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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

250 points by winterismute 8y ago

Mirioron 8y ago
>Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. Perhaps we didn't collect data on poverty globally before that, but we most certainly collected data on poverty before that regionally.
- prepend 8y ago
  This is the oddest argument in the article, I think. No one claims the data are perfect or identical before 1981, but it’s what we have and it’s used. I think it’s acceptable to provide an alternate proxy. Or to critique the methods rigorously. But it is frustrating when a rhetorical trick is used to point out how the pre-1981 data are different than 1981, that is known by anyone reading Pinker, and then throw out all pre-1981 data and claim it is meaningless. And even more strangely, that poverty during this period is just unknowable. I would think that the best way to critique this is to develop some other method of proxying poverty rate that doesn’t show drops. Later in the article, the author shows this with the $7.90 poverty rate, but only from 1981.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    I stopped reading after he began with that GDP point and spent so much time on it. Felt like a manipulative attack to dismiss an entire argument (“your argument is so laughably wrong, you can’t even get basic facts right.”)
deleted 8y ago
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bko 8y ago
The author nit-picks some of the numbers, noting that the poverty numbers prior to some date are unreliable. But this is all meaningless as the numbers aren't Pinker's point. The point is that society is getting richer and both relative and absolute poverty is dropping across the world. I think most reasonable people would believe this to be true. Those of us old enough remember a time where we didn't have the luxuries we have today. We had a choice of three channels on television, paid exorbitant long distance fees to call our family abroad and rarely traveled by plane. And that changed over the last 100 years or so. Surely on a larger time-scale we would notice even greater change (indoor plumbing, air conditioning, antibiotics, food safety). But the author doesn't see that: > As to my actual claims about the past, my argument was straightforward. I simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the global South. If you have read any colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land. Yes, people joined the urbanization movement but only did so kicking and screaming. They were perfectly happy living subsistence lifestyles. This strikes me as not only wrong but somewhat offensive. I don't know anything about the author but I don't think he lives or has lived a subsistence lifestyle, and neither have I. But from everything I read from less ideologically minded researchers, it was a brutal existence. It is a lot easier to live this subsistence lifestyle today. The world is still a large place. You can easily buy a cabin in the woods and avoid taxes. Ironically, the capitalist system the author likes to criticize promotes property rights that allows for living off the grid. So I welcome the author the chance to grasp his full potential and go off the grid. He and his followers could buy 100 acres in Texas for 75k, and pay only $500 in annual tax [0]. [0] https://www.landwatch.com/Hudspeth-County-Texas-Land-for-sale/pid/333134274 https://www.landwatch.com/Hudspeth-County-Texas-Land-for-sal...
- lazyjones 8y ago
  > true. Those of us old enough remember a time where we didn't have the luxuries we have today. We had a choice of three channels on television, paid exorbitant long distance fees to call our family abroad and rarely traveled by plane. The same people always seem to forget about this when they complain about not being able to afford proper housing or to sustain a family on a single income though.
  - bko 8y ago
    Home ownership rates in America are historically very high. It dipped since the peak in the pre 2008 when they were nearly 70% and is now around 65%. Pre-WW2 it was around 45%. The idea that home ownership is rare and out of reach for Americans is not true. [0] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/housing-market-perspectives/2016/if-housing-markets-are-recovering-why-is-homeownership-falling https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/housing-market-persp...
imartin2k 8y ago
It seems to me that the whole debate would benefit from some Quantum Thinking. The world can get better and worse at the same time. Poverty can go away in some parts and increase (in absolute or relative terms) in others. People can be more happy because they don't starve, don't die from trivial diseases and don't get murdered anymore on the street - while at the same time starting to be depressed about lack of meaning or sense of belonging, senseless (but well-paid) jobs, worries about allergies, eating animals, stress, climate change or whatever thing they worry about basic needs are met. There is just no point to attempt to come to a conclusion from a binary set of options ("things getting better" vs "things getting worse"). In my eyes, this question is too complex, too philosophical and too subjective for anyone to actually come to an absolute, definite and unassailable conclusion which everyone else could stand behind.
baragiola 8y ago
>Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population. This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90% of the country. This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture. This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population. And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market”. Free market doesn't just mean low or no taxes. People will do all sort of evil things and hide behind some nice ideal. The important thing is that none of those countries are doing it anymore and those who do, are quite the opposite of free market capitalist countries (ie, North Korea)
heyjudy 8y ago
Must reads about what was done to South America: - Various works by Smedley Butler, c. 20th c. - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Español: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias), c. 1542 - The well-researched videos of TheHistoryGuy on YT. Bunga! Bunga!
padobson 8y ago
The process of forcibly integrating colonized peoples into the capitalist labour system caused widespread dislocation (a history I cover in The Divide). Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population. This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90% of the country. This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture. This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population. And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market”. This paragraph basically backs up all of Pinker's criticisms. No one advocating for neoliberal capitalism would suggest that any of the evils of colonialization are the policies that most quickly brought prosperity to developing nations. Pinker is advocating that as economies become more free, they become more prosperous. There's nothing free about forced labor or death marches. The bit on "absolute povery numbers" is insane: The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981, from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion, according to World Bank data. This willfully ignores the fact that the world population has gone from 4.5 billion to 7.5 billion, because of plummeting mortality rates and access to healthcare and infrastructure. 3 billion extra people survived in 30 years. That's CRAZY! We should be having parades about that everyday. And the main problem with his poverty metric is that he's changing the numbers to obfuscate the progress. It doesn't matter if you use $1.90/day, $3.20/day, $5.50/day or $7.40/day. What matters is that fewer people live on the wrong side of the line today than they did yesterday, and fewer people did yesterday than the day before, and that has happened every single day for the past 30 years. Almost every example he uses of capitalism being bad are really colonialism enforced by state power. He rightly points out that some countries enjoyed increased prosperity when they freed themselves from their colonial powers, but that only enforces Pinker's arguments. Hickel spends most of this piece turning Pinker's arguments into strawmen. It's a marxist rant with cherry-icked stats that don't actually support his position. He should rightfully be dismissed as a bad faith actor in the conversation.
- andrepd 8y ago
