Atlanta
The toughest challenges and greatest opportunities before us are complex, multivariate and long term in nature. Far too many of those who purport to lead us, however, are focused on short-term gains and over-simplified “solutions” that address only pieces of the puzzle and often make matters worse. In other words, there is a vast misalignment between the leaders we need and the leaders we get. This is arguably the central challenge of our time.
Take the hunger issue, for example. We heard from Dr. John Cook at the Greater Boston Food Bank the other day. He’s a Principal Investigator for Children’s HealthWatch and a Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Cook spoke to us about what is called “food insecurity,” the massive and massively complex hunger issue in eastern Massachusetts and across the United States. Yes, it’s true. Many of our fellow citizens are forced every day to choose whether to eat, pay the rent or seek medical care. One indicator of the enormity of hunger in Greater Boston is the plain fact that Food Bank President Catherine D’Amato and her outstanding team distributed 57.7 million pounds of food to hungry people last year, equivalent to 48.1 million meals.
Realization of the social causes and costs of an issue such as food insecurity takes a very long time. Addressing true systemic causes means that an issue must wend its way through our societal thicket from data to awareness to actual policy changes, doing so through waves of resistance by vested interests and selfish, counterproductive politics. This is one reason why it took many decades to understand and address the obvious damage done by smoking, driving drunk or not wearing seat belts, Dr. Cook reminded us. The problem is that so many people lose their lives and livelihoods in the interim before we wake up to reality.
There is plenty of food available to feed our people. More than enough. The underlying problem has long been our collective unwillingness to distribute enough of it to where it is needed and to make food generally more accessible. A far greater challenge in attacking hunger, however, comes in our collective inability and unwillingness to understand the pervasive social costs of food insecurity and to confront their root causes.
The toughest challenges and greatest opportunities before us are complex, multivariate and long term in nature. Far too many of those who purport to lead us, however, are focused on short-term gains and over-simplified “solutions” that address only pieces of the puzzle and often make matters worse. In other words, there is a vast misalignment between the leaders we need and the leaders we get. This is arguably the central challenge of our time.
Take the hunger issue, for example. We heard from Dr. John Cook at the Greater Boston Food Bank the other day. He’s a Principal Investigator for Children’s HealthWatch and a Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Cook spoke to us about what is called “food insecurity,” the massive and massively complex hunger issue in eastern Massachusetts and across the United States. Yes, it’s true. Many of our fellow citizens are forced every day to choose whether to eat, pay the rent or seek medical care. One indicator of the enormity of hunger in Greater Boston is the plain fact that Food Bank President Catherine D’Amato and her outstanding team distributed 57.7 million pounds of food to hungry people last year, equivalent to 48.1 million meals.
Realization of the social causes and costs of an issue such as food insecurity takes a very long time. Addressing true systemic causes means that an issue must wend its way through our societal thicket from data to awareness to actual policy changes, doing so through waves of resistance by vested interests and selfish, counterproductive politics. This is one reason why it took many decades to understand and address the obvious damage done by smoking, driving drunk or not wearing seat belts, Dr. Cook reminded us. The problem is that so many people lose their lives and livelihoods in the interim before we wake up to reality.
There is plenty of food available to feed our people. More than enough. The underlying problem has long been our collective unwillingness to distribute enough of it to where it is needed and to make food generally more accessible. A far greater challenge in attacking hunger, however, comes in our collective inability and unwillingness to understand the pervasive social costs of food insecurity and to confront their root causes.
In terms of social costs, Dr. Cook’s (and plenty of other) research
demonstrates that the lack of proper nutrition seriously impairs a child’s brain
development in the critical first four years of life. That lack of baseline nutrition
demonstrably erodes a child’s readiness to learn. Reducing the readiness to
learn eclipses a child’s ability later in life to achieve and sustain gainful
employment. These are all proven, research-based facts. The human
capital costs associated with not addressing hunger at its root causes are staggering.
Yes, first and foremost, we should feed hungry people because it is the right
thing to do. Period. That said, our more mercenary friends should at least accept
that not investing in early-childhood development detracts from the
competitiveness of U.S. businesses and creates geometrically larger taxpayer
burdens in the future - if they even care to care about the future.
In terms of solutions, we need to understand the causal links
between these dreadful outcomes and failing to invest wisely in the social safety
net. For example, the U.S. tops OECD nations in health-care costs by a
considerable margin and yet performs quite poorly in terms of health-care outcomes,
e.g., infant mortality. That is, we’re spending far more on health care and achieving
far less than any other industrialized nation. On the other hand, the U.S.
ranks at the bottom of OECD nations in terms of investing in social development,
e.g., the root causes of hunger. The relationship between failing to invest intelligently
in social development and results such as soaring health-care costs, diminishing
health-care outcomes, weakening of human capital, and eroding of national competitiveness
are inescapable and undeniable.
In the face of these facts, however, we continue to elect
too many people to high public office who are unable or unwilling to accept
these realities. Just study the proposed Food Stamp program reductions in both
the current versions of the House or Senate tax bills. These selfish, short-sighted
politicians who place their ideological wet dreams ahead of common sense gleefully
act like they are saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in chopping
off our noses to spite our faces. Instead, this recklessness will inflict massive
harm on their fellow Americans – physically, intellectually, spiritually and
morally – and cost us needless billions of additional dollars down the road by
refusing to acknowledge the proven wisdom that an ounce of prevention is worth
a pound of cure. And yes, long-term stagnant wages are also a major contributor
to food insecurity since so many hungry people do hold jobs. Expectations that these tax bills will create substantial new jobs and boost wages need to
be muted, however, since another proven fact is that this kind of trickle-down nonsense has been shown not to work many times over recent decades.
Yes, food insecurity is a national security threat.
It should be positioned that way. So-called leaders who refuse to address it in
a systemic, long-term manner and actually work to create more hunger, however,
represent a clear and present danger.
Image courtesy of Craig McNamara.