Alexander Tabarrok

 The answer seems obvious – mass

starvation occur because of a mass
scarcity of food.
 The obvious answer, however, is
wrong.
 Sometimes mass starvation occur
when food per capita is low but
mass starvation has also occurred
when there was plenty of food per
capita.
 Many of the biggest mass starvations
have been intentional.
 When Stalin came to power in 1924 he
saw Ukranians, particulary the relatively
wealthy independent farmers known as
Kulaks to be a threat.
 Stalin proceeded to collectivize the
farms, expropriating the land of the
kulaks, killing thousands and sending
thousands more to Siberian gulags.
 A short-lived insurrection was crushed
by turning all of the Ukraine into a
concentration camp.
 While millions starved, food was
shipped out of the Ukraine and no food
was allowed in.
 Desperate Ukraines ate dogs, cats, bark.
Cannibalism was not uncommon.
 At least 4 million died in the Ukraine.
 In China during the “Great Leap Forward,” some 30 million people died of starvation.
 “We walked along beside the village. The rays of the sun shone on the jade-green
weeds that had sprung up between the earth walls, accentuating the contrast with
the rice fields all around, and adding to the desolation of the landscape. Before my
eves, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of
the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I
could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other
people’s children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field
seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt
sorry for the children, but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made
them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of other parents; flesh
that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares? In
that moment I understood what a butcher he had been, the man “whose like
humanity has not seen in several centuries, and China not in several thousand
years": Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong and his henchmen, with their criminal political
system, had driven parents mad with hunger and led them to hand their own
children over to others, and to receive the flesh of others to appease their own
hunger. ”
Wei Jingsheng, quoted in Courtois et al. The Black Book of Communism. Harvard University Press.1999.
 When accompanied by other factors, war can disrupt
and aggravate the normal channels of supply leading
to mass starvation. Often there is a combination of
intentional and non-intentional factors at work.
 The basic non-intentional causes of mass starvation
is lack of purchasing power or entitlements. i.e. food
is available but a certain class of people cannot
afford to buy the food. Explaining why varies from
case to case.
 • The 1974 famine in Bangladesh was not on the size of the Ukraine or
China, perhaps 26,000-100,000 people died of mass starvation but it was
probably the first televised starvation and it illustrates many important
themes.

• Floods destroyed much of the rice

crop of 1974 at the same time as
world rice prices were increasing.
• Overall, however, the fundamental
problem was not a lack of food per-se
as food per capita was in fact at an
all-time high in 1974.
• Starvation began before the rice that
the floods destroyed would have been
available for eating. So what was the
problem?
Source: Sen, Amartya. 1990. Public Action to Remedy Hunger. Arturo Tanco Memorial Lecture given in
London on 2nd August 1990, http://www.thp.org/reports/sen/sen890.htm
 Before the floods destroyed rice they destroyed livelihoods. The floods meant that
there was no work for landless rural labourers who in ordinary years would have
been employed harvesting the rice.
 Without income from work and facing rising world rice prices caused for other
reasons there was mass starvation.
 As Amartya Sen puts it:
“A food-centred view tells us rather little about starvation. It does not tell us
how starvation can develop even without declines in food availability. Nor does it
tell us – even when starvation is accompanied by a fall in the food supply – why
some groups had to starve while others could feed themselves…What allows one
group rather than another to get hold of the food that is there? These questions
lead to the entitlement approach…For example, a barber owns his labour power
and some specialized skill, neither of which he can eat, and he has to sell his
hairdressing services to earn an income to buy food. His entitlement to food may
collapse even without any change in food availabilty…”
Poverty and Famines (1981, 155-156).
 The fact that mass starvation is not primarily about mass
scarcity of food tells us something important – mass
starvations need not ocurr.
 Clearly, intentional starvations need not occur and we know
the solution – avoid totalitarian governments. Totalitarian
governments can and have starved their own people (not just
historically consider North Korea today, for example).
Totalitarian governments also kill their own people. R.J.
Rummel estimates that in the twentieth century
governments killed or starved some 262,000,000 of their own
citizens.
 Unintentional starvations can also be avoided since the main
thing that is required is the government will to redistribute
wealth or employment, and usually not much is required, to
those people who most need it.
 In this context consider the following:
“…no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning
democracy – be it economically rich (as in Western Europe or North America) or
relatively poor (as in post independence India, or Botswana or Zimbabwe.”
Amartya Sen. 2001. Development as Freedom. p.16
“Perhaps the most important reform that can contribute to the elimination of
famines, in Africa as well as in Asia, is the enhancement of democratic practice,
unfettered newspapers and – more generally – adversarial politics.”
Amartya Sen. 1990. Public Action to Remedy Hunger.
 Democracies for all their problems at least have incentives not to kill or let starve
voters or their friends.
 Opposition parties have incentives to bring problems to light.
 News media broadcast early warning signs of starvation and they castigate ruling
parties when problems are not solved.
 In The Political Economy of Government Responsiveness: Theory and
Evidence from India, Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess test Amartya Sen’s
theory of democracy, newspapers and famine.