  Maybe you should put "that bit about absolute numbers" in the proper context instead of wilfully misrepresenting it: >[After discussing 1.9$/day as a completely inhumane measure; the equivalent of 35 people living with a UK minimum wage, without any gifts, loans, donations, or help of any kind] the story changes quite a bit - and you know it. If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene. There is nothing worth celebrating about a world where inequality is so extreme that 58% of people are in poverty, while a few dozen billionaires have more than all of their wealth combined. >That’s proportions. Don’t get me wrong: proportions are an important indicator – and we should pay attention to it. But absolute numbers are equally important. In fact, that is the metric that the world’s governments first agreed to target in the Rome Declaration in 1996, the precursor to the Millennial Development Goals. The goalposts were shifted to proportions in the following years, which created the impression of faster progress. But really now it’s a moot point: if the goal is to end poverty, what matters is absolute numbers. Certainly that’s what matters from the perspective of poor people themselves. >And if we look at absolute numbers, the trend changes completely. The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981, from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion, according to World Bank data. Six times higher than you would have people believe. That’s not progress in my book – that’s a disgrace. It is a crushing indictment of our global economic system, which is clearly failing the majority of humanity. Your claims about global poverty intentionally skate around this fact. Again, that is not responsible scholarship. So yeah. Either you didn't read it or you wilfully ignored it, because comments such as "hat matters is that fewer people live on the wrong side of the line today than they did yesterday, and fewer people did yesterday than the day before" are incomprehensible otherwise.
LaGrange 8y ago
So I went and read the Pinker's "rebuttal." He just casually avoided the claim about the entire base of their infographic being bogus, then went on to calling mild centre-left socialdemocrats "far leftists". Why is _anyone_ treating that guy seriously?
- Mirioron 8y ago
  Because Pinker's rebuttal was initially supposed to be an email to somebody else. He recognized that Hickel was likely pushing an ideology and left it at that. Even in the email Pinker is saying that he's citing experts in the field. >then went on to calling mild centre-left socialdemocrats A central point in the criticism Hickel wrote was that markets don't work, but regulation, protectionism and state intervention does. I'm not sure that would qualify him as a "mild centre-left social democrat".
  - andrepd 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure regulation, protectionism and state intervention in a market economy is the definition of social-democracy.
    - jopsen 8y ago
      No, not really. Social democracy is about solidarity. It does not conflict with a free market which needs regulation to stay free, it does not encourage protectionism, rather it seeks solidarity with others. I should know I live in one :)
      - esarbe 8y ago
        I too live in a Social democracy. And I'd say that the GP is pretty much spot on. Social democracy, from Wikipedia, an excerpt: "The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy; measures for income redistribution and regulation of the economy in the general interest; and welfare state provisions." So, there you have regulation and and state-intervention. If you then consider that every Social Democracy in Europe has some sort of protectionist policy with regards to it's agricultural sector, I'd say that GP is spot on. For the European Union, the agricultural subsidies still make up about 38% of the budget. What's that, besides protectionist? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy) So, there you have all three; regulation and state-intervention by definition, protectionism by fact.
macspoofing 8y ago
This is the guy who claimed subsistence rural leaving shouldn't count as poverty, and that we really can't say anything about poverty pre-1981. Come on! How is he credible.
jpatokal 8y ago
> *We can end poverty right now simply by making the rules of our global economy fairer for the world’s majority (I describe how we can do this in The Divide, looking at everything from wages to debt to trade). Well, that's a pretty bold claim. Anybody have a TL;DR that doesn't require forking out 5 days of UN poverty-line income to read?
huffmsa 8y ago
England, what's with the clown show you've got going on at your unis? First the naked Brexit lady now this guy. 1) subsistence agrarian lifestyles were not better than our industrialized world. If Mr Hickel disagrees, he should lay down the pen and pick up the plow. 2) decreased child mortality and increased lifespans (thanks industrialized medicine!) means more people alive but not necessarily economically useful => lower GDP/head. Stop having babies you can't afford. This leads to a longer debate about the issues with food aid both raising subsistence levels and pricing out local farmers. 3) China, Singapore, Vietnam, etc saw huge improvement because they went balls to the walls with the forced industrialization this quack said was the problem. 4) Income inequality increasing doesn't matter because the the entry price for modern technology is decreasing faster than income inequality is increasing. This guy's a keyboard warrior who's never been in the field and shouldn't have cost my 5 minutes to read.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  It appears that his keyboard warrior friends have found this comment. Down votes should really require an explanation.
  - benj111 8y ago
    Agreed, but maybe people were put off by your opening racist? Insult, and needless reference to Brexit. I've responded to your first point, I don't agree with any of your other points either.
    - huffmsa 8y ago
      I'm used to a hot opener making people engage the rest of the points. Real life (debates in pubs) doesn't have an "I find this disagreeable" button.
      - flippin-burgers 8y ago
        This isn't a pub, and if you're "used to a hot opener" then surely you're used to people seeing you as a jerk for persistently making provocative and racist remarks.
colechristensen 8y ago
Can anyone summarize what is going on here? It seems like a flamewar with graphs, and not interesting enough to invest the time in reading.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Gates and Pinker are promoting the idea that the world is getting better overall, economically, and that poverty reduction is a real thing. They point to advances in economic development as a major driver of this. The 'rebuttal' is a little tricky. Hickel argues that the data is bad (at least before 1980's). Moreover, he argues that it's really only in China that people have dramatically 'come out of poverty' and that the data without China shows an increase in poverty. Hickel accuses Gates/Pinker et. al. of promoting 'hard neoliberal' (i.e. strong free market) ideals. I don't believe this characterization is fair. Hickel argues that neoliberal policies pursued by IMF etc. have led to setbacks and that China i.e. the 'winner' in this area is not capitalist, rather more or less 'statist/nationalist' etc.. Pinker is publicly lamenting this Hinker guy as 'far left' etc. which is an odd twist due to the ad hominem.
  - sooheon 8y ago
    > Hickel accuses Gates/Pinker et. al. of promoting 'hard neoliberal' (i.e. strong free market) ideals. I don't believe this characterization is fair. Gates/Pinker are selling exactly the antidote to potential guilt for "kicking away the ladder". History makes clear that "free market" ideals never apply to ourselves, only to those colonies and developing nations the IMF and World Bank can coerce into line. Argentina had 2~3x Korea's GDP per capita in 1970, and now the relation has almost exactly flipped. You should know which country had stronger protectionist policies and which was sold out to the World Bank. Pinker is marketing these harmful policies as "enlightenment", and lying with statistics to ease affluent intellectual guilt.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      There was effectively a uprising, a revolutionary coup and a dictatorship in Argentina during that time, causing enormous political turmoil. And your blaming this in the 'World Bank' and 'Capitalists'? No. Neoliberals had little to do with it. My comment stands: Pinker is not a neoliberal, and he's not even supporting neoliberalism. Frankly neither is Bill Gates. A 'neoliberal' would not support things like socialized medicine, or major investments in aid - which is exactly what Gates is trying to get the US to do. Is Gates calling for lower taxes? Austerity? No? Is Pinker calling for an end to socialized medicine? For 'Statoil' to be privatized? No.
lixtra 8y ago
> Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless. Just like for global warming you expect reasonable proxies.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  To say that going back to 1820 is meaningless is already deceptive. At that stage the only parts of the world that weren’t in extreme poverty are those that are now first world and that’s marginal. In 1750 in 1990 dollars GDP per capita in the first world was 804 dollars according to Paul Bairoch. In 1830, in 1960 dollars the richest country in the world, the highly monestised Netherlands which we have excellent records for had a GDP per capita of 347. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...
