20 ms·

The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

427 points by apsec112 11y ago

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
It's just insane how good this is. Yeah, the middle class is hurting (worldwide, or pretty close), but the bottom is escaping poverty at an amazing rate.
- FelixP 11y ago
  No. The middle class in the US and other highly developed nations is hurting, but by any global measure, this group of people is actually relatively wealthy. The global middle class has experienced an unprecedented level of growth and prosperity over the past 25+ years. Of course, this has in many cases come at the expense of the first group.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    I can buy that.
  - hwstar 11y ago
    I agree. The standard of living in the first world countries will meet the third world countries in the middle. This explains why wages haven't increased significantly in the past 25 years in the US. Where it gets interesting is when equilibrium has been reached.
underwires 11y ago
The only reason that I already know this is Hans Rosling. His work is excellent, check it out if you haven't already. http://www.gapminder.org/ http://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.google.com/webhp?q=hans+rosling&tbm=vid https://www.google.com/webhp?q=hans+rosling&tbm=vid
- yk 11y ago
  Came here to mention his lecture/BBC show Don't panic. Not only because it is interesting, but because a lecture that is produced like a TV show is a very interesting cross-over of genres. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p...
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Yes, yes, yes, Rosling is right all the way and he is a very good communicator on top of that, and hates the political correctness.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
manachar 11y ago
It's really weird to me how commonplace the attitude of "It is what it is" and "Government can't do anything". The air and water quality in the US is vastly better since the passage of laws that created and empowered the EPA (Created by the Republican President Nixon). The endangered species act has had many similar successes. I live on Maui. The waters are now filled with Green Sea Turtles and Humpback whales that were nearly non-existent just 30 years ago. Yet when development and global climate change are threatening our reefs, people look at you like you're crazy for thinking that laws can be effective in safeguarding the environment for the future.
- baddox 11y ago
  What are you referencing in regards to poverty? I would have guessed that the recent reduction in poverty is largely attributable to wealthy nations reducing efforts to centrally plan the economies of poor nations.
  - manachar 11y ago
    While this article was more focused on poverty, the other major theme was that things and people are better now in many respects that people think it is. For me, the environmental successes of the last 30 years are a pretty amazing example of some of the awesome things humans can do when they put their minds to it. Additionally, the overly negative and pessimistic view of government and laws removes critical tools for that improvement. That move away from centrally planning poor nations was often achieved by changes in laws, and by the actions of a wide variety of organizational bodies and peoples. I'm not sure I have enough information in this article or elsewhere to state what has been effective at reducing the poverty.
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      It's less than awesome, really - people got richer and demand rose for a cleaner environment.
  - malchow 11y ago
    The conceit of the article -- borne out by economic history -- is exactly that: it's the reduction of efforts to centrally plan, and the rise of entrepreneurial, capitalistic efforts to advance, that has reduced poverty. [1] [2] [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/deirdre-mccloskey-ideas-not-capital-are-root-cause-development https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/deirdre-mccloskey-... [2] https://ricochet.com/perhaps-the-most-powerful-defense-of-market-capitalism-you-will-ever-read/ https://ricochet.com/perhaps-the-most-powerful-defense-of-ma...
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Max_Horstmann 11y ago
Since this is HN, here's a question: what role could technology play in eliminating extreme poverty by 2030?
- whackedspinach 11y ago
  Well an easy answer is to take a lot of that money people are earning in technology (I'm talking personal income or gifts from companies) and put it towards programs that either work towards ending poverty in those cases (through economic development, direct cash grants, etc) or improving health conditions, which often helps. Some possibilities (although there are many others): http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities If you have a novel approach using technology, you should pursue it, but don't let a lack of a technological solution prevent you from doing anything right now.
  - JesperRavn 11y ago
    Also whenever you earn more money, some the tax you pay goes towards programs like this whether you donate anything extra or not. So getting a high paying job alone helps.
    - dannypgh 11y ago
      Your taxes also fund the IMF, the legal system used to defend drug parents, and the promotion of "abstinence-only" sex-ed. The reality is federal programs aren't started or canceled based on total, let alone an individual's, tax revenue, so I call bullshit here.
      - JesperRavn 11y ago
        OK, how about this for starters: do you agree that the following two statements are inconsistent: 1. Increasing tax dollars does not benefit the world by increasing the services provided by the government. 2. Rich people should pay more taxes. The fact that total tax revenue must ultimately equal total government expenditure in the long run, is not bullshit, it's basic accounting. And the things you listed don't come close to canceling out the benefits of aid (and what is wrong with the IMF in the first place?)
oldmanjay 11y ago
This journalistic impulse to sell the world as worse than it is will not end because a single journalist caught a quick (and likely fleeting) guilty conscience. It will continue until the profession recognizes that their addiction to narrative harms the entire population.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  No, it will continue until it stops generating revenue. It is our appetite for this sort of journalism that feeds it; if all the journalists in the world suddenly stopped writing fear-baiting stories, then someone else would start writing those stories to fill the void. The journalists aren't the ones with the addiction; it is their readers that have the addiction.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  I expect that "the entire population" will recognize this before the journalists do.
