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Unfortunately, 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 pr

Unfortunately, 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 ago
The 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 ago
  It 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 ago
      He'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.
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      What makes you think that day laboring in a field is any easier to do while sick than driving or serving or knowledge work? How you are paid for your work is irrelevant when you are too sick to do it. Also, why are we treating money like a colonial invention?
      - avmich 8y ago
        > What makes you think that day laboring in a field is any easier to do while sick than driving or serving or knowledge work? The fact that doing work for yourself allows you to structure it to your needs. You may till the garden early in the morning or late at night, when you feel like it, you can make decision on the spot and you don't need to coordinate with others. Or you can switch to home-centered work which you postponed before.
  - paganel 8y ago
    > It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income That's the author's (main) point, i.e. that using money/income in order to compare today's capitalist world with the one that came before it is pointless, because money wasn't that much of a thing in a pre-capitalist world and you could live reasonably well (and healthy) without having any access to "income".
    - neaden 8y ago
      You couldn't really live reasonably well and healthy though. For the vast majority of human history about 40% of people died before reaching adulthood.
    - hannasanarion 8y ago
      Not being paid wages doesn't mean not taking income. In an agricultural society, the produce of your farm, and profit from selling it is your income. You can't work the fields or go to market when you're bedridden with tuberculosis. Food didn't magically appear on people's plates ojt of thin air before capitalism. Also, why are we pretending that precolonial society was exclusively barter driven and agricultural? Tradespeople go back to the dawn of time.
      - paganel 8y ago
        The first chart in Gates's tweet (which is what the article is all about) is based on the idea that all incomes are converted into money for comparison reasons, otherwise I have no idea how they managed to compare incomes going back 200 years from different types of societies. How do you assign income for shared grazing grounds? Or for shared forests? Or for rotating ownership of the agricultural fields? (btw, rotating ownership is an idea very alien to capitalism, if you propose it today you'll be treated as a communist). You basically can't do all that, because these things don't have a very easily computable money equivalent. And, as such, comparing the rate of poverty in a capitalist society to the rate of poverty from a pre-capitalist society is bogus. Again, this is what the article is all about. > you're bedridden with tuberculosis. No, you can't, but your wife/uncle/cousin/aunt can until you get better. While living in a capitalist society mostly means an atomic family unit where, if you happen to be bed-ridden, you're basically on your own. Again, charts like the ones tweeted by Gates don't assign any monetary value to this type of close human relations, even though those close human relations greatly improve our well-being. Afaik nobody has assigned yet any money value to the ease of mind provided by thoughts like "hey, I'm not alone in this world, I'm not on my own".
- hartator 8y ago
  Health is linked to poverty. So it makes sensr to use it as a metric.
warmwaffles 8y ago
It's also really hard to find people in the population that do not have a cell phone or quick access to one.
neolefty 8y ago
I agree with both — I think it's a false dichotomy to say "either it's getting worse or it's getting better". 1. Yes, so much is getting better. 2. There are new injustices, and also we'd be even better off if wealth were more evenly distributed. On the one hand, as long as things continue to improve, that's good! On the other hand, things will only improve if we make them improve.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Unfortunately, the author of this piece seems to suffer from the delusion that subsistence life is ideal. That does not seem to be the argument. The argument seems to be that money-based measures that might be valid for comparing poverty within fully capitalist, money-oriented societies are not sensible ways of comparing societies across a continuum from not-at-all money-oriented or capitalist to fully capitalist, money-oriented.
- iguy 8y ago
  The simplest measures of past wealth do simply look at money. We know what unskilled building day-labor earner in Delhi in 1600, and converting this to calories of the staple diet gives a reasonable measure by which you can compare them to workers in (say) Amsterdam. Because both were paid in cash, and spent most of their income on food. The countryside is more complicated, but people do work out similar things.
coldtea 8y ago
>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 Which is not really relevant to whether poverty is decreasing or not. You can have some better tools or preventions decreasing infant mortality without getting people out of poverty otherwise. You can also force people out of traditional livable rural non-commercial existence with 0 $/day and into hellish city poverty with few $/day, and it would look like an improvement in the books.
- username90 8y ago
  Life expectancy is a pretty good measure. The most important life expectancy raiser is not healthcare but access to food and clean water. Most deaths 100 years ago were caused by diseases which well fed people shrugs off. I'd argue that anyone who lacks food and clean water is poorer than even those who lives on the street in modern western nations.
bko 8y ago
The specific passage from the article where the author romanticizes subsistence economies: > 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. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.
- ricw 8y ago
  This. Most people in developed countries typically don’t know that in poor countries subsistence farmers are the poorest of them all, literally starving for months when their crops are done. Without trade or refrigeration you simply can’t subsist. On the other hand people don’t know that people in cities, even if they live in slums, are much better nourished than people in the country side, who are mostly subsistence farmers. In short, typically cities are rich and the country side is poor, as much as that may go against a romanticised view of older days. Valid point may be that a dollar value may not be the best way to describe poverty. Nourishment, healthcare access and life expectancy are likely much better indicators.
trahn 8y ago
Well the author is from an institution called the University of London, and Max Roser, who's stats he is critiquing, from an institution called Oxford...
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Specifically Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and a fellow of the RSA. https://www.gold.ac.uk/anthropology/staff/hickel-jason/ https://www.gold.ac.uk/anthropology/staff/hickel-jason/
Balgair 8y ago
Factfulness is available, for free, here: http://www.factfulness.science/ http://www.factfulness.science/ The late Dr. Rosling's website is fantastic and a good example of easy to use GUIs for data science. Play around with the data yourself here: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2018;;&chart-type=bubbles https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2018;;&ch... Try taking the quiz here to see if you are smarter than a chimp: http://factfulnessquiz.com/ http://factfulnessquiz.com/ I'd encourage everyone to read Factfulness. It's fairly quick to churn through and very enlightening. The world really is getting better.

