. Together with one kilogram of potatoes, this then formed the entire weekly ration. The black market increasingly ran out of food as well, and with the gas and electricity and heat turned off, everyone was very cold and very hungry. In search of food, young strong people would walk for tens of kilometers to trade valuables for food at farms. Tulip bulbs and sugar beets were commonly consumed. Furniture and houses were dismantled to provide fuel for heating.

In the last months of 1944, in anticipation of the coming famine, tens of thousands of children were brought from the cities to rural areas where many remained until the end of the war. Deaths in the three big cities of the Western Netherlands (The Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam) started in earnest in December 1944, reaching a peak in March 1945, but remained very high in April and May 1945. In early summer 1945 the famine was brought quickly under control. From September 1944 until May 1945 the deaths of 18,000 Dutch people were attributed to malnutrition as the primary cause and in many more as a contributing factor.

There are a lot of other similar stories that could be told about World War II but the bottom line is that food scarcity was an issue in many areas during World War II and it always seemed to hit hardest in the urban areas. Now I think to a lot of people this is sort of like announcing that water is wet. Who would expect anything differently?

But the fact that the experience of World War II accords with people’s natural expectations is precisely the problem. The things that enabled rural areas to do better during times of food shortages at the time of World War II no longer hold true and yet I don’t think people have updated their thinking to account for the changes.

As Chelsea Green’s “A Short History of the Agricultural Seed” says (emphasis mine)……

These changes didn’t “take” with farmers overnight. First of all, many of these inputs were expensive, and most farmers were not operating on a cash-intensive system—they produced all or most of their own fertility, feed, and seed for their farms. Pesticides, nitrogen fertilizer, and even tractors wouldn’t become commonplace on North American or European farms until after World War II, and even later in other parts of the world. The main source of fuel on the farm was the grain and hay produced on-farm for horses. It’s hard to believe now that only 100 years ago, even in countries that were rapidly industrializing, most of the population lived on farms that were largely self-sufficient, breeding their own animals and growing their crops from seed they had grown.

I don’t think many people have fully internalized how unprecedented modern times are compared to most of recorded history. Urban areas have always been vulnerable to the collapse of complicated supply lines since the time of the Bronze Age collapse. Rome famously lived in fear of its grain supplies being cut off just as much as Great Britain feared submarines. But at the time of World War II a farmer in Great Britain could feed himself even if there were not enough famers in Great Britain to feed the largely urban population of what was one of the most urbanized countries in the world at the time. But now a farmer cannot feed himself without the aid of a long and complicated supply line anymore then a city dweller can.

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Some Thoughts on Preparedness

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I know a good man who has some serious health problems that were sadly predictable. He worked for a long time in a very dusty environment. He knew that was a health risk and whenever his son helped him he made him wear a respirator. He had the equipment to protect himself and he had the knowledge that it was dangerous. But for whatever reason, he did not make use of those things.
You see that a lot. There are people who know that smoking is dangerous but only get serious about quitting after they get lung cancer. There are people who know that that tree work is dangerous but only become serious about safety after their brother is killed by a falling limb. It is human to know something, to have no real doubt that what you know is true, and yet to still fail to act on it.

The book of James mocks those who profess to have faith and yet fail to act on it. The same sort of logic can be applied to knowledge. We all dam ourselves by what we say we know and being flawed as we are, we can never totally avoid it. But it is worth making an effort to avoid condemning ourselves by what we say we know.

This is a particular danger for me because I am a very judgmental man. I look at the middle class in Lebanon and wonder how they can be crying in the newspapers about how they losing all their savings. Didn’t they realize they were living in a country that is a byword for instability? How could they have money in the bank but no food in the pantry? I feel the same way about the middle class panic buying in the shops in South Africa because they are afraid that the riots might cause supply disruptions. You live in Africa and you are not prepared for the stores to be empty for a few weeks?

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How Come The EPA Emergency Guidelines On Using Pool Shock To Purify Drinking Water Are So Unclear?

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Today’s lecture is on the difference between understanding the reasons why authorities tell you to do certain things rather than simply being content with what they say. The authority in question for this particular lecture is the EPA and their instructions on how to use pool shock to disinfect water.

