פרסומים אחרונים במדור "חברה וכלכלה"

‏¹ haven't the Amirican people suffered enough?
‏² All the television of the world watching us!

On 20 June 1982 Saddam announced that he was prepared to accept a ceasefire on the basis of the pre-war status quo.‏⁶⁸ Bulloch and Morris wrote:

If the leaders in Tehran had accepted [the Iraqi ceasefire offer], they might have gained at the conference table what over six years they failed to achieve at a huge cost in men and material; but true to the bitterness and intransigence shown by both sides, Ayatollah Khomeini rejected the ceasefire offer and the Iranian troops fought on. Iran would remain at war until all of its demands were met, the Ayatollah said - and one of those demands was the removal of Saddam Hussein, the one condition which the Iraqi President could never accept‏⁷⁶

An estimated 95,000 Iranian child soldiers were killed during the Iran–Iraq War.‏⁷⁷On 21 June 1982 Khomeini rejected the Iraqi peace offer in a speech and proclaimed that Iran would invade Iraq and would not stop until the Ba'ath regime was replaced by an Islamic Shia republic.‏⁶⁸ Given that Saddam's offer of 1982 served as the basis of the 1988 ceasefire, Khomeini's decision extended the war for the next six years.‏⁷⁸

And yet...

I’ve just finished (the main text of) Amartya Sen’s ‘Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation’. Sen (famously) argues that, contrary to conventional belief, most famines aren’t created by food shortages. Harvest failures, reductions in food imports, droughts, etc, are often contributing factors – but far more important are the social systems that determine how a society’s food is distributed. Absolute scarcity – insufficient food to feed everyone – is extraordinarily rare. Vastly more common is for an adequate supply of food to be beyond the reach of those who need it most. Sen advocates shifting our attention from questions of food availability to questions of distribution, or to the social systems that guide this distribution. “If one person in eight starves regularly in the world, this is… the result of his inability to establish entitlement to enough food; the question of the physical availability of the food is not directly involved.” (p. 8).

http://praxisblog.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/amartya-s...