barry-cotter 8y ago
All of the books on Hickel’s reading list are historians and none of them are economic historians because it’s impossible to make the case he wants to make if you use data gathered by economic historians. Hickel references Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, which, whatever its many virtues does not accord with economic history at all. The other books he referenced are similarly useless for answering what is a question of economic history. He criticises the extreme poverty measure as being beneath human dignity when that’s the point. This is the natural inheritance of man, wretched poverty for almost everyone and what we would regard as poverty for the tiny elite. Hickel also ignores the other indicators that show enormous progress, education, literacy, lifespan, healthy lifespan and the fact that with population growth as rapid as it the decline in absolute poverty ex-Africa is a substantial achievement. Finally, neoliberalism delivered China from poverty. If it’s brought to the rest of the poor areas of the world it’ll do it there too. To neoliberalism! To the end of extreme poverty! https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/ https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/ > Note: the following are NOT my thoughts. It’s my summary of Beckert’s book. > {Summary begins} > The West got rich by impoverishing the Rest. > “War capitalism” was the violent exploitation of the non-West through piracy, enslavement, theft of natural resources, and the physical seizure of markets. It was not caused by superior technology or organisation. Nor did it rest on “offering superior goods at good prices”, such as you find in the la-la-land of economics textbooks, but on the “military subjugation of competitors and a coercive European mercantile presence in many regions of the world”.
- sooheon 8y ago
  Protectionism and controlled liberal policies brought China and the rest of the Asian Tigers to prosperity. Forced neoliberal policies is a curse on nascent economies.
0db532a0 8y ago
Sam Hyde’s 2070 Paradigm Shift [1] to solve world hunger. Link in references. [1] https://youtu.be/KTJn_DBTnrY https://youtu.be/KTJn_DBTnrY
- he6s4vyu 8y ago
  This is illuminating, even if humorous.
derriz 8y ago
Hickels rebuttal in the letter is that GDP cannot be used to gauge poverty which he claims has only been measured directly by the UN since 1981. But if you look around the world today, GDP/head is a remarkaby strong indicator of the level of poverty in a country. Nevermind that all the other quality of life stats: life expectency, child morality, average working hours, literacy, education levels, food affordability support Pinker's argument. Actually here is a fairly convincing (in my opinion) response which covers this and more: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/is-the-world-really-getting-poorer-a-response-to-that-claim-by-steve-pinker/ https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/is-the-w... Slightly off-topic: as I get older I get more and more suspisious of promoters of apocalyse narratives. Both hard left and hard right both require people to believe the "world getting worse and worse" in order to promote their opposition to the liberal democratic multilateral global world order. Apocalypse stories are one of the oldest "hacks" against human judgment and have been exploited by the religious, cults and political extremists for millennia.
- roenxi 8y ago
  > promoters of apocalyse narratives ... [b]oth hard left and hard right both require people to believe the "world getting worse and worse" There are still veterans of WWII alive today, and that was pretty much an apocalypse for the people involved. Just because the last 50 years have been peaceful doesn't mean good times are guaranteed, we should remain cautious of threats. Change is extremely rapid. Many of the issues raised by both sides are concerns worth taking seriously, even if the people raising them are wholly unqualified by temperament to do anything about it.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    And there are even more people (myself included) who lived through part of the Cold War and realise that we just got through that period by sheer luck and the good judgement of a handful of people on both sides.
  - ddebernardy 8y ago
    > There are still veterans of WWII alive today There are still veterans of WWII alive today that were born at a point in time where the idea of fighting a new world war was unthinkable. FTFY
grecy 8y ago
One of the most amazing things I learned reading the excellent "Factfullness" by Hans Rosling [1] is that the poorest countries in the world are currently improving faster than any country ever did, at any point in history. That's correct - countries like Lesotho and Central African Republic are improving faster than his home country of Sweden ever did, at any time. In only his lifetime Sweden went from having an infant mortality rate similar to that of the poorest countries today, to being one of the world leaders. Those poor countries are improving faster than Sweden ever did... so in just one more lifetime they'll be where the world leaders are today. The book makes it plainly clear that the world is improving much, much, much faster - even for the poorest - than the mainstream media would have anyone believe. [1] https://amzn.to/2Ihb6jM https://amzn.to/2Ihb6jM - full title is great "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think"
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "is that the poorest countries in the world are currently improving faster than any country ever did, at any point in history. " This isn't surprising and the reasoning isn't that hard. Economic advancement is very hard if you have to 'figure out how to do it' i.e. intensive R&D. But if you are 'far behind' and there are examples to copy, you can just copy. Developing nations not only have many examples, but they have access to capital, credit etc.. Many of them have natural resources to get things gong. As long as there is conscientious leadership - they can grow quickly. There are examples of countries growing 'even more quickly' than such developing nations - and those are post-war nations. Nations that already have functioning institutions, when faced with a cataclysmic shock of war - don't need to build from scratch, rather, they are 'repairing' their economy. Europe, S. Korea, Japan in the post-war years really boomed. China, one might argue is not just 'developing' but it's 'snapping back' after a long period of oppression. But once development reaches a certain level, it tends to slow, and come in line with the development of other advanced nations. You can see this glowingly with Japan and S. Korea as they rockted forward, but are now in the slog with the rest of us. When you have 'no roads' - investment decisions are easy. But when everyone has 'stuff' ... well ... it's a lot harder.
  - 8y ago
JackPoach 8y ago
Yes, I think that Pinker's attitude 'don't mess with liberal capitalism model, it's working miracles' kind of shuts off any possibility of real critics of real problems that we are facing today.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Pinker is not arguing that economic neoliberalism is perfect. Almost nobody is.
  - JackPoach 8y ago
    Sorry, but I don't see the word 'perfect' in my statement. I stated what I stated and I think I am fairly accurate when I say that Pinker's main premise is that modern global neoliberal capitalist model is fighting poverty much better than anything else. (Which is probably not true if you agree with the Pinker opponent POV).
eoinmurray92 8y ago
Just to note - Branko Milanovic (cited by Roser) backed up Hickel on many of the main poinst: https://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/02/global-poverty-over-long-term.html https://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/02/global-poverty-over-long...
- yboris 8y ago
  I strongly recommend Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality as an overview of poverty across millennia.
marcus_holmes 8y ago
I'm a bit confused about the global poverty amount. What is that $7.50 exactly? I've recently lived in Cambodia, and I'm now in Australia. $7.50 in Cambodia is enough to get three good meals and a couple of beers (for a local). $7.50 in Australia is not enough to get a single meal. How do they calculate it so they take into account disparate purchasing power?
- crefflar 8y ago
  The dollars quoted are in terms of purchasing power in the United States as of 2011.
  - marcus_holmes 8y ago
    I think I see - so if $7.50 in the USA in 2011 can buy 5Kg of rice, then the equivalent income in Cambodia is about $2.50 and in Australia is about $25... is that right?
tmpfs 8y ago
