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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

1 in 7 people in the U.S. face hunger every year and Flint still doesn't have clean water, but sure: let's buy every college graduate a book!

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Arguably, turning college graduates into better citizens by giving them a book can have a bigger long-term effect than directly solving the problem. Not that immediate action shouldn't be done, but both are valid attacks to the same problem.

I think Bill Gates' underlying reasoning is that by giving all college graduates this book, the future generation will be better thinkers and therefore that society will be better than today's. Hopefully, this will lead to a situation where that 1 in 7 number will turn into 1 in 70, and every place in the US will have access to clean water.

It's kind of like that saying "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.".

One might call it leverage.

Also, any good is better than no good, if by requiring a person to pursue the maximum good, they would have not had the emotional catalysis for pursuing the good.

Hungry people and Flint are not Bill Gates responsibility. If he choses to give a gift to somebody, that's a kind and generous thing to do.

Your intuition that the existence of more than one bad things means that people can't solve other bad things is exceedingly wrong. It flies in the face of the fact that humans regularly tackle more than one issue at a time.

Also, its not lets. Someone else is buying this book, not us. Their money does not belong to us. So we do not have the right to claim credit for this charitable deed. You especially, in opposition to this charitable deed, do not have any claim to it.

If he was to spend that money to fight hunger, how should he have done it exactly? What would he spend it on? How lasting would its effect be?

How much do you think it costs to give away 2 million pdf files and how much do you think it would cost to feed 44 million people?

I'm pretty sure the statistic is that every year 1 in 7 people in the U.S. face hunger.

Saying 1 in 7 people in the U.S. face hunger every year implies that the same group of people are hungry year after year. While a large portion of the hungry population probably are hungry multiple years, surely not all of them repeat every year.

I ate a donut this morning and I could have had a banana.

There is not a hunger issue in America, there is an obesity epidemic among the American poor.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2011/11/20/...

This is very incorrect.

On increasing rates of obesity: http://time.com/4980225/obesity-rates-adults-children/

Association of obesity with socioeconomic status: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.pdf

"Among women, obesity prevalence increases as income decreases."

Here is what is strange, from a National Geographic article on hunger in the US: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/hunger/

'It’s the same every month, Dreier says. Bills go unpaid because, when push comes to shove, food wins out. “We have to eat, you know,” she says, only the slightest hint of resignation in her voice. “We can’t starve.”'

But in the very same article: "Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight."

A bit overweight. That is not what starvation looks like. That is not what hunger looks like.

We can talk all day about strategies for strengthening the social safety net, but it is simply not true that people are going hungry in the United States.

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