Now before we start I want to make it clear that I am not out to bash the EPA on this particular issue. I think it is a good thing that some bureaucrat took the time to go through all the steps and all the committees that it took to get this on a public facing federal website. It is true that it is poorly written but good writers are hard to come by and I imagine that what good ones the EPA had were needed for higher profile subjects. But fundamentally, I think it is a good thing that a federal agency is letting the world know that it is okay to treat drinking water with pool shock in the event of the emergency.

The problem that I have is that some (many?) people who are interested in preparedness are simply content to accept that “the EPA says it is okay” without understanding why the EPA says it is okay. I would think if you were interested in being prepared you would want to know why the EPA thinks it is okay and how it works rather than be simply content with “the government says so.”

So we what we are going to do is pick apart the EPA instructions to try to figure out “why” they say what they do. Our first step is to look at the EPA directions as they are retrieved on 7/17/2021 (they could change them and probably should make them a little clearer).

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A draft Primer On Critical Thinking

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I started writing a primer on Critical Thinking for those unfortunate souls that I was tutoring. I never completed it because it did not fit in an obvious way with the subject at hand and also because it was clear that learning by reading was not going to be the best way to teach this subject. But if you are interested in my half completed attempt to explain critical thinking in a simple enough manner for young people can you can read below the break.

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10 Paragraphs

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A few years ago, I wrote a short story on a lark. It was not good but in my judgment it was not terrible. It was easy to write compared to serious non-fiction of comparable length so I figured I would do it again when I had some spare time. That may still happen sometime, but if it does, it will not have been easy. I have now gone through ten drafts (actually, eleven but one of the files is corrupted and I can’t look at it) and almost all of those drafts were pages and pages of writing.

You would think that if you already know what happens, figuring how to tell it should not be that hard particularly if you are not too concerned about quality. And it is not like I have been going though all these drafts because the events in question have been changing. ON the contrary, in all of the drafts, nothing about the basic facts of the story change. All that changes is how I try to tell those facts.

Even though it is my own writing, I actually found in interesting to go back and review the different ways I tried to accomplish this over the years. On the off chance that others might find it interesting as well, I have put the first paragraph (or the first and second if the first paragraph was really short) of each draft I have access to with some commentary below the jump.

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A Rant On Japan’s Demographics.

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The end of the modern culture is one of those things that most people can see coming but few want to acknowledge. Our culture’s ending is guaranteed by college educated populations failing to reproduce at rates sufficient to sustain the population. In the end, this failure means that modern culture must end, unless it can sustain itself parasitically on a non modern culture that is fecund enough to both sustain itself and the burden of a modern culture. But based on all available evidence, modern culture is very successful at supplanting whatever traditional culture it comes across if given a level playing field. For this reason, it seems unlikely that modern culture will ever be able to moderate its own success in a manner that would enable it to be successfully parasitical.

Granted, that message of doom and gloom is not mainstream. But it is the only conclusion supported by simple math and observing what is going on around us in the world. Anyone who is capable of understanding basic logic and is aware of the world around them should be able to understand it for themselves. At least, that is what I would like to think.

In reality, it is apparent the people struggle mightily with basic logic and they are not at all keen on observing the world around them. This has recently been rubbed into my face by the reaction to Tyler Cowen’s recent musings about how the world might “stop depopulating.” Cowen’s musing are banal and even a little delusional. But at least his musings acknowledged the basic mathematical fact that this has to stop at some point or the human race will cease to exist. Nonetheless, his comment section was overrun by people mocking or otherwise uncomprehending why Professor Cowen thought “depopulating” was a problem. Apparently, simple math is a form of logic too deep and complicated for most of his readership to comprehend.

One point that was repeatedly made in the comment section particularly got under my skin and is the occasion for tonight’s rant. And that is the idea that people have been predicting for a long time that demographic issues were going lead to an economic catastrophe for Japan and yet Japan is still going strong. I have seen this argument advanced many times over the last few years and yet rarely do I see anyone explain why this is logically and observationally an absurd argument.

To rectify that, I thought I would throw together a brief explanation of why the idea that “Japan shows the demographic decline is not a problem” is absurd.

