When Elon Musk made his multi-billion dollar bid for Twitter (now known as ‘X’), some rather silly things were said. One claim, which showed the dreadful state of common core math, was that Musk could give everyone in the USA a million dollars and still have billions left over. Another claim was that Musk could solve world hunger with a few billion dollars. But that claim does not account for the real cause of world hunger.
World hunger is most certainly not caused by a shortage of food, money, or resources. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has claimed that each year sees 1.3 billion tonnes of food worth $940 billion lost or wasted. Philanthropists such as Bill and Melinda Gates have given many times more than the amount of money it is claimed needed to end world hunger. We see widespread hunger and poverty in resource-rich nations, while no one needs go hungry in resource-poor nations like Singapore.
So, what really causes world hunger, and how will Elon Musk help end it?
I believe that an explanation comes from the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, whose interest in the causes of famine were formed by his own experience of the Bengal famine of 1943. In his seminal work, Poverty and Famines and other publications, he argued that it is not a shortage of food that causes famines but the mechanisms of food distribution. Those mechanisms are not resolved by money or resources, but by politics.
Indeed, Amartya Sen’s research showed that there has never been a famine where there has been a representative democracy and a free press.
The point may be surprising, but it is supported by history. To give a few examples, the Holodomor in Ukraine was engineered by the Soviet socialists. The Bengal famine occurred in British India. The Irish ‘potato famine’ also occurred under British rule. The North Korean famine of the 1990s showed that famines can occur under self-rule if it is neither democratic nor protected by a free press. In none of these events was the shortage of food the real cause of the famines.
In Democracy as a Universal Value, Amartya Sen argues that,
Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence … they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press.
The reason for this is, as he writes in Development as Freedom, is that democratic governments that fall under the scrutiny of a free press, ‘…have to win elections and face public criticism, and have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other catastrophes.’
In Poverty and Famines Sen argued for the importance of positive freedoms, in which people are active citizens who are informed and empowered to act in order to protect their interests. To put Sen’s insights into other words, famine is not caused by lack of resources or money, but by information poverty and people’s lack of representation.
This is where Elon Musk comes in. It may be that Musk could give away billions of dollars to spend on food, but a fair proportion of that money will wind up in the hands of corrupt officials and, long term, the world’s poor will remain hungry.
Musk’s greater and more enduring contribution will be the promotion of democratic values of free speech and representation. Free speech has been under sustained attack in both old and new media for some time now. Musk’s purchase of X/Twitter sent shockwaves throughout the media, which have for too long been comfortable in their ability to stop the free flow of information and to ‘control the narratives’ on which our lives are based. Musk has made a crucial contribution to a democratised free flow of information and the ability of people to make their voices heard.
To put the point in other words, the familiar saying is that you can feed a person for a day by giving them a fish, but you can feed them for a lifetime by teaching them to catch fish. Likewise, we can feed the world for a year with a few billion dollars, but we can prevent world hunger more permanently by addressing information poverty and by advancing democracy and free speech. While Musk cannot solve these issues alone, he is making a crucial contribution by advancing the cause of free speech and the free flow of information. In that endeavour, all people of goodwill should wish him every success.