I think the focus on money is misplaced, forget about GDP and start measuring GNH (Gross National Happiness); it is about time the rest of the world looked to Bhutan and realized there is much more to a pleasurable human existence than simply quantifying in terms of income/money/wealth. It is an over-simplification that degrades humanity and our potential.
- PixyMisa 8y ago
  Bhutan? Great, unless you're LGBT, in which case they lock you up. Or you're a journalist and write something critical of the government, in which case they lock you up. Or you practice a religion other than Buddhism or Hinduism, in which case they lock you up. Or you want to wear Nepalese clothing, in which case they skip right past locking you up and simply revoke your citizenship and kick you out of the country.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    They were talking about happiness, you are talking about personal freedom. Two different things. It's possible that people are most happy when minorities are done away with. Not exactly what I would prefer, but it's still possible.
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      I doubt that the minorities are most happy...
starchild_3001 8y ago
I'm 40 years old. I remember the last 30 years in my home country (Turkey) very well. What happened in this period? Awesome things. Access to food, shelter, healthcare, cars, many many amenities and luxuries of life have expanded wildly. The marxist dude is likely cherry picking data to make a bogus point. E.g. the charts in his letter aren't normalized by world population. Pinsker is presenting distributions, not absolute numbers, as world population has a tendency to grow. He has one valid point. $1.90 might be too low to draw the poverty line. But as the whole distribution has shifted, that point seems moot. He has another interesting point: People had access to land in the old age, although they didn't have cash. I think that makes sense. Land has some value... but but there's a big cost to utilizing it---it's a full time job :) Anyone can go back... become a farmer, hunter or a herder... live at subsistance-level. I think few people want that lifestyle, as is clear from occupancy stats. The benefits of having access to land and its cost (the specific lifestyle) may cancel each other.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  The difference of opinion between those who've lived through something and the opinion of bourgeoisie academics who've studied the same thing from an Ivory tower is usually quite different. Like how the advice and experience of a startup founder, regardless of success, is almost immeasurably more valuable than that of a consulting analyst.
jfnixon 8y ago
Needs more consistency: "There is nothing worth celebrating about a world where inequality is so extreme that 58% of people are in poverty, while a few dozen billionaires have more than all of their wealth combined." Followed later by: "Yes, life expectancy, mortality and education have improved – this is fantastic news that we should celebrate!"
zeroname 8y ago
TLDR; When the numbers don't fit the narrative, you need to pick out different numbers. "Here are a few points to keep in mind. Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty." It shows that "only" 700 million people live in extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank. "If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity, then it’s too low – period." Yeah, no shit. Extreme Poverty is extremely bad. "Remember: $1.90 is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011." Yes, it's bad. Really really bad. Let's drive that point home some more. "If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene." No it doesn't! The fact that the number of people that used to live in extreme poverty has gone down means that these people don't live in extreme poverty anymore. That's actually much more significant than the number of generally poor people that are now slightly less poor.
- andrepd 8y ago
  Wait a minute, how does that go one way but not the other? Why is using $7.4 "doctoring the data" to fit your narrative but $1.9 not? The author uses arguments such as >The USDA states that about $6.7/day is necessary for achieving basic nutrition. Peter Edwards argues that people need about $7.40 if they are to achieve normal human life expectancy. The New Economics Foundation concludes that around $8 is necessary to reduce infant mortality by a meaningful margin. to support his view that 1.9$ is a ridiculous measure promoted only to make the graphs look good and the narrative of "neoliberal progress" work. While on the other hand, the ~7$ figure, which he argues based on those references is the bare minimum, makes it all look rather drab (71%->58% in 40 years...)
  - zeroname 8y ago
    I didn't say anyone is doctoring data. The data may well be true, but it may not fit your narrative. If your narrative is "people are getting poorer" you need to set the bar high, if your narrative is "people are getting richer", you need to set the bar low. In that sense it goes both ways. However, the difference between outright starving to death, being extremely poor and simply "being poor" is staggering. You wouldn't argue that a million people saved from starvation looks "rather drab when considering that the average poor person still can't afford to drive a car". You may say "1.90$ is ridiculous", but hundreds of millions of people actually do have to live on that. It's not like it's a fantasy number that nobody actually lives off.
allworknoplay 8y ago
Most people here seem to be missing the point: it’s not that poverty hasn’t been moderately improved over the past 30 years, but rather that Pinker’s work has had an incredibly outsized impact on policy and influence on media narratives. Simply put, Pinker and Gates have tricked much of the world into thinking neoliberalism is the best thing ever, even though the data actually shows that the majority of the improvement comes from other brands of economic policy and that most of the wins overall are going to a small number of extremely wealthy people. It’s not abjectly terrible but also not great, and when our capacity to improve poverty has improved so much, isn’t there a moral imperative to do better? Here’s an episode of one of my favorite podcasts that features Hickel as a guest: https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-58-the-neoliberal-optimism-industry https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-58-the-neolib... https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/citations-needed/id1258545975 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/citations-needed/id12585...
- JanSt 8y ago
  "even though the data actually shows that the majority of the improvement comes from other brands of economic policy" Can you expand on this? Genuinely interested.
  - sedor123 8y ago
    They are referring to Chinese and other Southeast Asian policies, as Hickels said in his post. What they won't say is that those policies are fundamentally capitalist in nature. China's economy is capitalist at its core, with a super powerful state (that happens to be remarkably repressive to its citizens, an inconvenient fact Hickels simply ignores) that engages in protectionism for specific national industries. Hickels is trying to get us to implicitly assume that Chinese policies are socialist and that non-capitalist policy is responsible for their gains, but he won't say it directly because he knows that would be an outright lie.
    - allworknoplay 8y ago
      I didn’t say markets are a bad way to value goods, man, I said china’s state planned and financed approach to the market has produced the gains Pinker is saying neoliberalism should get credit for. What we’re talking about here is the false idea that America’s approach to capitalism is responsible for very much of the global reduction in poverty, and whether we should consider other modes instead.
paulpauper 8y ago
The vast majority of gains against poverty have happened in one region: East Asia. As it happens, the economic success of China and the East Asian tigers – as scholars like Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade have long pointed out – is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation (the same measures that Western nations used to such great effect during their own period of industrial consolidation). They liberalized, to be sure – but they did so gradually and on their own terms. China's trade policy is consistent with neo liberalism. China's economy began its huge expansion in the 70's and 80's after opening up trade with the rest of the world, and especially the U.S. So that example fails. Trump is the one who began the tariff war, not china.
deleted 8y ago
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caiocaiocaio 8y ago
Medium grey text on a white background makes this almost unreadable. I don't know what point he was trying to make, because tow paragraphs gave me a headache.
yboris 8y ago
