Please read Amartya Sen. An interesting indication of the way things are going in terms of bourgeois ideology in the field of economics is the Nobel Prize. In 1997 the prize for economics went to Myron Scholes and Robert Merton for their work in the field of the pricing of risk. Their work kade possible the entire field of structure finance which have created havoc in the global finance system every two years during the 1990's, culmulating in the LTCM fiasco in which Merton was a partner. Sen's study of famines traces how, due to high food prices in a famine, there is lower effective demand, that is shrinking markets, for non food products.
Special action is needed to restore entitlements.
The theorist does this to rule out the awkward in the formal proof construction, just as the theory rules out the possibility of the bankruptcy for firms. Thus, for instance, if one were to introduce minimum subsistence for consumers as necessary condition for equilibrium, discontinuities enter and make mathematical proofs difficult. But what, for general equilibrium theorists is an anomaly or a curiosity to be ruled out, is the central problem to be investigated in famines i.e. precisely the fact that minimum subsistence quantities are necessary for survival, but impossible to obtain for a sizeable number of people. The pure economic model of competitive equilibrium cannot handle this any more than than it can handle the phenomenon of involuntary unemployment. To rule it out or to minimize its importance by labelling it an anomaly does not make the problem go away.