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Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
- travisoneill1 8y agoSubsistence farming societies today: poor Subsistence farming societies before: not poor! Anybody who looks can see that poverty has increased!
- tdrgabi 8y agoThis sounds like fantasy to me: "Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor." They still fought over resources and hunting grounds. They even had slaves. I don't understand how that is a robust system of sharing and reciprocity.
- makerofspoons 8y agoIt's the 21st century and we are still propagating the noble savage stereotype.
- iguy 8y agoRight! Not to mention erasing the pre-colonial civilisations of half the world. Delhi is what, the 9th city on that site? The Guardian believes that none of those palace builders employed tax-collectors?
- mberning 8y agoAlso, none of the people promoting this regressive ideal are willing to be the first to give up current lifestyle either.
- coldtea 8y agoAs if it was "refuted" conclusively (as opposed to merely replaced by the opposite myth of monotonic progress)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- michaelscott 8y agoIndeed. Most societies across the planet were either also invading and conquering their neighbours or at the least systems in place that were analogous to those of colonists. Mongolia, China, Japan, India and many other Asian nations had been in and out of well documented wars for millenia, and even "primitive" cultures such as the Yurok had a working currency and trade economy, and the Iroquois a now well-known federation of tribes with a strong governmental structure.
- avmich 8y agoWe still fight even now, even most developed countries have wars. And subsistence societies don't necessarily have slavery on a big scale.
- sct202 8y agoYeah my parents are from one of those formerly poverty stricken places, and there was money, trade, and land ownership. So many people who are living today have experienced their lives improving rapidly within their memory, that it seems ridiculous to claim the opposite.
- watwut 8y agoYour parents are from "prior to colonization"? That is unlikely. Regardless of original claim of before colonization, your parents might see end of it.
- sct202 8y agoI'm sure that the 40 years of European colonization 400 years ago most definitely taught my barbaric ancestors how to use silver and claim land.
- iguy 8y agoSure, but "money, trade, and land ownership" were common in lots of places, long long before Europeans showed up. I mean we have Sumerian tax records!
- gipp 8y agoAnd to whatever extent it was ever true, its erosion would be much more about the growth of population and the shrinking of the commons that results from that. Not some half-baked Marxist angle
- seibelj 8y agoMaybe a hunter-gatherer society that never found conflict could fit this stereotype, if they ever existed. But the moment people put down roots, others wanted their stuff. The Aztecs were destroyed as a result of colonization, but Cortes couldn’t have killed them without getting a coalition of enemies of Montezuma on his side. And the reason a coalition could happen was that the Aztecs were merciless in their enslavement, taxation, and domination of other tribes and cities in their region. Colonizers did horrible things but let’s not pretend that humanity was pristine and without malice before the Europeans arrived. Human nature does not change.
- coldtea 8y ago>They still fought over resources and hunting grounds. They even had slaves. Western powers fought (and still fight) over resources and zones of interest, so there's that.
- bovermyer 8y agoUnfortunately, the author of this piece seems to suffer from the delusion that subsistence life is ideal. He makes a valid point that our data about poverty prior to 1981 is lacking; however, he completely ignores more telling data, such as infant mortality rates correlated with infrastructure development. Short version: life _is_ improving for the majority of people on the planet. Recommended reading on the subject: - _Factfulness_ by Hans Rosling, et al. - The WHO's health trend data: http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/en/ http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/en/
- avmich 8y agoThe author discusses poverty, not health. We can argue that health is more achievable in modern world, but the picture of poverty isn't changed by that.
- hannasanarion 8y agoIt absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income. We should expect poverty to be directly corellated with health, and the data agrees. Poke around on gapminder and see for yourself.
- avmich 8y ago> Poke around on gapminder What do you mean?
- jsjolen 8y agoHe's talking about Gapminder: https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/ He's basically telling you to educate yourself ;-)
- avmich 8y ago> If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income. It's easier for me to imagine sick person doing some work for himself or his family than sick person doing many kinds of work for others in monetary economy. If you have society with little use of money, I think relationship between health and poverty is different than in modern capitalism.
- tryptophan 8y agoI wonder why it is so hard for so many people to accept that the world is better than it ever has been, and is still getting better. You see this from every side of the political spectrum. Is being super cynical just a bug in our nature?
- justaman 8y agoPersonal anecdote here. Socialists seem to reject the idea that capitalism has brought more general prosperity to the world more often than not when speaking in terms of life longevity and food availability. Its as if they don't want to admit the upsides of capitalism at the cost of rationality. I personally haven't seen this from the far right as I have the far left.