avmich 8y ago

The 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 ago
It 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 ago
    He'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.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    What makes you think that day laboring in a field is any easier to do while sick than driving or serving or knowledge work? How you are paid for your work is irrelevant when you are too sick to do it. Also, why are we treating money like a colonial invention?
    - avmich 8y ago
      > What makes you think that day laboring in a field is any easier to do while sick than driving or serving or knowledge work? The fact that doing work for yourself allows you to structure it to your needs. You may till the garden early in the morning or late at night, when you feel like it, you can make decision on the spot and you don't need to coordinate with others. Or you can switch to home-centered work which you postponed before.
- paganel 8y ago
  > It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income That's the author's (main) point, i.e. that using money/income in order to compare today's capitalist world with the one that came before it is pointless, because money wasn't that much of a thing in a pre-capitalist world and you could live reasonably well (and healthy) without having any access to "income".
  - neaden 8y ago
    You couldn't really live reasonably well and healthy though. For the vast majority of human history about 40% of people died before reaching adulthood.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    Not being paid wages doesn't mean not taking income. In an agricultural society, the produce of your farm, and profit from selling it is your income. You can't work the fields or go to market when you're bedridden with tuberculosis. Food didn't magically appear on people's plates ojt of thin air before capitalism. Also, why are we pretending that precolonial society was exclusively barter driven and agricultural? Tradespeople go back to the dawn of time.
    - paganel 8y ago
      The first chart in Gates's tweet (which is what the article is all about) is based on the idea that all incomes are converted into money for comparison reasons, otherwise I have no idea how they managed to compare incomes going back 200 years from different types of societies. How do you assign income for shared grazing grounds? Or for shared forests? Or for rotating ownership of the agricultural fields? (btw, rotating ownership is an idea very alien to capitalism, if you propose it today you'll be treated as a communist). You basically can't do all that, because these things don't have a very easily computable money equivalent. And, as such, comparing the rate of poverty in a capitalist society to the rate of poverty from a pre-capitalist society is bogus. Again, this is what the article is all about. > you're bedridden with tuberculosis. No, you can't, but your wife/uncle/cousin/aunt can until you get better. While living in a capitalist society mostly means an atomic family unit where, if you happen to be bed-ridden, you're basically on your own. Again, charts like the ones tweeted by Gates don't assign any monetary value to this type of close human relations, even though those close human relations greatly improve our well-being. Afaik nobody has assigned yet any money value to the ease of mind provided by thoughts like "hey, I'm not alone in this world, I'm not on my own".
hartator 8y ago
Health is linked to poverty. So it makes sensr to use it as a metric.