- notNow 11y ago
  Mean world syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome
quan 11y ago
Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.
- marincounty 11y ago
  I couldn't find any correlation to inflation. I put in $2.00 in the calculator, and the millions of people in poverty came close to doubling. Maybe I'm missing something?
  - meow_mix 11y ago
    When I put $2.00 into the calculator it only showed me 2011. Maybe I'm missing something? I wish they would elaborate on the calculations on the site
  - hliyan 11y ago
    Who is down-voting all the inflation related questions? This shouldn't have to be explained to someone with downvote-level karma, but disagreeing with a comment's point of view is not a good reason to downvote it.
- meow_mix 11y ago
  I'm a bit confused about that as well. What's worse is that the background papers that the world bank website references seem to all 404: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTPROGRAMS/EXTPOVRES/EXTPOVCALNET/0,,contentMDK:21869487~menuPK:5314882~pagePK:64168445~piPK:64168309~theSitePK:5280443,00.html#Background_Papers http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/...
  - guiraldelli 11y ago
    Better luck here: https://wdronline.worldbank.com/handle/10986/6781 https://wdronline.worldbank.com/handle/10986/6781
- guiraldelli 11y ago
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Tossrock 11y ago
Reminds me of this similar article on the global decline in violence: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
mazerackham 11y ago
Another big secret, is that the source of a lot of poverty being lifted is because of China. That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years. That is definitely a big secret of american media, and something that it neglects to report on, in favor of free speech violations, naval exercises, ip infringement, and "job stealing".
- piker 11y ago
  Perhaps American sentiment is based on China's hundreds of years of bad policy relegating those same millions of people to extreme poverty? [edit: it might be more fair to say decades here, if you believe we can only attribute "policy" to the Communist Party]
  - mazerackham 11y ago
    I think you're right in your edit, the Community Party has only been in power for decades. Prior to that, China was in turmoil due to colonization and imperialism by the U.S., France, Britain, and other European states, as well as Japan. I believe it's more accurate to say that the American sentiment is derived from China being a rising world power ideologically backed by Communism, and an actual threat to America's dominance (by some methods, China's GDP has exceeded the U.S. already). As a Chinese American (I've lived in the U.S. all my life), it concerns me that American media shows such an insanely biased and untruthful view of China. Growing anti-Chinese sentiment is not a good thing for me, or my future children. I actually find it ironic that we Americans believe that the Chinese population believes in false state communist propaganda, but in reality, we suffer from it ourselves, just from free corporate backed media instead.
    - piker 11y ago
      While changes may be afoot, the one-party system has bred open and notorious corruption and censorship for 30+ years. The Party is also jeopardizing the global economy with its treatment of the market correction, mostly in the interest of defending its own position. I don't think negative American sentiment towards the Party is entirely misplaced.
narrator 11y ago
I think the average American is going to be shocked in the next couple of years when the rest of the world passes us by. The technological capability of developing nations has increased rapidly. Our rate of technological progress is slowing down. For example, Intel is having difficulty scaling down process technology past 14nm while the fabs in China are catching up at 28nm.
- aianus 11y ago
  > For example, Intel is having difficulty scaling down process technology past 14nm while the fabs in China are catching up at 28nm. It's much, much easier to "catch up" than to actually innovate. With the education system and culture in China and India there's no way they're going to pass us by. Those are countries where having an original thought and arguing with your teacher gets you kicked out of school. Hell, in China you need a license to put up a website.
  - mazerackham 11y ago
    China has plenty of "original thought[s]". I bet India does too. I always find it amazing that in the U.S. we tend to judge other countries as being "unoriginal" or "lacking creativity", simply because we are better right now. We forget to factor in that we are the wealthiest country in the world, have been for hundreds of years. We have the best resources, and that create a compounding effect for our accomplishments. Not to mention that a lot of our original ideas likely come from specifically China and India.
    - blumkvist 11y ago
      He talks about the culture of those countries. If you managed a typical Indian worker all you would ever hear is "yes, sir, I understood sir, it will get done, sir". Then an endless myriad of excuses and blame shifting and promises. People there are simply wired to always say "yes", never to question, never to doubt, never to criticize. I hope you can see why this might be a problem for transitioning to a "first world" economy, which relies on workers performing services, rather than standing on an assembly line. Things in China are a bit different, but not quite. Chinese culture makes people very reluctant to admit they do not know something. In addition to that in Chinese culture it is the responsibility of the listener to understand what is being said, as opposed to western culture where it is the speaker's responsibility to make sure that he is understood. This makes transfer of knowledge en mass a very difficult task. These simple, but fundamental differences are major hurdles for those economies going further.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Yes, a vast number of the world's poorest population have been raised out of nominal abject poverty, this is true. What Kristof doesn't state, however, are these facts: 1. Those people live almost entirely in China and India. 2. The rise in nominal wealth has come from a tremendous increase in energy consumption. 3. Both nations have extreme environmental problems, including the worst air pollution situations in the world, result of extreme amounts of coal consumption, water shortages, water pollution, and extensive land contamination from mining, industrial, municipal, and other waste. 