Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

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I would think that most people view this as positive, but not without downsides. For example, I've been traveling to China (from the US) since the late-90's, when the economy in China had just started to open up. The effects from that hadn't really impacted most people yet; most people were still pretty poor. Back then, obesity was unheard of. Telling someone they looked "fat" was a compliment, meaning you could afford to eat. Since then, over the years, China got flooded with Western-style junk food, like Pepsi/Coke, KFC, McDonalds, and so on. And now, obesity is an actual thing in China, not the same level as the US, but the fact that 25 years ago it didn't even exist, and now it's becoming a public health issue - well, I think that's what most people are making jokes about, the inevitable and unfortunate consequences that never seem to get attention.

Ask the average Chinese person whether life was better for them in the late 90s or the late 2010s.

I'm pretty sure the rates of hunger and malnutrition dropped significantly over that timeframe. I have no doubts that obesity is higher now, but also a lot less people are starving.

> I'm pretty sure the rates of hunger and malnutrition dropped significantly over that timeframe.

Being fat does not mean being sat or good fed.

> Since then, over the years, China got flooded with Western-style junk food, like Pepsi/Coke, KFC, McDonalds, and so on. And now, obesity is an actual thing in China

China also got rich in that time. Do we have counterfactuals with which to disentangle Western food from wealth?

This is a valid point but lacks proportionality.

If some high% of people have a life improvement, a smaller % don’t, and an even smaller % end up obese.. that’s an overall improvement - even though some lives are worse than they’d have been without the “improvement”.

Of course if the majority became obese or otherwise became worse off, that’s a bad thing overall. But from what is reported it sounds like opening the Chinese economy has been net good, ie. good for most people.

In both situations one obesity case is too many. But it needs to be proportionally considered alongside the benefit it hitched a ride with and never in isolation.

It takes having numbers to know how much weight (sic) to place on that counterpoint of “some obesity happened”.

I'd rather worry about eating too many Calories than too few.

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