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COVID Deaths and Demographic Realities

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Let’s try to only use data from sources that are pro-covid apocalypse, to try to offset my personal bias somewhat:

USA Deaths per 1,000 people in the USA

Note the data for 2020 (8.88) is a pre-covid projection – we should expect it to be higher when the real numbers come in. The question is, how much higher? According to The Conversation, which is using CDC data, in July deaths of any cause were 8-12% higher than it was projected. That was in July – should we assume that death rate continues for the rest of 2020, or did the death rate from COVID decrease over the year? Well, according to NBC, it dropped off heavily for the rest of the year, even during the fall “surge”. This shouldn’t be surprising given widespread reports from the medical establishment that the death rate is falling across all age brackets.

Notably, NYS did it’s best to spread the disease rapidly, getting most of their cases over with in the beginning of the year and mostly avoiding the 2nd season surge:

OK, so how should we estimate the percentage of increase in deaths over the whole year? Well, if you eyeball the chart, it looks like the later half of the year had about half as many Covid deaths. Let’s pick mid-range of The Conversation’s estimate of 8-12%, and say we had a 10% increase in deaths in the first half of 2020, and 5% in the 2nd half. Average that out over the whole year, and you have 7.5%. Let’s assume a grim Nov/Dec round that up to 8% for the whole year. According to the UN estimate for the USA in 2020, they were thinking we’d have 8.8 deaths per thousand. If you increase 8.8 by 8%, you get 9.5 deaths per thousand. This is a “normal” death rate when my parents were growing up. It’s only a bit higher than when I was growing up:

Now consider demographics. Obviously your deaths per 1,000 will be expected to be higher in a group of 1,000 elderly people than it would be in 1,000 people who are young. There has been huge increase in the ratio of people 65 years old and older since the time of our parents, see below. You’ll notice the age projections on this graph closely align with the death rate projections from the UN above.

So what does this all mean? It means that with a even with an older population, and a global pandemic, folks in general no more likely to die in the USA today than they were in our parent generation. In fact, it’s only because we have such a high percentage of elderly that the death rate even manages to match the 1970’s. According to data from the CDC, (and many other sources), the vast majority of deaths have occurring in individuals over 65 years old:

Using the data provided by pro-covid apocalypse sources, it’s reasonable to believe that “the world we live in today” is actually still much safer than it was in our parents’ generation, and that disease-related fatality surges are an unavoidable consequence of having an aging population. Diseases like COVID-19, which disproportionately impact the elderly, would have had almost half the impact in the 1950’s than they have now. They likely would not have even caused a ruckus.

Right now the percentage of the population over 65 years old is at about 17%. As that number continues to climb, it means that the percentage of deaths increase for even milder illnesses will go up. If our nation has become so soft that we are no longer able to tolerate the death rate that our parents grew up with, we should keep in mind that the death rate is projected to climb much higher than it currently is over the next 50 years, even discounting pandemics. If you feel this warrants drastic changes to society, you should plan on having to make the same sacrifices from now on until the end of your life.

Aftermath

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The big question prior to this election for me was who was living in reality and who was living in a delusional world? Ironically, it appears that the person with the best grasp on reality was Donald Trump’s own personal pollster.

You can see a comparison of predictions here.

Of course, conservatives are up in arms about the results regardless of the fact that Trump did far better then was predicated. Part of that is just the emotion of moment and of course the media is blaming Trump from stirring up those emotions without any solid proof. But while I could wish that Trump was more professional, the media is as usual doing a disservice to the country by focusing on that.

The real reason many conservatives are so sure they have been had is because of this…..

Not even pretending anymore

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for it. But the media will treat anyone who raises any questions about this as being an enemy of Democracy and this will only convince the rank and file that support Trump that they have been had. If the media would do its job and report on this very strange happening they would do more to bring peace to the country then just saying that Trump is bad for claiming fraud without evidence.

One of the strange things about this election is that only group that Trump did worse then in the past was with White Males. This is not what I would have expected at all.

A rant on the “second wave” and calls for more lock-downs.

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My “somebody on the internet is wrong” personality flaw has been triggered. Or maybe it would be better to say that people are missing the obvious point. At any rate, this is going to be a little bit of departure from normal links to news.
To set the stage, let us consider the following opinions from the great and good.

1. There are “bad people” who believe that we should strive for herd immunity and who argue that we can achieve herd immunity from smaller number of infections then “good people” this is possible.