warmwaffles 8y ago

It's also really hard to find people in the population that do not have a cell phone or quick access to one.

neolefty 8y ago

I agree with both — I think it's a false dichotomy to say "either it's getting worse or it's getting better". 1. Yes, so much is getting better. 2. There are new injustices, and also we'd be even better off if wealth were more evenly distributed. On the one hand, as long as things continue to improve, that's good! On the other hand, things will only improve if we make them improve.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> Unfortunately, the author of this piece seems to suffer from the delusion that subsistence life is ideal. That does not seem to be the argument. The argument seems to be that money-based measures that might be valid for comparing poverty within fully capitalist, money-oriented societies are not sensible ways of comparing societies across a continuum from not-at-all money-oriented or capitalist to fully capitalist, money-oriented.

iguy 8y ago
The simplest measures of past wealth do simply look at money. We know what unskilled building day-labor earner in Delhi in 1600, and converting this to calories of the staple diet gives a reasonable measure by which you can compare them to workers in (say) Amsterdam. Because both were paid in cash, and spent most of their income on food. The countryside is more complicated, but people do work out similar things.

coldtea 8y ago

>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 Which is not really relevant to whether poverty is decreasing or not. You can have some better tools or preventions decreasing infant mortality without getting people out of poverty otherwise. You can also force people out of traditional livable rural non-commercial existence with 0 $/day and into hellish city poverty with few $/day, and it would look like an improvement in the books.

username90 8y ago
Life expectancy is a pretty good measure. The most important life expectancy raiser is not healthcare but access to food and clean water. Most deaths 100 years ago were caused by diseases which well fed people shrugs off. I'd argue that anyone who lacks food and clean water is poorer than even those who lives on the street in modern western nations.

bko 8y ago

The specific passage from the article where the author romanticizes subsistence economies: > 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. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.

ricw 8y ago
This. Most people in developed countries typically don’t know that in poor countries subsistence farmers are the poorest of them all, literally starving for months when their crops are done. Without trade or refrigeration you simply can’t subsist. On the other hand people don’t know that people in cities, even if they live in slums, are much better nourished than people in the country side, who are mostly subsistence farmers. In short, typically cities are rich and the country side is poor, as much as that may go against a romanticised view of older days. Valid point may be that a dollar value may not be the best way to describe poverty. Nourishment, healthcare access and life expectancy are likely much better indicators.

trahn 8y ago

Well the author is from an institution called the University of London, and Max Roser, who's stats he is critiquing, from an institution called Oxford...

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Specifically Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and a fellow of the RSA. https://www.gold.ac.uk/anthropology/staff/hickel-jason/ https://www.gold.ac.uk/anthropology/staff/hickel-jason/

Balgair 8y ago

Factfulness is available, for free, here: http://www.factfulness.science/ http://www.factfulness.science/ The late Dr. Rosling's website is fantastic and a good example of easy to use GUIs for data science. Play around with the data yourself here: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2018;;&chart-type=bubbles https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2018;;&ch... Try taking the quiz here to see if you are smarter than a chimp: http://factfulnessquiz.com/ http://factfulnessquiz.com/ I'd encourage everyone to read Factfulness. It's fairly quick to churn through and very enlightening. The world really is getting better.