This is a weird one. Bear with me. From !dataisbeautiful@lemmygrad.ml:
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
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.
They’re abusing a chart which is supposed to be configured more like this:
I think the increase in the US is probably real, maybe increasing desperation as the combination of the financial crash, opioid epidemic, and increasing rents drove people increasingly into the margins. But the size of the problem in the US is still basically 0 as in other functioning countries. I don’t know for sure, but I think if accurate numbers for North Korea were on that chart, they’d be way up above South Sudan and Madagascar. At least there are aid agencies trying to do something in Africa. In North Korea, people are just dying, and that’s it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65881803