2. The current rising number of infections in places that have already been hard hit (like Spain) show that the “bad people” are wrong (was there ever any doubt?).

3. “Bad people” are trying to switch the subject to talking about how low the case fatality rate is. But this lower date rate is only because the demographics of those getting infected are currently different and have nothing to do with the seriousness of COVID.

Granted, the above is a little over simplified, but I think (despite the snark) it is a pretty fair representation of the views of a lot of people. If you want to see someone who is struggling to be fair minded address this issue, you can read this Marginal Revolution post so you can see the argument being made sans the snark.

Now I am not going to defend the work of the “bad” herd immunity people. I suspect that they are making a critical error in modeling a “herd” as being a given group of people located a geographical point and we know this model is flawed. For example, studies of anti-body samples seem to show quite clearly that there was a big COVID class divided in New York City. It seems that COVID was much more prevalent in the poor and working class in New York then it was in the middle and upper classes. In fact, the difference is so stark that they might as well been two different cities. So the lower economic classes of New York might very well have “herd immunity” were as the upper economic classes are ripe for a “second wave” as it were. And regardless of what mathematical models show, it is hard to see how lower classes having herd immunity (assuming they do) will protect the upper classes who do things like go to weddings in Brazil and vacation in Mexico. I suspect the same logic plays out in places like Spain/Madrid or other areas that were hard hit but still experiencing a “second wave”.

But this brings to me much lower death rate that is being experienced as part of this “second wave”. The great and good will tell you this is because of the younger age demographic of those getting infected and they have statistics to back that up. I also suspect that a much higher percentage of those now being infected are better off and whiter then the first wave. I have not seen statistics to that effect but given the lack of stories about “minorities hardest hit” and “meatpackers are all going to die” I would guess that a lot more of the infections are in the upper class then previously. This would also tie into the lower death rate because as a general rule the wealthier you are the better your health and the better health care you receive. The bottom line is that a younger and wealthier set of victims goes a long way to explaining the lower case fatality rate for COVID currently being observed.

So far, I don’t have a problem with the story that the great and good are spinning (except that I think that testing and other methodological problems plays a bigger role then they are acknowledging). My problem is that obvious implications about the “success” of lockdowns are being ignored and the clamor is for “more lockdown.” This to me is missing the obvious point that the case fatality rate is so low now because vulnerable and the poor were not protected during the lock down. The people getting infected now are the people who were protected during the lockdown.

The wealthy and middle class who were able to work from home and keep their kids home with them were protected by the lockdown. The poor who could not afford to stay home and had to keep going to work (often in nursing homes, hospitals, meat packing plants, and so on and so forth) and had to have their kids in daycare (often their elderly parents since all other options were closed) were heavily hit on the first wave and not suffering as bad with the “second wave”.

What bugs me is that now that upper classes see the infections are hitting them, they want another lock down because it successfully protects them. They don’t care all that much about the economic fallout because so far that has disproportionately hurt the lower classes that have never been protected by any lock down.

The bottom line: The current rise in infections is occurring in people previously protected by lockdowns. The fact that the case fatality rate is currently so low shows that the lockdowns never did a very good job a protecting the vulnerable. Current calls to re-instate the lockdowns should be looked at as privileged people trying to protect themselves from something that the poorer classes have already suffered.

Maybe there is another way of interpreting the data, but if there is, I have not seen the argument being made. Mostly, the great and good seem to prefer to ignore the implications of the fact that infections are only now impacting them and comparatively ignoring the poor and vulnerable who were so hard hit last time.

Some Thoughts COVID-19 in New York

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New York City is emerging as the hot spot in America similar to Lombardy in Italy. Why this is so is one of those mysteries that we may never find out the answer to but that is not my main focus. My main focus is on three main questions that seem to be freaking people out. As best as I can tell they are as follows…..

1. How many people already have it?
2. Why are so many young people in the hospital?
3. How far away is the peak?

As far as question #1 goes, the answer of course is that we can’t know. But we can do better at guessing then a lot of people out there. The first thing to remember is that the number of reported cases means nothing. It drives me nuts to see headlines like “Coronavirus cases doubling faster in the U.S. than any other country, report says.” This is purely an artifact of US ramping up testing and trying to catch up to other countries. It tells us nothing about how fast it is spreading in the US. Anyone with half a brain should be able to understand this but apparently brains are in short supply these days. One thing we can do is look at death rates. Assuming they are pretty well reported, they should be able to give us a better idea of infection rates. The main problem with using death rates is that they are backwards looking and are likely to misleading for countries that are just getting started. Nonetheless, a quick look at death rates can be instructive if we make an effort to compare like to like.

