The Glass Is Both Half Full and Half Empty – and Leaking
Introduction to Dieback and Collapse, part iv
When considering the “state of the world,” some pundits see the glass as half-full and filling fast. They consider themselves optimists. In the previous post, I called them Cornucopians. They see the world providing inexhaustible abundance. The problem, they say, is not too many people, but too few. There’s not too much consumer demand, but too little supply. And a robust market economy – left to its own miraculous devices – can take care of that.
However, I propose that the glass is half-full and it is half empty. And the glass is draining fast.
Many of the problems of differing perceptions have to do with which facts we choose to prioritize and which we choose to ignore. An economist will joyfully note the billions of people who are making more money and eating more meat. An environmentalist will express alarm at the resulting deforestation, carbon emissions, and river pollution.
A favorite factoid of Cornucopians is that a smaller percentage of the world population suffers from poverty and hunger in 2025 than in the past. However, demographer will point that because the world population has risen so dramatically in the last seventy-five years there are actually more people who are poor and hungry in 2025.
And even when the opposing camps do accept many of the same facts, we interpret them differently by the meanings and context we attach to the words we are using. For instance, the definition of poverty can be misleading. The World Bank’s standard is most often referenced, which, as of June 2025, set the international poverty line at $3 a day, up from the previous $2.15. There are many problems with using this flat and arbitrary rate for everyone, not the least of which is its absurdly low value. Numerous studies have found that even $3 a day does little more than keep one alive, saying little about the quality or viability of the person’s existence.[i] Those three dollars will pay for the requisite calories, but not necessarily the proper nutrition, nor buy clothes, medicines, health care, and an education. And neither will a few dollars more.
So, although some 820 million people live in what the World Bank calls extreme poverty, the lives of some billion others are hardly any better. In his final report on July 2, 2020, the outgoing UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, lamented, “The International Poverty Line is explicitly designed to reflect a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity. Under the measure, one can ‘escape’ from poverty without an income anywhere near that required to achieve an adequate standard of living, including access to healthcare and education. This standard is a world apart from the one set by human rights law and embodied in the UN Charter.”[ii] And for the past few decades there have continuously been somewhere between 800 million and two billion people in the world who live below this absurdly low standard, according to the World Bank’s count.[iii]
Through innovations in sanitation, medicines, and farming, Civilization has been able to keep far more people alive for far longer than ever before. The average lifespan was 32 years in 1900. It’s 73 years in 2025. This is a fact upon which we can all agree. In this important way, the glass is half full.
On the other hand, the number of hungry, malnourished, and starving worldwide has remained stubbornly high for decades despite the global abundance of food. So, yes, the glass is also half empty.
Indeed, today far more people suffer from the excruciating pangs of hunger and from diseases that their chronically malnourished – and therefore immunocompromised – bodies cannot fight than did at the turn of the 20th century. There were only 1.6 billion people on the planet in 1901. In 2025, there are over 8.2 billion people. And at least two billion of them, perhaps as many as three billion, are stunted physically and mentally due to inadequate nutrition. About 750 million are chronically hungry. And, although it is difficult to know the exact numbers, some nine to twelve million people die annually from long-term malnutrition. This is no less than the number of people who died each year in what is considered the modern world’s greatest famine, the Chinese famine of 1958-1961. Unlike acute famines (like those occurring in Gaza and Sudan, for example), Civilization’s perpetual famine has not been concentrated in any one country but rather has proceeded as a chronic event spread unevenly across the globe, thereby losing the concreteness that our minds need to name and recognize it. We are living in a time of a perpetual (albeit invisible) famine.
Again in agreement with the Cornucopians, in the past few decades there have been more “democracies” than ever before, and I wouldn’t disparage this trend. I want to live in a society where power rests with its citizens attempting to serve all people, not just a few. However, we know that most representational democracies and constitutional republics are pale reflections of that ideal. The largest democracies (India and the U.S., particularly) are sliding towards autocracy, becoming more unequal, and enriching oligarchs to extremes unprecedented in human history.
Moreover, despite Amartya Sen’s arguments for famines not occurring in democracies, extreme hunger, chronic malnutrition, and famine do occur in democratic countries. They did when he proposed this idea in 1981, and they have been occurring ever since. To understand how a kind, humanistic, obviously brilliant Nobel laureate can be so wrong, we need to consider definitions again.
Famine is defined by both “extreme hunger and starvation” and “extreme food scarcity.” If one considers the second definition only, then no, there have been no famines in democratic countries, because they have had enough food to feed everyone. Nevertheless, plenty of people starve in democratic countries. So, by the first (I would say, more existentially important definition), democracies do experience famines. More people are dying from starvation than perhaps any extended period in history, and many of them are starving in democracies. These include Nigeria, once referred to as “Africa’s largest democracy,” and India, “the world’s largest democracy.” With a population that was – until recently – greater than India’s, autocratic China has had far fewer hungry and starving people.
From another perspective, however, one can claim with the help of simple statistics that the democracies of India and Nigeria have relatively few hungry people. Given their enormous populations, the starving make up but a small percentage of the whole. This is where we must be careful about percentages and absolutes and the ways we communicate information. If we want to simply persuade others to our position, then choose the weapon, by all means. If, however, we would rather honestly understand our situation, that is understand as clearly as possible, because we sense the importance of clarity and the potential consequences of obfuscation and ignorance, then let us communicate with each other with open hearts and minds.
ENDNOTES
[i] For example, Reddy (2008), Ahmed (2010), Deaton (2010), Reddy and Pogge (2010).
[ii] Alston (2020).
[iii] Johnson et al. (2006), UN (2015:3), World Bank (2015, Sep 30), World Bank (2018a), UN (2020a).
REFERENCES
Ahmed, N.M. (2010) A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization. Pluto Press, London.
Alston, P. (2020) The Parlous State of Poverty Eradication: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. Human Rights Council, UN.
Deaton, A. (2010) Price Indexes, Inequality, and the Measurement of World Poverty. American Economic Review; 100(1): 5-34.
Johnson, P.M., Mayrand, K., and Paquin, M. (2006) The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Global Sustainable Development Governance, pp. 1-10 in Johnson, P.M. Governing Global Desertification: Linking Environmental Degradation, Poverty and Participation. Routledge, London.
Reddy, S.G. (2008) The World Bank’s New Poverty Estimates: Digging Deeper into a Hole. Challenge; 51(6): 105-12.
Reddy, S.G., and Pogge, T. (2010) How Not to Count the Poor, pp. 42-85 in Anand, S., Segal, P., and Stiglitz, J.E. (Editors) Debates on the Measurement of Global Poverty. Oxford Univ. Press, New York.
UN (2015) The Millennium Development Goals Report 2015. United Nations, New York.
UN (2020) Ending Poverty. United Nations, New York. Accessed Apr 22, 2020 at https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/poverty/.
World Bank (2015b, Sep 30) FAQS: Global Poverty Line Update. Accessed Feb 1, 2018 at http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/brief/global-poverty-line-faq.
World Bank (2018a, Oct17) Nearly Half the World Lives on Less that $5.50 a Day. Accessed April 18, 2020 at https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/17/nearly-half-the-world-lives-on-less-than-550-a-day.