A fantastic overview of poverty across the history of humanity comes in a short book: The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality Paperback by economist Branko Milanovic, in which he compares wealth and poverty across millennia. And for a serious philosophical treatment about poverty, informed by numerous statistics comes in a long treatise World Poverty and Human Rights by philosopher Thomas W. Pogge who among other things points out the fudging of numbers by the international community. For example creating seeming amelioration of extreme world poverty by redefining malnutrition (how long it needs to persist for it to count), caloric deficit (for sedentary lifestyle rather than a hardworking farmer), redefining success (proportion of humanity rather than absolute numbers), etc. Link to relevant time in a talk by Dr. Pogge about this subject: https://youtu.be/Dsl9cyaIn-g?t=382 https://youtu.be/Dsl9cyaIn-g?t=382
mabbo 8y ago
It sounds to me like both sides are picking metrics that make their point the strongest. And the reality is, both can be right. The proportion of the world in extreme poverty (<$.190/day) can be going down while overall number of people in poverty (<$7.50/day) can be increasing. These aren't contradictory. And reducing both metrics are good goals! The problem, as I see it, is that both of these sides seem to be exploiting the problem of poverty to support political agendas that are perhaps unrelated to poverty. Pinker perhaps moreso than Hickel (but that may be because we literally just read Hickel's very well-written thoughts on it). The correct way forward, in my view, is to have both sides agree to a combined, single metric or a set of metrics that best capture the essence of the problem. When we agree on how to measure success, we can best see what works to improve it. I mean, presuming both sides actually care about reducing poverty and not just promoting their favorite political system, then coming together to come up with a better overall goal should be something everyone wants to do.
patientplatypus 8y ago
So this report came out yesterday: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti.... "The 2.5% rate of annual loss (of insect biomass) over the last 25-30 years is “shocking”, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.” So, in 100 years all insects will die. All of them. And therefore us, long beforehand. So this "reduction of poverty" through capitalist economic expansion has been achieved by the use of pesticides for cheap food, plastic, global warming etc. How can anyone claim that reduction of poverty is a good thing when it comes at the cost of the survival of the entire world ecosystem?
- sedor123 8y ago
  Needlessly apocalyptic thinking. No one knows what will happen as a result of this reduction in insect biomass, that is literally the definition of unprecedented... Every time some alarmist starts preaching apocalyptic nonsense because of a story like this, nature inevitably plugs the hole. Do you remember the climate alarmists telling us Florida would be underwater up to the panhandle by 2010? Yeah, we are still using those same models, just tweaked around the edges. Academics are not as smart as they would have you believe.
  - patientplatypus 8y ago
    Having no more insects is needlessly alarmist? What would be worrying to you if not that? Yikes.
spandrew 8y ago
It's a bit frustrating to read his follow-up letter because it largely ignores the root counterpoints Pinker made in favour of pushing the data integrity angle. Hans spends an awful lot of time poking holes in the historical accuracy of income data. But Pinker states in very basic, understandable terms that the benchmark isn't the point — setting the benchmark at $7 or 100k doesn't stop the fact that wealthy has trended positively. Starting from 1981 or 1810 doesn't matter because it's relative: Do people have access to more wealth (things they desire) than before? The answer is yes. The other benchmarks of education and literacy round out the picture — wealth and money isn't the only thing being measured. As much as Hans paints a utopia of open fields and shared communal livestock we know people historically chose to pillage each other's resources. Without incentive to look beyond differences we went to war and took from each other's cultures to accumulate wealth.
- falcor84 8y ago
  I somewhat disagree, Hans does spend some time in this article refuting the claim that benchmark doesn't matter. In particular, he shows charts demonstrating how raising the benchmark changes the result.
  - titanomachy 8y ago
    Who is Hans? Isn't this article by Jason Hickel?
    - falcor84 8y ago
      Apologies, yes, I was referring to Hickel. I can't seem to be able to edit the comment anymore.
- throwaway47861 8y ago
  > Do people have access to more wealth (things they desire) than before? The answer is yes. You lost all credibility right here. I suppose people living in their economically-alright bubbles will never be able to look objectively at how awful things are in so many places in the world. You just prefer the cozy illusion that it's all getting better. Statistical averages mean nothing to the millions of family barely making ends meet and not being able to pay for the kids' gyms and proper nutrition. But sure, "on average things are better" -- and even this outlandish claim is proven wrong by this article, with hard data.
throw2016 8y ago
We urgently need to jettison naive and simplistic models of the world that ignores centuries of history to deflect accountability, provide a comfort zone for some and perpetuate another fraud on the world. Look at the word fraud of 'aid' when it's loans and 'leverage' that are used to further the creditors interests in the region. Africa has suffered at the hands of global agendas for centuries now, some of these countries are barely 50-60 years of colonialism and were divided arbitrarily for reasons suited to colonialists. Yet we have narratives that seriously suggest all these invasive actions do not have consequences and these 'made up' countries after centuries of systemic exploitation and plunder will magically emerge developed in mere decades and if they don't its their own fault. That may suit a certain blame shifting worldview but has nothing to do with reality. Narratives that ignore the kind of effort, century scale timelines, political and religious conflicts, colonialism and context in which we grew and how the current world operates and ignores all that to point to statistics have to go because they are completely lacking depth and connection with reality. Look at the 'extraction' in pre-colonialism and post colonialism, the methods change but the objective is the same, corrupt the top leadership to benefit yourself and your companies, while 99% of the local country suffers. And if they don't fall in line organize coups, destabilize countries to get new despots who benefit you. This model is replicated efficiently in South America and across Africa and is happening right now. How can you 'develop' and improve the conditions of people across the world when your policies are actively and intentionally sabotaging them? You don't because that's just cover, conversations about statistics by pinker and his ilk then fall right into place to deflect, deceive and affect fake concern. South Korea and Taiwan have great stats but what those stats don't tell you is South Korea grew under a dictatorship with extreme western political and economic support that grew oligarchic chaebols for political reasons to counter the North and China. Can that context be replicated?
jbssm 8y ago
This letter is missing (willingly or unwillingly) the point of the original Pinker statement: Comparisons do exist and they indeed show us that we are better off, but are the comparisons numerically accurate? Probably not.
skybrian 8y ago
The part where he writes off East Asia as not really counting, somehow, while acknowledging its success, is rather strange: "As it happens, the economic success of China and the East Asian tigers – as scholars like Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade have long pointed out – is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation (the same measures that Western nations used to such great effect during their own period of industrial consolidation)." It's true that many of the countries there are state-led. (Some also have lots of corruption and many have extreme inequality.) But they also had spectacular growth via export-led economies. I don't know what "neoliberal" means other as a term of disparagement, but there's clearly a lot of capitalism and international trade going on. Participating in the global system has been a huge win there.
dash2 8y ago
The argument about the poverty line is a bit weird. It's completely reasonable that $1.90/day is still very low, and that we might want to take a higher point as a poverty line. But if the numbers below that line have decreased, that is still a huge win. Going from $1.80/day to $3.60/day, say, is a big improvement. That is true precisely because $1.90 is so low. Jason Hickel's argument seems to show that there is still a lot to do. But it does not show that we have not got much better.