For example, using the data from this site we see that that Germany has had 72 deaths and some 20 thousand confirmed cases. On the other hand, France has 450 deaths and only some 12 thousand confirmed cases. Looking at these numbers we have to say that either Covid is lot deadlier in France or France is way under detecting COVID cases. France being France and Germany being Germany, I am inclined to believe that France is not keeping tabs as well as Germany is.

So what is a reasonable figure of COVID cases per death? If we look at the Diamond Princess it is 89 symptom showing COVID case per death. In South Korea it is 86 cases per death. Based on those two numbers, I looked at various areas reporting COVID deaths and multiplied that number by 90 to see how large a number of cases they were missing. In France’s case it means they have only located a little 25% of the cases and it could be even worse then that if they are at an early stage of their curve. Germany on the other hand would only have a little over 6 thousand cases based on their death rate. So either they are early in the curve or COVID is less deadly in Germany. Assuming Germany is early in the curve but at roughly the same place on the curve as France, that would mean that France has almost a 130,000 cases and they have only caught roughly a 10th of that. We can play this game with a lot of countries. Italy for example should have about 360,000 thousand cases even though they are only reporting just under 50 thousand. And that is assuming they are far along on their death curve. If they are earlier then South Korea, they will have a lot more cases out there.

But what we really care about is New York. According to John Hopkins data (which lags behind the times a bit) New York had 42 deaths and 8310 confirmed cases. That works out to about 200 cases per death. That is a lot lower death rate then the Diamond Princess or South Korea. However, let us assume we are at the same place in the curve as Germany. That would mean we have about 120 thousand cases out there and have only counted roughly 80 thousand of them. If those cases don’t grow (unlikely) it means New York would see around 134 deaths to be at roughly the same rate as South Korea. If we are like Italy (no reason to think that yet) we could see as many as 5 thousand extra deaths in New York over the next 6 months. That sound like a lot, but by way of comparison there is typically over 3 thousand opioid over-dose deaths in New York and those deaths are concentrated in the young and otherwise healthy. Overall, there are almost a million deaths ever year in New York from all causes so even 5 thousand deaths is not going to move the needle very much. Particularly since a lot of deaths from Covid will be people with poor health that might have caused them to die in the near term anyway.

All of the above does not mean much as there are too many unknowns. But it gives you a context to put the various numbers the media throws around into.

So on to the second question, why are there so many young people in New York Hospitals? This is a pretty easy question to answer—- The average age of people in New York city is about 37. This is far younger on average then most of places in the world that have been suffering from COVID up to this point. Judging by data from the Diamond Princess, people in there 30s and 40s do not have a special immunity from COVID, they are just a lot less likely to die from it. So while the media is trying to hype up the number of young people in the hospitals in New York City, this is not really surprising given the demographic profile and data from Diamond Princess. If we have a high death rate per confirmed cases of COVID in New York city that might be surprising (assuming testing is wide spread) but right now that is far from being the case and testing is far from being widespread in New York City. Given the likely under counting of cases, we are nowhere even close to having a high death rate from COVID in New York as of yet. Granted, it is early, but do keep in mind that we have a death rate that is more like Germany then it is Italy so far.

One thing that will be interesting to see is if America’s high rates of obesity lead to greater death rates among the young in the US. But right now, there is nothing in the data that makes it seem like COVID is doing anything different in the US then it has in other countries.

Last question, how long will it take COVID to peak in New York? Again, this question can’t really be answered as there are to many unknowns. People are throwing around a 45 day figure for Covid to peak. If we go by hospital admissions, COVID really started to take off in the beginning of March in New York. So if we use March 1st as a start date, the peak in deaths should come around the middle of April for New York and go down from there.

Obviously, this is all based on very limited information. But I hope it puts things that they are reading in the media in perspective for people. Based on the data from other countries, we are doing pretty well in comparison. That could change as it progress, but right now we are no where near as bad as it could be based on what has happened elsewhere.