4. Though overall efficiency in GDP output per unit energy has increased modestly, overall, increases in economic wealth require vast amounts of additional resource consumption. The combination of factors 3 and 4 above means that the gains in economic output are being accomplished largely by both strip-mining resources and exhausting effluent dumps in China and India. 5. Much of the apparent "de-materialisation" of economies in the developed world outside China and India is actually, on closer examination, based on exporting raw material (and effluent) demands to those countries. See research out of CSIRO (Australia) and UCSB. 6. Outside of China and India (though yes, they're both huge countries), progress in the "developing" world has been far more modest. In cases, backsliding. Add to this economic regression through much of the Middle East and North Africa (much of the disturbances of the Arab Spring is attributable to economic circumstances), and even in OECD/European nations, particularly Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. And finally: the foundations of modern economic wealth, vast quantities of nonrenewable resources, tapped at uttelry unsustainable rates, are quite simply not sustainable. Without looking to this basis, effectively the fuel in the tank, observations of altitude or velocity tell little.
- kderbe 11y ago
  I'd like to know more about #4 and #5. Do you have links to sites/articles/papers for more information? I'm having trouble searching for good sources.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  3. China is working on that by building a lot of nuclear reactors. Give it time.
- ekianjo 11y ago
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mninm 11y ago
"We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off." It always fascinates me how much my world view and the world view of those around me is based on the exceptional and not the mundane. The news outlets report the news assuming that the audience knows what's normal. When the news is used to become informed about the world many people come away with a skewed impression of reality. I am of the opinion that people would be better served by news reports that provide context to explain why the news is in fact news. Here's some context I find interesting: According to the CDC: Americans murdered per year: 16,121 Americans killed in car accidents per year: 33,804 Americans killed by smoking related diseases per year: 480,000 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_...
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  This is very important to realize about "the news". The conceit is that consuming the news will make you informed about the state of the world in the present, that is utterly false. It's a tiny soda straw view of some of the more exceptional things happening around the world at any given time. Actually educating people about the overall state of what's going on around the world is a much more difficult task which most news media organizations more or less avoid doing.
- clarkmoody 11y ago
  Context is dangerous to news & politics. Numbers are even more dangerous. So the likelihood of your wish coming true is almost nothing, at least in the mainstream news outlets. You'll get tons of context in long-format blogs and podcasts, where the purpose of the content is to educate. The primary purpose of media news is to make money, hence the bent toward entertainment more than anything. Data from the FBI[1] lists information about murders, including weapon types, circumstances of the murder, relationship to the victim, etc. (2013 numbers) Going through those numbers is enlightening and will augment your CDC data, which gives great context to overall death rates. [1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-offense/expandedoffensemain_final https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...
MisterMashable 11y ago
Ending illegal wars, the death penalty and torture are even more important. Why would our government which has no problem killing, maiming and even "torturing some folks" even begin to care about poverty, illiteracy and disease? You may disagree but as a whole our government has a strong proclivity to violence which implies a lack of regard for life. Dealing effectively with poverty, illiteracy and disease presupposes our government is sufficiently motivated to direct its attention to those issues. Pick any metric you like and it clearly shows our government has other priorities. Poverty is up, illiteracy is up, education is overall declining, university tuition skyrocketing, cost of healthcare skyrocketing, planned parenthood under attack etc. Our government just bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, executed a woman in Georgia who should have served a life sentence instead, is about to execute a man whose guilt is unclear and still tortures people in dark forgotten corners of the globe. I don't think there can be any meaningful change until bad people with no respect for life are removed from office and replaced with good people who do respect life. It's no coincidence that since the warmongers seized control of this country that education and healthcare took a dive. Dr. Strangelove doesn't care one whit about poverty, illiteracy and disease .
beatpanda 11y ago
Meanwhile, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/19/humans-creating-sixth-great-extinction-of-animal-species-say-scientists http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/19/humans-cr...
- beatpanda 11y ago
  Kristof also conveniently doesn't mention that poverty in the United States is actually increasing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
  - webXL 11y ago
    That article is a textbook example of cherry picking. If you pick the height of a boom as your baseline, of course poverty will increase during a major recession.
- beatpanda 11y ago
  Wow, downvotes? What happened to this place?
ekianjo 11y ago
So this is where some folks on HN should come and complain and the raising inequalities, despite the fact that literally everyone is getting richer. Which is what ultimately matters.
- gozo 11y ago
  Not everyone is getting richer. People aren't getting richer because of inequality. Even if they were they don't lose their right to a fair share. "What ultimately matter" is a weak argument that could be said to justify anything e.g. security over freedom.
_gopz 11y ago
> The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted. I assume this is adjusted for inflation, but I didn't see anything in the link. Does anyone know?
xacaxulu 11y ago