- yogthos 8y agoThat's complete and utter nonsense. Capitalism works on slave labor plain and simple. The reason everything is made in third world countries is because they have no worker protections. Your clothing is made by some kids in Pakistan, your phone parts are made by suicidal workers at Foxconn, and so on. This is slavery in anything but name. Any countries that don't want to play in this system are systematically destroyed by US interventions. Just look at the history of South America as an example. It's a continuous stream of brutal coups and dictatorships instigated by CIA. Even domestically US now has a huge prison labor force that's become its own economy. You likely never experienced any of this personally, and never really wondered about the human cost of your lifestyle. A rational person would understand that a system where 1% of the population owns 99% of the wealth is not working for the common people around the world.
- jelliclesfarm 8y agoYou don’t seem to have an understanding of the concept of ‘slavery’. It’s a word that is used willy nilly these days. Collectivism by coercion is likely more apt to be considered slavery than free market capitalism
- bogle 8y ago
- tossaccount123 8y ago100 years ago the richest man in the world could die from a simple infection because there were no such thing as antibiotics. People take for granted so many things we have in the modern world, they want some form of utopia right now. Perfect is the enemy of good
- bogle 8y ago10 years from now the richest man in the world could die from a simple infection because there will be no such thing as antibiotics. A possible future with some basis in our current situation. As the financial world has it, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. It would be foolish to take for granted anything we have now which is why we should keep watching where things are possibly going, evaluate the risks, and take action to correct where we may be going wrong.
- CamTin 8y agoAnd now the poorest man in the world will die from the same infection because he can't afford the antibiotics, or has no access to a doctor who can prescribe them to him. What's the difference between something existing but being impossibly expensive vs not existing at all, except for the ultra rich?
- tossaccount123 8y agoExcept all stats on infant mortality, life expectancy, etc show that's not true. US and Europe have dumped over a trillion dollars in foreign aid to africa alone, 9x more than the Marshall plan post WWII.
- b_tterc_p 8y agoWhen you say ultra rich, you really mean not third world country poor.
- CamTin 8y agoThat's true for penicillin, but what about more exotic medical procedures? "Socialized" medicine is railed against for "rationing" but all markets have rationing as well. The whole point of a market is to ration resources to those most willing and able to pay. But yes. In general the line that matters is "Can I afford it?". If it doesn't exist, the answer is no for everbody. If it does exist, and has a price tag on it, the answer is no for some people and yes for others. The "no"s in the latter situation are pretty much in the same situation as they were before the good existed.
- CompelTechnic 8y agoThe article claims that a large number of people formerly lived cashless lives, but now live a lower-quality life that depends on cash. This claim doesn't have a lot of data for it, but is maybe believable. A data-driven discussion of quality of life, regardless of cash income, would clear this up. Looks like other commenters are dispelling the notion pretty quickly. Regarding cash income though, I feel that this article disrespects the actual data by cherry-picking. For a less sensationalized presentation of it, I recommend reading about the elephant curve. Most of the world's poor are doing much better in terms of cash income than they used to be. https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-world-income-distribution-the-elephant-chart-revisited/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-wo...
- iguy 8y agoI think it's well beyond "disrespects the actual data", more into science denial territory. We have had decent data about this for a long time. It's a lot easier to gather than climate data, on which the same people will profess great certainty. But it doesn't fit everyone's preferred view of things.
- blattimwind 8y agoClassic "noble savage" / "everything was better in the past" article. Why is this on HN?
- gpvos 8y agoIt makes a good discussion piece, and while far from perfect, it does bring some interesting data to the table (such as the stagnation in poverty decline if you exclude China).
- bogle 8y agoI think the article posited that the graphic was based on incomplete data and failed to show the effect of China's policies. He wasn't trying to make a case for it being all roses before 1981, he was trying to demonstrate that the Davos neo-liberals couldn't claim to be right. Perhaps it's suitable for HN because it raises the question of good data analysis versus making up numbers that amount to false news.