250 points by winterismute 8y ago

>Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. Perhaps we didn't collect data on poverty globally before that, but we most certainly collected data on poverty before that regionally.

prepend 8y ago
This is the oddest argument in the article, I think. No one claims the data are perfect or identical before 1981, but it’s what we have and it’s used. I think it’s acceptable to provide an alternate proxy. Or to critique the methods rigorously. But it is frustrating when a rhetorical trick is used to point out how the pre-1981 data are different than 1981, that is known by anyone reading Pinker, and then throw out all pre-1981 data and claim it is meaningless. And even more strangely, that poverty during this period is just unknowable. I would think that the best way to critique this is to develop some other method of proxying poverty rate that doesn’t show drops. Later in the article, the author shows this with the $7.90 poverty rate, but only from 1981.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  I stopped reading after he began with that GDP point and spent so much time on it. Felt like a manipulative attack to dismiss an entire argument (“your argument is so laughably wrong, you can’t even get basic facts right.”)

deleted 8y ago

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bko 8y ago

The author nit-picks some of the numbers, noting that the poverty numbers prior to some date are unreliable. But this is all meaningless as the numbers aren't Pinker's point. The point is that society is getting richer and both relative and absolute poverty is dropping across the world. I think most reasonable people would believe this to be true. Those of us old enough remember a time where we didn't have the luxuries we have today. We had a choice of three channels on television, paid exorbitant long distance fees to call our family abroad and rarely traveled by plane. And that changed over the last 100 years or so. Surely on a larger time-scale we would notice even greater change (indoor plumbing, air conditioning, antibiotics, food safety). But the author doesn't see that: > As to my actual claims about the past, my argument was straightforward. I simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the global South. If you have read any colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land. Yes, people joined the urbanization movement but only did so kicking and screaming. They were perfectly happy living subsistence lifestyles. This strikes me as not only wrong but somewhat offensive. I don't know anything about the author but I don't think he lives or has lived a subsistence lifestyle, and neither have I. But from everything I read from less ideologically minded researchers, it was a brutal existence. It is a lot easier to live this subsistence lifestyle today. The world is still a large place. You can easily buy a cabin in the woods and avoid taxes. Ironically, the capitalist system the author likes to criticize promotes property rights that allows for living off the grid. So I welcome the author the chance to grasp his full potential and go off the grid. He and his followers could buy 100 acres in Texas for 75k, and pay only $500 in annual tax [0]. [0] https://www.landwatch.com/Hudspeth-County-Texas-Land-for-sale/pid/333134274 https://www.landwatch.com/Hudspeth-County-Texas-Land-for-sal...

lazyjones 8y ago
> true. Those of us old enough remember a time where we didn't have the luxuries we have today. We had a choice of three channels on television, paid exorbitant long distance fees to call our family abroad and rarely traveled by plane. The same people always seem to forget about this when they complain about not being able to afford proper housing or to sustain a family on a single income though.
- bko 8y ago
  Home ownership rates in America are historically very high. It dipped since the peak in the pre 2008 when they were nearly 70% and is now around 65%. Pre-WW2 it was around 45%. The idea that home ownership is rare and out of reach for Americans is not true. [0] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/housing-market-perspectives/2016/if-housing-markets-are-recovering-why-is-homeownership-falling https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/housing-market-persp...

imartin2k 8y ago

It seems to me that the whole debate would benefit from some Quantum Thinking. The world can get better and worse at the same time. Poverty can go away in some parts and increase (in absolute or relative terms) in others. People can be more happy because they don't starve, don't die from trivial diseases and don't get murdered anymore on the street - while at the same time starting to be depressed about lack of meaning or sense of belonging, senseless (but well-paid) jobs, worries about allergies, eating animals, stress, climate change or whatever thing they worry about basic needs are met. There is just no point to attempt to come to a conclusion from a binary set of options ("things getting better" vs "things getting worse"). In my eyes, this question is too complex, too philosophical and too subjective for anyone to actually come to an absolute, definite and unassailable conclusion which everyone else could stand behind.

baragiola 8y ago

>Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population. This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90% of the country. This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture. This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population. And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market”. Free market doesn't just mean low or no taxes. People will do all sort of evil things and hide behind some nice ideal. The important thing is that none of those countries are doing it anymore and those who do, are quite the opposite of free market capitalist countries (ie, North Korea)

heyjudy 8y ago

Must reads about what was done to South America: - Various works by Smedley Butler, c. 20th c. - A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Español: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias), c. 1542 - The well-researched videos of TheHistoryGuy on YT. Bunga! Bunga!

padobson 8y ago

The process of forcibly integrating colonized peoples into the capitalist labour system caused widespread dislocation (a history I cover in The Divide). Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population. This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90% of the country. This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture. This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population. And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market”. This paragraph basically backs up all of Pinker's criticisms. No one advocating for neoliberal capitalism would suggest that any of the evils of colonialization are the policies that most quickly brought prosperity to developing nations. Pinker is advocating that as economies become more free, they become more prosperous. There's nothing free about forced labor or death marches. The bit on "absolute povery numbers" is insane: The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981, from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion, according to World Bank data. This willfully ignores the fact that the world population has gone from 4.5 billion to 7.5 billion, because of plummeting mortality rates and access to healthcare and infrastructure. 3 billion extra people survived in 30 years. That's CRAZY! We should be having parades about that everyday. And the main problem with his poverty metric is that he's changing the numbers to obfuscate the progress. It doesn't matter if you use $1.90/day, $3.20/day, $5.50/day or $7.40/day. What matters is that fewer people live on the wrong side of the line today than they did yesterday, and fewer people did yesterday than the day before, and that has happened every single day for the past 30 years. Almost every example he uses of capitalism being bad are really colonialism enforced by state power. He rightly points out that some countries enjoyed increased prosperity when they freed themselves from their colonial powers, but that only enforces Pinker's arguments. Hickel spends most of this piece turning Pinker's arguments into strawmen. It's a marxist rant with cherry-icked stats that don't actually support his position. He should rightfully be dismissed as a bad faith actor in the conversation.

andrepd 8y ago
Maybe you should put "that bit about absolute numbers" in the proper context instead of wilfully misrepresenting it: >[After discussing 1.9$/day as a completely inhumane measure; the equivalent of 35 people living with a UK minimum wage, without any gifts, loans, donations, or help of any kind] the story changes quite a bit - and you know it. If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene. There is nothing worth celebrating about a world where inequality is so extreme that 58% of people are in poverty, while a few dozen billionaires have more than all of their wealth combined. >That’s proportions. Don’t get me wrong: proportions are an important indicator – and we should pay attention to it. But absolute numbers are equally important. In fact, that is the metric that the world’s governments first agreed to target in the Rome Declaration in 1996, the precursor to the Millennial Development Goals. The goalposts were shifted to proportions in the following years, which created the impression of faster progress. But really now it’s a moot point: if the goal is to end poverty, what matters is absolute numbers. Certainly that’s what matters from the perspective of poor people themselves. >And if we look at absolute numbers, the trend changes completely. The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981, from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion, according to World Bank data. Six times higher than you would have people believe. That’s not progress in my book – that’s a disgrace. It is a crushing indictment of our global economic system, which is clearly failing the majority of humanity. Your claims about global poverty intentionally skate around this fact. Again, that is not responsible scholarship. So yeah. Either you didn't read it or you wilfully ignored it, because comments such as "hat matters is that fewer people live on the wrong side of the line today than they did yesterday, and fewer people did yesterday than the day before" are incomprehensible otherwise.

LaGrange 8y ago

So I went and read the Pinker's "rebuttal." He just casually avoided the claim about the entire base of their infographic being bogus, then went on to calling mild centre-left socialdemocrats "far leftists". Why is _anyone_ treating that guy seriously?