>That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. Sad, funny and completely unsurprising. At least this writer understands his profession's complicity in the stultifying of America.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  The author himself is quite complicit to this misbehavior.
mc32 11y ago
Implied but not stated directly is that because vast reduction in disease and proportionate increase in life expectancy people are having fewer children so that the small resources people have don't have to be divided into smaller slices but rather into larger slices. Globalization, the boogeyperson of lots of people, has allowed some income redistribution to the developing world -has the developed world not globalized, it's not a given that had the developed world hoarded their industry and jobs the poor countries would have done as relatively well as they have. It's also surprising to not see much comment on the interesting phenomenon where countries which had relatively good economies in the early 20th century (Mexico, Argentina, etc) went way down hill after WWii, partly severe corruption and simple non-investment due to antiquated policies and emphasis on natural resources rather than technologies.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  Nit pick: This is not about income redistribution to the developing world. The poor of the world has simply become more productive and generated more of their own income.
  - mc32 11y ago
    Right, but would the hundreds of millions of destitute subsistence farmers of China have become more secure without the foreign investment and "job shipping" of developed countries like Japan, North Am and Europe? Would Africa be emerging as much without the Chinese foreign investment? How does India plan on getting its poor on better standing other than inviting firms from developed countries to invest in Indian manufacturing with the lure of lower labor costs --even syphoning jobs off from China now that China's workforce has become more expensive as they have become a rich country (the second largest economy in the world).
crdoconnor 11y ago
>One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Curious that the author attempts to attribute this to media sensationalism rather than, say, an increase in American poverty. Or perhaps not, since Kristof is a fierce critic of the anti-sweatshop movement.
- tim333 11y ago
  Looking at the data for American poverty it hasn't budged that much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Measures_of_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#M...
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hunger-the-us-historic-highs http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hunger-the-us-historic-highs
astazangasta 11y ago
This article is deceptive because it speaks of raw numbers rather than percentages. While the number of people living on less than a dollar a day went up throughout the 20th century, this was because populations were exploding over the same period. At the same time, the fraction of people living on less than a dollar a day plunged dramatically. In fact, this trend slowed after 1990 - since then this rate has declined less quickly than it did during the seventies, when it fell from almost 30% to less than 10% in 1985. See https://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/capitalism.jpg?w=900 https://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/capitalism.jp... e.g.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  That particular chart seems to show significantly lower numbers than most I've seen. Sub 10% since 1985. This one shows 20% as of 2010. And over 40% in 1990. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/USAID_Projections.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/USAID_Pr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty Also from that article. "n 1990, the percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty was 43.1%, but in 2010, that percentage had dropped down to 20.6%." That doesn't line up AT ALL with your image which says 10% in 1985. So I'm not sure what's going on here exactly. But I don't think it's as simple as absolute vs percentage deception.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    Different definitions of extreme poverty might change the percentages; however, in all of these it ought to be clear that the rate of poverty declined throughout the twentieth century, it did not go up mid century as Kristof implies.
coffeemug 11y ago
> We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off. This is why everyone should read The Economist instead of The New York Times. The Economist does a phenomenal job avoiding the selection bias and finding a way to cover mundane trends. It makes the mundane interesting, and gives a view of the world that's much closer to reality than any other publication I've ever seen. I'd strongly encourage everyone to give it a shot.
- ckozlowski 11y ago
  I enjoy the fact that while they have a very clear opinion and bias (liberal economics and the free market), they avoid mudslinging, keep their criticisms factual, and are often quick to point out where their preferred system is failing. That being said, I've few issues with The New York Times.
- pnut 11y ago
  Why not read both? There is some correlation between the quality of a publication and the quality of the comments section. NYT is head and shoulders above the Economist in this regard.
dkbrk 11y ago
A minor note: the author refers to "Volkswagen corruption". I have not seen the company's actions called corruption elsewhere, nor was it justified in the provided link. Volkswagen deliberately subverted regulations on emissions control. It would have been corruption if they also bribed officials to get away with it. I'm not attempting to defend Volkswagen in any way, but the phrase is sensationalist and strictly incorrect, even if only very slightly so. This is interesting given the overall point of the article.
tchibon 11y ago
As a side note, mr. Nicolas is the one feeding the media with "war, scandal and disaster". It's enough to take a look at his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kristof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kristof or the topics he covers: http://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Byline&region=Header&pgtype=article http://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof?action=click&...
tragomaskhalos 11y ago
Disasters and tragedies sell, and we now get to hear about them from all over the world, so selection bias is sadly inevitable. This is why millenarian religions like the Jehovah's Witnesses (and, perhaps, radical Islam) are able to so easily convince the gullible that the world is on its last legs.
waltherp 11y ago
Not to overreach here but thank you Internet! The single greatest equalizer in human history.

