this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024

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129

TIL that malnutrition isn't an issue in North Korea (ponder.cat)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This is a weird one. Bear with me. From [email protected]:

So I said to myself, "that's a little bit weird. The US one going up, I can actually believe, but the North Korea one being lower is definitely wrong."

I think Our World In Data is just being shoddy, as they often do.

https://www.wfp.org/countries/democratic-peoples-republic-korea

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269924/countries-most-affected-by-hunger-in-the-world-according-to-world-hunger-index/

The thing I found funny, and why I'm posting here, comes from observing why it was that they started their graph at 2003 and exactly at 2003.

I feel like you could use this as a slide in a little seminar in "how to curate your data until it matches your conclusion, instead of the other way around."

And also, I don't think the hunger rate suddenly dropped from epic to 0 exactly in 2003, I think more likely Our World in Data is just a little bit shoddy about their data.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 5 days ago (1 children)

CIA propaganda, the poverty rate in the DPRK is -1%, and party approval rate is 102%

Source: from the DPRK, of course! Lying is illegal in glorious DRPK!

[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 days ago (6 children)

In my experience, it's more akin to:

Source: Literally anything! That isn't corrupt and Western!

"Like what?"

Source: Anything!

"Can I use Al Jazeera? Or Wikipedia? Or can you give me a few sources that I can look at?"

Source: No, those are corrupt and Western! You're lying! Look at this UN report!

"This UN report says the opposite of what you said."

Source: That's because the UN is corrupt, and lying! And Western!

"Can you just tell me where you got this information in the first place? Even if it's not 'reliable' per se, surely someone told it to you in the first place. Who was that? Where do you get your news?"

Source: Shut up! You're sealioning! You're being bad! You're lying! Blocked. Cry some more!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Obviously you gonna look at the news from a blogpost! Thats the only reliable news source!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Someone told me a few days ago that Israel was striking Syria with nuclear weaponry, and the only reason I didn't know about it was that I only consumed Western news sources.

They sent me an article that proved it! And a video of the explosion. Okay. I stopped talking with them shortly after that, after they said "Thank you for taking the bait. We’ve now come full circle," without explaining what they meant by that.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Most of their arguments in conversations rely on strawmanning anyway, so it's expected they don't want you to look up any source except ones that agree with them. Especially ""NATOpedia"" 🙄 but this obscure ML post written 6 years ago on a niche forum is a completely valid source!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago

And everything needs to be "contextualized." Meaning, they can decide what your sources actually mean, even if it's something different than what they say.

"Can I do that to your sources too?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I don't even have sources. Are you sealioning again?"

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

but ya see, it took 48 years of feeding the starving into the foodschmunkgeneratorium2000™ to march north korean statistics out of the state of starvation with the will and pure physical determination of the people! just not the living

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago

The issue here is, there's no way to confirm the data as all these dictatorship tend to manipulate their data before releasing it, and you have no way to confirm anything. Only idiots will eat it up.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This chart is specifically the death rate. The other charts you provided are "affected by" aggregate statistics or "undernourished" if I understand correctly.

It seems possible that NK is improving on people dying directly from it or deaths are being categorized differently (if everyone is malnourished, another more immediate cause of death may be recoreded).

So I'm not sure this is entirely wrong.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

All three charts measure different things, yes. I suspect that "Our World in Data" is converting some more complex metrics into "estimated deaths per 100,000" to have an apples to apples comparison, and doing it badly in this case, since their numbers are so different from other sources. It could be also that they just can't get good numerical data out of North Korea. Some sources don't even quote numbers because there would be too much guesswork involved.

But I definitely wouldn't count that, or "deaths are being categorized differently by the government" as a sign that this isn't wrong. The literal death rate from malnutrition in North Korea is far from negligible like it is in China, Vietnam, or the US (even with it going up in the US). You don't have 20% of your children with stunted growth without some of them being too weak to make it and dying of some condition due to malnutrition. And that absolutely haunting video of the starving North Korean woman gathering grass, who died shortly after the interview, is from 2010.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

10.7 million people are undernourished
18% of children are stunted (impaired growth and development due to chronic malnutrition)
25.9 million population

That's pretty terrible. I couldn't find an apples to apples comparison, but the best numbers put food insecurity (not the same at all as malnutrition) at 5-13.5% (5% was severe food insecurity), and growth stunting was <5% (not sure on the severity).

Having ~40% of your population be malnourished is horrendous. This is absolutely cherry-picked data at best.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago (11 children)

Bruh, I had someone told me that "China lifted millions of people out of poverty"

Me, whose family emigrated out of China for both economic and political reasons: "Uh-huh, interesting......" 🤭 "Kinda odd so many people want to go to foreign countries, but few of those foreign countries' Citizens want to immigrate to China... I wonder why..." 🙈

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I've seen that. They love to post up graphs of life expectancy, income, etc, and show it going up and up after the revolutions. It kind of loses its steam when you put those graphs next to the graphs of life expectancy, income, etc, worldwide, during that same time period, and they all go up together as a more or less unified grouping as agriculture and medicine improved and the technology boosted up the whole world.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

it's still kinda low overall (just look at steam's regional pricings), but you were probably above the poverty line, especially if you managed to emigrate. and if you're checking population under the UN poverty line, the statistic does hold up. that just means more people survive, not that more people self-actualize.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

you were probably above the poverty line, especially if you managed to emigrate

Family based immigration to USA, had to wait like 13+ years, paperworks started wayy before I was born. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with how rich you are (well, beside the fact that the relative in the US has to sign a paper to "sponsor" us, basically promising to pay the government in case we took certain government benefits within 5 years of entering, which we we never took any of those government benefits btw). Basically its nust luck.

Edit: Also, I heard that many people, particulary people from Fujian, China, have immigrated to the US without permission. Like, they didn't even get legal permission and could get deported at any time, yet they still came here. Like that's how much people wanted to leave.

Which just think about it, I seemed kinda lucky tbh, most people can't through the legal method, and is at risk of deportation come 2025 (ya know... new administration... honestly I'm not sure if legal immigrants like me are safe... 😖 hopefully, my citizenship status is good enough to not get kicked out.)

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 days ago (7 children)

This article talks about the global famine relief effort for North Korea in 2002 that included monitoring so food actually went to people.

https://asiasociety.org/famine-north-korea

So yes, I believe it could have gone from epic to 0 in one year because most of the developed world came together and shipped food to North Korea.

And it's still shameful that it's increasing in the US.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago

But... it's very rare that sustained international intervention into a basically hostile country to solve a decades-long issue ever even works the way it's supposed to in the first place, let alone reduces the problem it was trying to address from "crisis" to "totally nonexistent" within the space of one year.

Here are some other stats about hunger in North Korea over time:

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/PRK/north-korea/hunger-statistics

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-of-chronic-malnutrition-among-North-Korean-children-by-year_fig2_322157603

I am sure there is variation by how you measure things, which is why those graphs look radically different, but my point is that they don't shoop down to 0 all of a sudden in one year and then stay there.

My suspicion is that it stopped being possible to get good data in 2003, for some reason, and they just fell back on horrible data instead, which is why the sudden discontinuous change that's at odds with all the other data sources I could find.

And it’s still shameful that it’s increasing in the US.

Agreed. And that probably does correspond to actual desperate poverty.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 days ago

Cherry picking data has long been a problem. I recall a short piece from high school in the 80s called something like “How to Lie with Statistics.” It’s always stuck with me.

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