 India is a federal democracy with 16 major states. The states vary

considerably in their susceptibilty to food crises, newspaper circulation,
education, political competition and other factors.
 Besley and Burgess ask whether the state government are more responsive
to crises when there is more political competition and more newspapers.
 Note that both of these factors are important. Newspapers won’t work
without political competition and political competition won’t without
newspapers. (Education is also an interesting interaction factor. Note that
the state of Kerala is the best educated, has the most political competition
and the highest newspaper circulation. It is not the richest state.)
 After controlling for a wide variety
of other variables B and B find:
 A 1 percent increase in newspaper
circulation is associated with a 2.4
percent increase in public food
distribution and a 5.5 percent increase
in calamity relief expenditures.
 Greater political competition is
associated with higher levels of public
food distribution. Public food
distribution is also higher in election
and pre-election years.
 In addition, government is also more
responsive to a given shock when
newspaper circulation is higher. That
is, when food production falls or flood
damage occurs governments increase
food distribution and calamity relief
more in states where newspaper
circulation is higher.
 We have seen that the media can help to
hold government accountable….the
government does not like to be held
accountable.
 Thus it’s not surpising that governments
try very hard to control the media. A
fascinating and unusual piece of evidence
comes from Peru.
 Vladimor Montesinos Torres was the head
of the Peruvian secret-police. With
Alberto Fujimori as President, Montesinos
ran Peru, methodically bribing judges,
politicians and the news media.
 What is unusual is that Montesinos kept
detailed accounts of his bribes including
thousands of bribe contracts and
videotapes.
 By examining the prices of bribes we can
see the relative value that Montesinos
placed on different sources of potential
opposition.
Bribes to Politicians
Between $20,000 and
$3,000 per month when
official salaries for a
Congressman were on
the order of $7,000 per
month.
Bribes to Judges

Bribes to judges
were more
irregular and a
little bit less on
average than to
politicians say
$5,000 to $10,000
per month.
Bribes to Newspapers were much higher than to
politicians or judges - Thousands of dollars per
week/per story.

Interesting fact: Montesinos cared about the tabloids

read by the masses not about the refined
newspapers read by the educated.
Bribes to television channel owners were the highest of all – up to
$1,500,000 per month.
 McMillan and Zoido make an important point about
checks and balances – they complement one another.
“The news media are the most potent of the democratic checks and
balances. This is our main conclusion. Measured by the bribes
Montesinos paid, the legislature and the judiciary are far less pressing
constraints on the executive branch of government than television.
Those other checks and balances obtain their force via the threat of
exposure to the citizens, and television gives widest exposure. Our
finding applies only to 1990s Peru, of course, but it may extrapolate to
nascent democracies elsewhere.
That the news media are the chief watchdog has implications for policy.
The checks and balances work as a system, so an independent judiciary
and genuine political competition are needed. But measures to
safeguard the media’s independence from political influence and to
ensure their credibility to the public are perhaps the crucial policies for
shoring up democracy. “
 Even better than controlling the media with bribes is censoring, even
better than censoring is owning the media.
 In much of the world government ownership of media is common. For
example:
“On average, governments in Africa control 61 percent of the top five (in
circulation) daily newspapers and reach 84 percent of the audience for the top
five television stations. Seventy-one percent of African countries have state
monopolies in television broadcasting.”
Djankov et al. 2003. Who owns the media? Journal of Law and Economics. XLVI: 341-381.

What are the consequences/correlates of government media ownership?

“Government ownership of the press is associated with (statistically

significantly) lower levels of poltical rights, civil liberties, security of property,
and quality of regulation and higher levels of corruption and risk of
confiscation…These results support the public choice view that government
ownership of the press restricts information flows to the public, which reduces
the quality of the government.
Djankov et al. 2003. Who owns the media? Journal of Law and Economics. XLVI: 341-381.
 Yes!
 But why do we make a big distinction between the market for goods and the market for
ideas?
 Consider all the usual stories of why markets need to be regulated and ask whether they
apply to the market for ideas.
 Public Goods Yes!
 Externalities Yes!
 Consumer Ignorance Yes!
 Natural Monopoly Yes!
 Thus if you believe the standard market failure stories then you should be in favor of
regulating the media but we have just seen that regulating the media is a very bad ideas.
Thus the standard stories need to be modified by public choice.
 As Coase says in The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas:

“It is hard to believe that the general public is in a better position to evaluate competing views on
economic and social policy than to choose between different kinds of food.”

 Djankow et al. add:

“Nonetheless, the assumption of benevolent government often stops at the doorstep of the media,
perhaps because economists want to protect their own right to supply information without being
subject to regulation.”
 Government wants to control the media because the
media can be used to mold opinion and controlling
opinion means controlling power.
 What else can be used to mold opinion?
 Education!
 Lott (1999) finds that the more authoritarian the
government the more likely the government is to own
television stations. Also, the more authoritarian the
government the more likely it is to invest in public
education.
 Importantly, Lott finds no relationship between health
care spending and authoritarianism thus supporting the
interpretation that authoritarian governments invest in
public education in order to indoctrinate.