427 points by apsec112 11y ago

It's just insane how good this is. Yeah, the middle class is hurting (worldwide, or pretty close), but the bottom is escaping poverty at an amazing rate.

FelixP 11y ago
No. The middle class in the US and other highly developed nations is hurting, but by any global measure, this group of people is actually relatively wealthy. The global middle class has experienced an unprecedented level of growth and prosperity over the past 25+ years. Of course, this has in many cases come at the expense of the first group.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  I can buy that.
- hwstar 11y ago
  I agree. The standard of living in the first world countries will meet the third world countries in the middle. This explains why wages haven't increased significantly in the past 25 years in the US. Where it gets interesting is when equilibrium has been reached.

underwires 11y ago

The only reason that I already know this is Hans Rosling. His work is excellent, check it out if you haven't already. http://www.gapminder.org/ http://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.google.com/webhp?q=hans+rosling&tbm=vid https://www.google.com/webhp?q=hans+rosling&tbm=vid

yk 11y ago
Came here to mention his lecture/BBC show Don't panic. Not only because it is interesting, but because a lecture that is produced like a TV show is a very interesting cross-over of genres. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p...
ekianjo 11y ago
Yes, yes, yes, Rosling is right all the way and he is a very good communicator on top of that, and hates the political correctness.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

manachar 11y ago

It's really weird to me how commonplace the attitude of "It is what it is" and "Government can't do anything". The air and water quality in the US is vastly better since the passage of laws that created and empowered the EPA (Created by the Republican President Nixon). The endangered species act has had many similar successes. I live on Maui. The waters are now filled with Green Sea Turtles and Humpback whales that were nearly non-existent just 30 years ago. Yet when development and global climate change are threatening our reefs, people look at you like you're crazy for thinking that laws can be effective in safeguarding the environment for the future.

baddox 11y ago
What are you referencing in regards to poverty? I would have guessed that the recent reduction in poverty is largely attributable to wealthy nations reducing efforts to centrally plan the economies of poor nations.
- manachar 11y ago
  While this article was more focused on poverty, the other major theme was that things and people are better now in many respects that people think it is. For me, the environmental successes of the last 30 years are a pretty amazing example of some of the awesome things humans can do when they put their minds to it. Additionally, the overly negative and pessimistic view of government and laws removes critical tools for that improvement. That move away from centrally planning poor nations was often achieved by changes in laws, and by the actions of a wide variety of organizational bodies and peoples. I'm not sure I have enough information in this article or elsewhere to state what has been effective at reducing the poverty.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    It's less than awesome, really - people got richer and demand rose for a cleaner environment.
- malchow 11y ago
  The conceit of the article -- borne out by economic history -- is exactly that: it's the reduction of efforts to centrally plan, and the rise of entrepreneurial, capitalistic efforts to advance, that has reduced poverty. [1] [2] [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/deirdre-mccloskey-ideas-not-capital-are-root-cause-development https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/deirdre-mccloskey-... [2] https://ricochet.com/perhaps-the-most-powerful-defense-of-market-capitalism-you-will-ever-read/ https://ricochet.com/perhaps-the-most-powerful-defense-of-ma...

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Max_Horstmann 11y ago

Since this is HN, here's a question: what role could technology play in eliminating extreme poverty by 2030?

whackedspinach 11y ago
Well an easy answer is to take a lot of that money people are earning in technology (I'm talking personal income or gifts from companies) and put it towards programs that either work towards ending poverty in those cases (through economic development, direct cash grants, etc) or improving health conditions, which often helps. Some possibilities (although there are many others): http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities If you have a novel approach using technology, you should pursue it, but don't let a lack of a technological solution prevent you from doing anything right now.
- JesperRavn 11y ago
  Also whenever you earn more money, some the tax you pay goes towards programs like this whether you donate anything extra or not. So getting a high paying job alone helps.
  - dannypgh 11y ago
    Your taxes also fund the IMF, the legal system used to defend drug parents, and the promotion of "abstinence-only" sex-ed. The reality is federal programs aren't started or canceled based on total, let alone an individual's, tax revenue, so I call bullshit here.
    - JesperRavn 11y ago
      OK, how about this for starters: do you agree that the following two statements are inconsistent: 1. Increasing tax dollars does not benefit the world by increasing the services provided by the government. 2. Rich people should pay more taxes. The fact that total tax revenue must ultimately equal total government expenditure in the long run, is not bullshit, it's basic accounting. And the things you listed don't come close to canceling out the benefits of aid (and what is wrong with the IMF in the first place?)

oldmanjay 11y ago

This journalistic impulse to sell the world as worse than it is will not end because a single journalist caught a quick (and likely fleeting) guilty conscience. It will continue until the profession recognizes that their addiction to narrative harms the entire population.

cortesoft 11y ago
No, it will continue until it stops generating revenue. It is our appetite for this sort of journalism that feeds it; if all the journalists in the world suddenly stopped writing fear-baiting stories, then someone else would start writing those stories to fill the void. The journalists aren't the ones with the addiction; it is their readers that have the addiction.
jessaustin 11y ago
I expect that "the entire population" will recognize this before the journalists do.
notNow 11y ago
Mean world syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome

quan 11y ago

Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.

