“El hambre” (The Hunger) by Martín Caparrós (Anagrama, 2015) is an unsettling, even unpleasant book. Especially if you are not only a good person – in the sense used by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado – but also a mathematician. And it is so because what he says about the hungry has all the appearance of being true, and what he says about numbers, about manipulation with numbers, is also true.
Caparrós’ book does not deal with the most brutal – and mediatic – version of hunger: famine; or, to use the FAO’s “bureaucratic” terminology: “acute temporary malnutrition”. Caparrós’ book is about “structural malnutrition”, to continue with the bureaucratic jargon. Hunger, as Caparrós describes it, “is not the drama, the catastrophe, the spectacular irruption of disaster, but the insidious normality of lives in which not eating what is necessary is the most usual situation”. Famine is exceptional, and every year it can affect some 50 million people. Hunger, structural malnutrition, affects forty times as many people every year: 2 billion. Famine kills, in proportion, more than hunger, but as forty times more people are affected by chronic hunger, it causes, in absolute terms, far more deaths and illnesses. Perhaps that is why Caparrós devotes this book to studying hunger and not famine in our world.
In the previous paragraph, the numbers have just appeared. Apparently an aseptic tool we use to count the hungry. “In the society of show business, malnutrition has no way of being displayed onstage” writes Caparrós “Only in terms of numbers. But numbers don’t have the sex appeal of a photo of a stunted boy”.
Caparrós’ book is full of numbers… and warnings of the manipulation that can be carried out with them. “Numbers are the alibi of a poor relativism. If it happens to many, it is very bad, if to a lot it is more or less bad, if to a few it is not so bad. If this book were brave – if I were brave – it would not include any numbers”, says Caparrós; and before that: “I take refuge, scoundrel, in the little cave of quantity”. And on another point: “Numbers give an appearance of solidity to any initiative, to any policy, to any business, to any protest”. And also: “Numbers are the language in which we think we understand each other – we pretend to understand each other, we try to understand each other. Numbers are the contemporary way of apprehending the world: approximate, inexact, arrogant”.
A journalist once asked me: “If mathematics is science, why are there so many numbers in superstitions and cabals?” “For the same reason that polar bears are white,” I replied. Augurs and cabalists try to camouflage their nonsense behind the infallible reputation of numbers. That is also why politicians’ mouths sometimes spout numbers non-stop”. Because, I now add, there is no better manipulation than that based on something as infallible as numbers. That is why Caparrós, writing about the hungry of the world, has to warn time and again about numbers, about the manipulation that can be perpetrated with them: “But we know that numbers are also the refuge of certain scoundrels”.
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