- alistairSH 8y agoOn-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.[0] 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cryoshon 8y agothe perspective that i think is missing from the article is that a lot of the drop in extreme poverty isn't the result of organized work by the world to curb misery. it's a result of the chinese economic boom which created the world's biggest middle class while also nearly erasing extreme poverty in the world's biggest country. a lot of the numbers we see regarding "world poverty" are misleading because of how impressive china has been able to do over the last 20 years. "world poverty reduction" data sans china looks much worse than any of us would like. i'm parroting these thoughts from a talk that i attended by the former secretary of the UN, ban ki-moon. he said the world had failed to reduce poverty, but that china had succeeded, giving the rest of the world a chance to feel good when it hadn't done much. now, directly to the article's point: yeah, forced participation as a laborer in the neoliberal world economy could be considered coercive and detrimental. but subsistence living is very far from desirable for many reasons. i don't think this is an argument we can really have in good faith -- there's no putting globalization back in the box at this point, so we need to make the best of it for the people who are doing the worst.
- iguy 8y agoIndeed "organized work by the world" has little to do with it. The aid industry may sometimes do good in a crisis, but has nothing to do with the overall trajectory. But while China is the poster-child for this (in the last 30 years), it's not just China. The life of many people in many smaller countries has been meaningfully improved.
- neolefty 8y agoAnd the effort in China was definitely deliberate. Maybe not having world wars for 70 years has helped — Steven Pinker's renaming of the Cold War to the Long Peace resonates!
- bogle 8y ago> the perspective that i think is missing from the article is that a lot of the drop in extreme poverty isn't the result of organized work by the world to curb misery He did indeed make that point by calling out the flatlining in poverty reduction if you removed China from the data.
- agurk 8y agoIt is probably worth noting that the author of this piece is also the author of a book about global inequality and his solutions to it [0]. While I haven't read his book, I recently completed Factfulness by Hans Rosling, which paints a more nuanced picture of how things are changing for people, and how small increases in wealth at the bottom can bring about life-changing differences. Claiming that people lived in a situation where they didn't need money as the author does, is taking the view that there are no benefits of the modern world. It reminds me of the noble savages that previous generations praised. I think the trend of bringing more people fresh water and access to healthcare is something to be celebrated. Trying to bundle this with the ills of modern society instead feels forced. [0] The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
- whack 8y ago> "The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard... Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty" If living on $3 per day is so bad, imagine how much worse it would be to live on less than $2 per day. That's the entire point being made by the optimists. The percentage of people living on less than $2 per day has shrunk by ~80%. You'd have to be willfully cynical to deny that being a good thing. > "Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the number of people in poverty gone up..." Of course the "number of people" has gone up. The world population has exploded. That's a completely unrelated topic, unless the author is advocating forced sterilizations. > "... the proportion of people in poverty has remained stagnant at about 60%" Any idea where he's getting this 60% number from? He has not given any citation whatsoever.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago"About 60%" means 71.8% in 1990 and 58.1% in 2013. https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-egregiousness-of-poverty-is-worse-than-ever-before-in-history https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-egregio...
- maw 8y agoI'm still waiting to find someone who uses the word neoliberal as a slur and who hasn't benefited enormously from it. It could be a while.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoNote that the author uses absolute numbers rather than relative numbers, nor does he give the value of the increase. Hint: the increase is measured in millions rather than billions. The relative numbers are 71.8% in 1990 vs 58.1% in 2013 https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-egregiousness-of-poverty-is-worse-than-ever-before-in-history https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-egregio...
- bogle 8y agoThat is a really interesting article, thanks. Through asking good questions about the relationships between the relative and absolute numbers it casts an uncomfortable spotlight onto our current responses to inequality.
- mrits 8y agoMy first reaction was that such irresponsible writing shouldn't be allowed here. But it's a good reminder how an expert with a narrative to fit is much worse than someone misinformed with good intentions.
- bogle 8y agoThe data in the graphic was misleading. Given the data corrected for China from 1981 it shows a flat line. I'm sure that is a useful takeaway, even if the politics isn't to your tastes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ackfoo 8y agoWhy do people listen to Bill Gates? He had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time and he cut a deal that has become the sine qua non of bad deals (for IBM). Then he went on to produce the worst OS in history, held together by gum and bits of string. It was only successful initially because there was no other viable choice. Its later success was fuelled by inertia and predatory trade practices. Windows created enormous suffering for an unprecedentedly large number of people because of poor design choices. Anyone trying to use a computer had to spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to fix that computer. All of which resulted in a guy with billions but no particular insight into reality. If you want Bill Gates-level ideas, ask any other old family member around the table at Thanksgiving. Getting lucky in business and having a lot of money doesn’t qualify you to run the world, and it doesn’t confer insight or wisdom.
- CompelTechnic 8y agoBill Gates is more well-informed than most people about the conditions of extreme poverty because he is actively attempting to fix it and is in charge of one of the largest charitable organizations ever assembled for this purpose.