The glorious 1000% rise in the number of food banks

This calls for a celebration we think. It’s also a useful example of what happens when we have both technological development and also a rise in the general wealth of the society - we get to do new things, solve old problems:

As the economists Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan observe, from 1980 to 2017 the UK’s GDP rose 100%. Over the same period the number of food banks in the UK leapt 1,000%.

The rise was rather more compressed than that, the Trussell Trust itself points out that food banks pretty much didn’t exist in the UK when they started in 2000. The technology - a manner of organisation is indeed a technology - hadn’t been imported from the United States at that point. Then it was. Much hunger has been eliminated as a result of the adoption of that technology, we regard this as a good thing.

It is also true that a richer society is able to divert more to solving such problems than a poorer one and as we can see that is exactly what has been happening.

We are, of course, supposed to think the other way around, that’s the point of the statistic being presented to us. That society has become worse therefore the need for such food banks. Reality works the other way around. State inefficiency in distributing welfare did not start in 2000 - we ourselves have direct experience of that not being true. Nor were those 20th century days free of pockets of hunger. What changed was both the wealth to do something about it and also the technology to do so efficiently. At which point we say Huzzah! For the pangs of poverty are being alleviated better than they were before and isn’t that a good thing?

That claim that the increase in food banks is a bad thing is, when thought about properly, an absurdity. For it is to say that solving a problem is proof of the problem getting worse. Instead of what has actually been happening, the world becoming a better place as a problem is solved. We’re all in favour of food banks, who wouldn’t be happy at fewer people being hungry?