Mirioron 8y ago
Because Pinker's rebuttal was initially supposed to be an email to somebody else. He recognized that Hickel was likely pushing an ideology and left it at that. Even in the email Pinker is saying that he's citing experts in the field. >then went on to calling mild centre-left socialdemocrats A central point in the criticism Hickel wrote was that markets don't work, but regulation, protectionism and state intervention does. I'm not sure that would qualify him as a "mild centre-left social democrat".
- andrepd 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure regulation, protectionism and state intervention in a market economy is the definition of social-democracy.
  - jopsen 8y ago
    No, not really. Social democracy is about solidarity. It does not conflict with a free market which needs regulation to stay free, it does not encourage protectionism, rather it seeks solidarity with others. I should know I live in one :)
    - esarbe 8y ago
      I too live in a Social democracy. And I'd say that the GP is pretty much spot on. Social democracy, from Wikipedia, an excerpt: "The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy; measures for income redistribution and regulation of the economy in the general interest; and welfare state provisions." So, there you have regulation and and state-intervention. If you then consider that every Social Democracy in Europe has some sort of protectionist policy with regards to it's agricultural sector, I'd say that GP is spot on. For the European Union, the agricultural subsidies still make up about 38% of the budget. What's that, besides protectionist? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy) So, there you have all three; regulation and state-intervention by definition, protectionism by fact.

macspoofing 8y ago

This is the guy who claimed subsistence rural leaving shouldn't count as poverty, and that we really can't say anything about poverty pre-1981. Come on! How is he credible.

jpatokal 8y ago

> *We can end poverty right now simply by making the rules of our global economy fairer for the world’s majority (I describe how we can do this in The Divide, looking at everything from wages to debt to trade). Well, that's a pretty bold claim. Anybody have a TL;DR that doesn't require forking out 5 days of UN poverty-line income to read?

huffmsa 8y ago

England, what's with the clown show you've got going on at your unis? First the naked Brexit lady now this guy. 1) subsistence agrarian lifestyles were not better than our industrialized world. If Mr Hickel disagrees, he should lay down the pen and pick up the plow. 2) decreased child mortality and increased lifespans (thanks industrialized medicine!) means more people alive but not necessarily economically useful => lower GDP/head. Stop having babies you can't afford. This leads to a longer debate about the issues with food aid both raising subsistence levels and pricing out local farmers. 3) China, Singapore, Vietnam, etc saw huge improvement because they went balls to the walls with the forced industrialization this quack said was the problem. 4) Income inequality increasing doesn't matter because the the entry price for modern technology is decreasing faster than income inequality is increasing. This guy's a keyboard warrior who's never been in the field and shouldn't have cost my 5 minutes to read.

huffmsa 8y ago
It appears that his keyboard warrior friends have found this comment. Down votes should really require an explanation.
- benj111 8y ago
  Agreed, but maybe people were put off by your opening racist? Insult, and needless reference to Brexit. I've responded to your first point, I don't agree with any of your other points either.
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    I'm used to a hot opener making people engage the rest of the points. Real life (debates in pubs) doesn't have an "I find this disagreeable" button.
    - flippin-burgers 8y ago
      This isn't a pub, and if you're "used to a hot opener" then surely you're used to people seeing you as a jerk for persistently making provocative and racist remarks.

colechristensen 8y ago

Can anyone summarize what is going on here? It seems like a flamewar with graphs, and not interesting enough to invest the time in reading.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Gates and Pinker are promoting the idea that the world is getting better overall, economically, and that poverty reduction is a real thing. They point to advances in economic development as a major driver of this. The 'rebuttal' is a little tricky. Hickel argues that the data is bad (at least before 1980's). Moreover, he argues that it's really only in China that people have dramatically 'come out of poverty' and that the data without China shows an increase in poverty. Hickel accuses Gates/Pinker et. al. of promoting 'hard neoliberal' (i.e. strong free market) ideals. I don't believe this characterization is fair. Hickel argues that neoliberal policies pursued by IMF etc. have led to setbacks and that China i.e. the 'winner' in this area is not capitalist, rather more or less 'statist/nationalist' etc.. Pinker is publicly lamenting this Hinker guy as 'far left' etc. which is an odd twist due to the ad hominem.
- sooheon 8y ago
  > Hickel accuses Gates/Pinker et. al. of promoting 'hard neoliberal' (i.e. strong free market) ideals. I don't believe this characterization is fair. Gates/Pinker are selling exactly the antidote to potential guilt for "kicking away the ladder". History makes clear that "free market" ideals never apply to ourselves, only to those colonies and developing nations the IMF and World Bank can coerce into line. Argentina had 2~3x Korea's GDP per capita in 1970, and now the relation has almost exactly flipped. You should know which country had stronger protectionist policies and which was sold out to the World Bank. Pinker is marketing these harmful policies as "enlightenment", and lying with statistics to ease affluent intellectual guilt.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    There was effectively a uprising, a revolutionary coup and a dictatorship in Argentina during that time, causing enormous political turmoil. And your blaming this in the 'World Bank' and 'Capitalists'? No. Neoliberals had little to do with it. My comment stands: Pinker is not a neoliberal, and he's not even supporting neoliberalism. Frankly neither is Bill Gates. A 'neoliberal' would not support things like socialized medicine, or major investments in aid - which is exactly what Gates is trying to get the US to do. Is Gates calling for lower taxes? Austerity? No? Is Pinker calling for an end to socialized medicine? For 'Statoil' to be privatized? No.

lixtra 8y ago

> Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless. Just like for global warming you expect reasonable proxies.

barry-cotter 8y ago
To say that going back to 1820 is meaningless is already deceptive. At that stage the only parts of the world that weren’t in extreme poverty are those that are now first world and that’s marginal. In 1750 in 1990 dollars GDP per capita in the first world was 804 dollars according to Paul Bairoch. In 1830, in 1960 dollars the richest country in the world, the highly monestised Netherlands which we have excellent records for had a GDP per capita of 347. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...

barry-cotter 8y ago

All of the books on Hickel’s reading list are historians and none of them are economic historians because it’s impossible to make the case he wants to make if you use data gathered by economic historians. Hickel references Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, which, whatever its many virtues does not accord with economic history at all. The other books he referenced are similarly useless for answering what is a question of economic history. He criticises the extreme poverty measure as being beneath human dignity when that’s the point. This is the natural inheritance of man, wretched poverty for almost everyone and what we would regard as poverty for the tiny elite. Hickel also ignores the other indicators that show enormous progress, education, literacy, lifespan, healthy lifespan and the fact that with population growth as rapid as it the decline in absolute poverty ex-Africa is a substantial achievement. Finally, neoliberalism delivered China from poverty. If it’s brought to the rest of the poor areas of the world it’ll do it there too. To neoliberalism! To the end of extreme poverty! https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/ https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/ > Note: the following are NOT my thoughts. It’s my summary of Beckert’s book. > {Summary begins} > The West got rich by impoverishing the Rest. > “War capitalism” was the violent exploitation of the non-West through piracy, enslavement, theft of natural resources, and the physical seizure of markets. It was not caused by superior technology or organisation. Nor did it rest on “offering superior goods at good prices”, such as you find in the la-la-land of economics textbooks, but on the “military subjugation of competitors and a coercive European mercantile presence in many regions of the world”.

sooheon 8y ago
Protectionism and controlled liberal policies brought China and the rest of the Asian Tigers to prosperity. Forced neoliberal policies is a curse on nascent economies.