marincounty 11y ago
I couldn't find any correlation to inflation. I put in $2.00 in the calculator, and the millions of people in poverty came close to doubling. Maybe I'm missing something?
- meow_mix 11y ago
  When I put $2.00 into the calculator it only showed me 2011. Maybe I'm missing something? I wish they would elaborate on the calculations on the site
- hliyan 11y ago
  Who is down-voting all the inflation related questions? This shouldn't have to be explained to someone with downvote-level karma, but disagreeing with a comment's point of view is not a good reason to downvote it.
meow_mix 11y ago
I'm a bit confused about that as well. What's worse is that the background papers that the world bank website references seem to all 404: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTPROGRAMS/EXTPOVRES/EXTPOVCALNET/0,,contentMDK:21869487~menuPK:5314882~pagePK:64168445~piPK:64168309~theSitePK:5280443,00.html#Background_Papers http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/...
- guiraldelli 11y ago
  Better luck here: https://wdronline.worldbank.com/handle/10986/6781 https://wdronline.worldbank.com/handle/10986/6781
guiraldelli 11y ago

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Tossrock 11y ago

Reminds me of this similar article on the global decline in violence: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

mazerackham 11y ago

Another big secret, is that the source of a lot of poverty being lifted is because of China. That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years. That is definitely a big secret of american media, and something that it neglects to report on, in favor of free speech violations, naval exercises, ip infringement, and "job stealing".

piker 11y ago
Perhaps American sentiment is based on China's hundreds of years of bad policy relegating those same millions of people to extreme poverty? [edit: it might be more fair to say decades here, if you believe we can only attribute "policy" to the Communist Party]
- mazerackham 11y ago
  I think you're right in your edit, the Community Party has only been in power for decades. Prior to that, China was in turmoil due to colonization and imperialism by the U.S., France, Britain, and other European states, as well as Japan. I believe it's more accurate to say that the American sentiment is derived from China being a rising world power ideologically backed by Communism, and an actual threat to America's dominance (by some methods, China's GDP has exceeded the U.S. already). As a Chinese American (I've lived in the U.S. all my life), it concerns me that American media shows such an insanely biased and untruthful view of China. Growing anti-Chinese sentiment is not a good thing for me, or my future children. I actually find it ironic that we Americans believe that the Chinese population believes in false state communist propaganda, but in reality, we suffer from it ourselves, just from free corporate backed media instead.
  - piker 11y ago
    While changes may be afoot, the one-party system has bred open and notorious corruption and censorship for 30+ years. The Party is also jeopardizing the global economy with its treatment of the market correction, mostly in the interest of defending its own position. I don't think negative American sentiment towards the Party is entirely misplaced.

narrator 11y ago

I think the average American is going to be shocked in the next couple of years when the rest of the world passes us by. The technological capability of developing nations has increased rapidly. Our rate of technological progress is slowing down. For example, Intel is having difficulty scaling down process technology past 14nm while the fabs in China are catching up at 28nm.

aianus 11y ago
> For example, Intel is having difficulty scaling down process technology past 14nm while the fabs in China are catching up at 28nm. It's much, much easier to "catch up" than to actually innovate. With the education system and culture in China and India there's no way they're going to pass us by. Those are countries where having an original thought and arguing with your teacher gets you kicked out of school. Hell, in China you need a license to put up a website.
- mazerackham 11y ago
  China has plenty of "original thought[s]". I bet India does too. I always find it amazing that in the U.S. we tend to judge other countries as being "unoriginal" or "lacking creativity", simply because we are better right now. We forget to factor in that we are the wealthiest country in the world, have been for hundreds of years. We have the best resources, and that create a compounding effect for our accomplishments. Not to mention that a lot of our original ideas likely come from specifically China and India.
  - blumkvist 11y ago
    He talks about the culture of those countries. If you managed a typical Indian worker all you would ever hear is "yes, sir, I understood sir, it will get done, sir". Then an endless myriad of excuses and blame shifting and promises. People there are simply wired to always say "yes", never to question, never to doubt, never to criticize. I hope you can see why this might be a problem for transitioning to a "first world" economy, which relies on workers performing services, rather than standing on an assembly line. Things in China are a bit different, but not quite. Chinese culture makes people very reluctant to admit they do not know something. In addition to that in Chinese culture it is the responsibility of the listener to understand what is being said, as opposed to western culture where it is the speaker's responsibility to make sure that he is understood. This makes transfer of knowledge en mass a very difficult task. These simple, but fundamental differences are major hurdles for those economies going further.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Yes, a vast number of the world's poorest population have been raised out of nominal abject poverty, this is true. What Kristof doesn't state, however, are these facts: 1. Those people live almost entirely in China and India. 2. The rise in nominal wealth has come from a tremendous increase in energy consumption. 3. Both nations have extreme environmental problems, including the worst air pollution situations in the world, result of extreme amounts of coal consumption, water shortages, water pollution, and extensive land contamination from mining, industrial, municipal, and other waste. 4. Though overall efficiency in GDP output per unit energy has increased modestly, overall, increases in economic wealth require vast amounts of additional resource consumption. The combination of factors 3 and 4 above means that the gains in economic output are being accomplished largely by both strip-mining resources and exhausting effluent dumps in China and India. 5. Much of the apparent "de-materialisation" of economies in the developed world outside China and India is actually, on closer examination, based on exporting raw material (and effluent) demands to those countries. See research out of CSIRO (Australia) and UCSB. 6. Outside of China and India (though yes, they're both huge countries), progress in the "developing" world has been far more modest. In cases, backsliding. Add to this economic regression through much of the Middle East and North Africa (much of the disturbances of the Arab Spring is attributable to economic circumstances), and even in OECD/European nations, particularly Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. And finally: the foundations of modern economic wealth, vast quantities of nonrenewable resources, tapped at uttelry unsustainable rates, are quite simply not sustainable. Without looking to this basis, effectively the fuel in the tank, observations of altitude or velocity tell little.

kderbe 11y ago
I'd like to know more about #4 and #5. Do you have links to sites/articles/papers for more information? I'm having trouble searching for good sources.
ekianjo 11y ago
3. China is working on that by building a lot of nuclear reactors. Give it time.
ekianjo 11y ago

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mninm 11y ago

"We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off." It always fascinates me how much my world view and the world view of those around me is based on the exceptional and not the mundane. The news outlets report the news assuming that the audience knows what's normal. When the news is used to become informed about the world many people come away with a skewed impression of reality. I am of the opinion that people would be better served by news reports that provide context to explain why the news is in fact news. Here's some context I find interesting: According to the CDC: Americans murdered per year: 16,121 Americans killed in car accidents per year: 33,804 Americans killed by smoking related diseases per year: 480,000 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_...

InclinedPlane 11y ago
This is very important to realize about "the news". The conceit is that consuming the news will make you informed about the state of the world in the present, that is utterly false. It's a tiny soda straw view of some of the more exceptional things happening around the world at any given time. Actually educating people about the overall state of what's going on around the world is a much more difficult task which most news media organizations more or less avoid doing.
clarkmoody 11y ago
Context is dangerous to news & politics. Numbers are even more dangerous. So the likelihood of your wish coming true is almost nothing, at least in the mainstream news outlets. You'll get tons of context in long-format blogs and podcasts, where the purpose of the content is to educate. The primary purpose of media news is to make money, hence the bent toward entertainment more than anything. Data from the FBI[1] lists information about murders, including weapon types, circumstances of the murder, relationship to the victim, etc. (2013 numbers) Going through those numbers is enlightening and will augment your CDC data, which gives great context to overall death rates. [1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-offense/expandedoffensemain_final https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

MisterMashable 11y ago

Ending illegal wars, the death penalty and torture are even more important. Why would our government which has no problem killing, maiming and even "torturing some folks" even begin to care about poverty, illiteracy and disease? You may disagree but as a whole our government has a strong proclivity to violence which implies a lack of regard for life. Dealing effectively with poverty, illiteracy and disease presupposes our government is sufficiently motivated to direct its attention to those issues. Pick any metric you like and it clearly shows our government has other priorities. Poverty is up, illiteracy is up, education is overall declining, university tuition skyrocketing, cost of healthcare skyrocketing, planned parenthood under attack etc. Our government just bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, executed a woman in Georgia who should have served a life sentence instead, is about to execute a man whose guilt is unclear and still tortures people in dark forgotten corners of the globe. I don't think there can be any meaningful change until bad people with no respect for life are removed from office and replaced with good people who do respect life. It's no coincidence that since the warmongers seized control of this country that education and healthcare took a dive. Dr. Strangelove doesn't care one whit about poverty, illiteracy and disease .

beatpanda 11y ago

Meanwhile, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/19/humans-creating-sixth-great-extinction-of-animal-species-say-scientists http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/19/humans-cr...

beatpanda 11y ago
Kristof also conveniently doesn't mention that poverty in the United States is actually increasing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
- webXL 11y ago
  That article is a textbook example of cherry picking. If you pick the height of a boom as your baseline, of course poverty will increase during a major recession.
beatpanda 11y ago
Wow, downvotes? What happened to this place?

ekianjo 11y ago

So this is where some folks on HN should come and complain and the raising inequalities, despite the fact that literally everyone is getting richer. Which is what ultimately matters.

gozo 11y ago
Not everyone is getting richer. People aren't getting richer because of inequality. Even if they were they don't lose their right to a fair share. "What ultimately matter" is a weak argument that could be said to justify anything e.g. security over freedom.

_gopz 11y ago

> The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted. I assume this is adjusted for inflation, but I didn't see anything in the link. Does anyone know?

xacaxulu 11y ago

>That’s 95 percent of Americans — who are utterly wrong. Sad, funny and completely unsurprising. At least this writer understands his profession's complicity in the stultifying of America.

blumkvist 11y ago
The author himself is quite complicit to this misbehavior.

mc32 11y ago

Implied but not stated directly is that because vast reduction in disease and proportionate increase in life expectancy people are having fewer children so that the small resources people have don't have to be divided into smaller slices but rather into larger slices. Globalization, the boogeyperson of lots of people, has allowed some income redistribution to the developing world -has the developed world not globalized, it's not a given that had the developed world hoarded their industry and jobs the poor countries would have done as relatively well as they have. It's also surprising to not see much comment on the interesting phenomenon where countries which had relatively good economies in the early 20th century (Mexico, Argentina, etc) went way down hill after WWii, partly severe corruption and simple non-investment due to antiquated policies and emphasis on natural resources rather than technologies.

BurningFrog 11y ago
Nit pick: This is not about income redistribution to the developing world. The poor of the world has simply become more productive and generated more of their own income.
- mc32 11y ago
  Right, but would the hundreds of millions of destitute subsistence farmers of China have become more secure without the foreign investment and "job shipping" of developed countries like Japan, North Am and Europe? Would Africa be emerging as much without the Chinese foreign investment? How does India plan on getting its poor on better standing other than inviting firms from developed countries to invest in Indian manufacturing with the lure of lower labor costs --even syphoning jobs off from China now that China's workforce has become more expensive as they have become a rich country (the second largest economy in the world).

crdoconnor 11y ago

>One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Curious that the author attempts to attribute this to media sensationalism rather than, say, an increase in American poverty. Or perhaps not, since Kristof is a fierce critic of the anti-sweatshop movement.

tim333 11y ago
Looking at the data for American poverty it hasn't budged that much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Measures_of_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#M...
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hunger-the-us-historic-highs http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hunger-the-us-historic-highs

astazangasta 11y ago

This article is deceptive because it speaks of raw numbers rather than percentages. While the number of people living on less than a dollar a day went up throughout the 20th century, this was because populations were exploding over the same period. At the same time, the fraction of people living on less than a dollar a day plunged dramatically. In fact, this trend slowed after 1990 - since then this rate has declined less quickly than it did during the seventies, when it fell from almost 30% to less than 10% in 1985. See https://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/capitalism.jpg?w=900 https://orderorder.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/capitalism.jp... e.g.

forrestthewoods 11y ago
That particular chart seems to show significantly lower numbers than most I've seen. Sub 10% since 1985. This one shows 20% as of 2010. And over 40% in 1990. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/USAID_Projections.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/USAID_Pr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty Also from that article. "n 1990, the percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty was 43.1%, but in 2010, that percentage had dropped down to 20.6%." That doesn't line up AT ALL with your image which says 10% in 1985. So I'm not sure what's going on here exactly. But I don't think it's as simple as absolute vs percentage deception.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  Different definitions of extreme poverty might change the percentages; however, in all of these it ought to be clear that the rate of poverty declined throughout the twentieth century, it did not go up mid century as Kristof implies.

coffeemug 11y ago

> We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off. This is why everyone should read The Economist instead of The New York Times. The Economist does a phenomenal job avoiding the selection bias and finding a way to cover mundane trends. It makes the mundane interesting, and gives a view of the world that's much closer to reality than any other publication I've ever seen. I'd strongly encourage everyone to give it a shot.

ckozlowski 11y ago
I enjoy the fact that while they have a very clear opinion and bias (liberal economics and the free market), they avoid mudslinging, keep their criticisms factual, and are often quick to point out where their preferred system is failing. That being said, I've few issues with The New York Times.
pnut 11y ago
Why not read both? There is some correlation between the quality of a publication and the quality of the comments section. NYT is head and shoulders above the Economist in this regard.

dkbrk 11y ago

A minor note: the author refers to "Volkswagen corruption". I have not seen the company's actions called corruption elsewhere, nor was it justified in the provided link. Volkswagen deliberately subverted regulations on emissions control. It would have been corruption if they also bribed officials to get away with it. I'm not attempting to defend Volkswagen in any way, but the phrase is sensationalist and strictly incorrect, even if only very slightly so. This is interesting given the overall point of the article.

tchibon 11y ago

As a side note, mr. Nicolas is the one feeding the media with "war, scandal and disaster". It's enough to take a look at his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kristof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Kristof or the topics he covers: http://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Byline&region=Header&pgtype=article http://www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof?action=click&...

tragomaskhalos 11y ago

Disasters and tragedies sell, and we now get to hear about them from all over the world, so selection bias is sadly inevitable. This is why millenarian religions like the Jehovah's Witnesses (and, perhaps, radical Islam) are able to so easily convince the gullible that the world is on its last legs.

waltherp 11y ago

Not to overreach here but thank you Internet! The single greatest equalizer in human history.