0db532a0 8y ago

Sam Hyde’s 2070 Paradigm Shift [1] to solve world hunger. Link in references. [1] https://youtu.be/KTJn_DBTnrY https://youtu.be/KTJn_DBTnrY

he6s4vyu 8y ago
This is illuminating, even if humorous.

derriz 8y ago

Hickels rebuttal in the letter is that GDP cannot be used to gauge poverty which he claims has only been measured directly by the UN since 1981. But if you look around the world today, GDP/head is a remarkaby strong indicator of the level of poverty in a country. Nevermind that all the other quality of life stats: life expectency, child morality, average working hours, literacy, education levels, food affordability support Pinker's argument. Actually here is a fairly convincing (in my opinion) response which covers this and more: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/is-the-world-really-getting-poorer-a-response-to-that-claim-by-steve-pinker/ https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/is-the-w... Slightly off-topic: as I get older I get more and more suspisious of promoters of apocalyse narratives. Both hard left and hard right both require people to believe the "world getting worse and worse" in order to promote their opposition to the liberal democratic multilateral global world order. Apocalypse stories are one of the oldest "hacks" against human judgment and have been exploited by the religious, cults and political extremists for millennia.

roenxi 8y ago
> promoters of apocalyse narratives ... [b]oth hard left and hard right both require people to believe the "world getting worse and worse" There are still veterans of WWII alive today, and that was pretty much an apocalypse for the people involved. Just because the last 50 years have been peaceful doesn't mean good times are guaranteed, we should remain cautious of threats. Change is extremely rapid. Many of the issues raised by both sides are concerns worth taking seriously, even if the people raising them are wholly unqualified by temperament to do anything about it.
- arethuza 8y ago
  And there are even more people (myself included) who lived through part of the Cold War and realise that we just got through that period by sheer luck and the good judgement of a handful of people on both sides.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  > There are still veterans of WWII alive today There are still veterans of WWII alive today that were born at a point in time where the idea of fighting a new world war was unthinkable. FTFY

grecy 8y ago

One of the most amazing things I learned reading the excellent "Factfullness" by Hans Rosling [1] is that the poorest countries in the world are currently improving faster than any country ever did, at any point in history. That's correct - countries like Lesotho and Central African Republic are improving faster than his home country of Sweden ever did, at any time. In only his lifetime Sweden went from having an infant mortality rate similar to that of the poorest countries today, to being one of the world leaders. Those poor countries are improving faster than Sweden ever did... so in just one more lifetime they'll be where the world leaders are today. The book makes it plainly clear that the world is improving much, much, much faster - even for the poorest - than the mainstream media would have anyone believe. [1] https://amzn.to/2Ihb6jM https://amzn.to/2Ihb6jM - full title is great "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think"

sonnyblarney 8y ago
"is that the poorest countries in the world are currently improving faster than any country ever did, at any point in history. " This isn't surprising and the reasoning isn't that hard. Economic advancement is very hard if you have to 'figure out how to do it' i.e. intensive R&D. But if you are 'far behind' and there are examples to copy, you can just copy. Developing nations not only have many examples, but they have access to capital, credit etc.. Many of them have natural resources to get things gong. As long as there is conscientious leadership - they can grow quickly. There are examples of countries growing 'even more quickly' than such developing nations - and those are post-war nations. Nations that already have functioning institutions, when faced with a cataclysmic shock of war - don't need to build from scratch, rather, they are 'repairing' their economy. Europe, S. Korea, Japan in the post-war years really boomed. China, one might argue is not just 'developing' but it's 'snapping back' after a long period of oppression. But once development reaches a certain level, it tends to slow, and come in line with the development of other advanced nations. You can see this glowingly with Japan and S. Korea as they rockted forward, but are now in the slog with the rest of us. When you have 'no roads' - investment decisions are easy. But when everyone has 'stuff' ... well ... it's a lot harder.
- 8y ago

JackPoach 8y ago

Yes, I think that Pinker's attitude 'don't mess with liberal capitalism model, it's working miracles' kind of shuts off any possibility of real critics of real problems that we are facing today.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Pinker is not arguing that economic neoliberalism is perfect. Almost nobody is.
- JackPoach 8y ago
  Sorry, but I don't see the word 'perfect' in my statement. I stated what I stated and I think I am fairly accurate when I say that Pinker's main premise is that modern global neoliberal capitalist model is fighting poverty much better than anything else. (Which is probably not true if you agree with the Pinker opponent POV).

eoinmurray92 8y ago

Just to note - Branko Milanovic (cited by Roser) backed up Hickel on many of the main poinst: https://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/02/global-poverty-over-long-term.html https://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/02/global-poverty-over-long...

yboris 8y ago
I strongly recommend Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality as an overview of poverty across millennia.

marcus_holmes 8y ago

I'm a bit confused about the global poverty amount. What is that $7.50 exactly? I've recently lived in Cambodia, and I'm now in Australia. $7.50 in Cambodia is enough to get three good meals and a couple of beers (for a local). $7.50 in Australia is not enough to get a single meal. How do they calculate it so they take into account disparate purchasing power?

crefflar 8y ago
The dollars quoted are in terms of purchasing power in the United States as of 2011.
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  I think I see - so if $7.50 in the USA in 2011 can buy 5Kg of rice, then the equivalent income in Cambodia is about $2.50 and in Australia is about $25... is that right?

tmpfs 8y ago

I think the focus on money is misplaced, forget about GDP and start measuring GNH (Gross National Happiness); it is about time the rest of the world looked to Bhutan and realized there is much more to a pleasurable human existence than simply quantifying in terms of income/money/wealth. It is an over-simplification that degrades humanity and our potential.

PixyMisa 8y ago
Bhutan? Great, unless you're LGBT, in which case they lock you up. Or you're a journalist and write something critical of the government, in which case they lock you up. Or you practice a religion other than Buddhism or Hinduism, in which case they lock you up. Or you want to wear Nepalese clothing, in which case they skip right past locking you up and simply revoke your citizenship and kick you out of the country.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  They were talking about happiness, you are talking about personal freedom. Two different things. It's possible that people are most happy when minorities are done away with. Not exactly what I would prefer, but it's still possible.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    I doubt that the minorities are most happy...

starchild_3001 8y ago

I'm 40 years old. I remember the last 30 years in my home country (Turkey) very well. What happened in this period? Awesome things. Access to food, shelter, healthcare, cars, many many amenities and luxuries of life have expanded wildly. The marxist dude is likely cherry picking data to make a bogus point. E.g. the charts in his letter aren't normalized by world population. Pinsker is presenting distributions, not absolute numbers, as world population has a tendency to grow. He has one valid point. $1.90 might be too low to draw the poverty line. But as the whole distribution has shifted, that point seems moot. He has another interesting point: People had access to land in the old age, although they didn't have cash. I think that makes sense. Land has some value... but but there's a big cost to utilizing it---it's a full time job :) Anyone can go back... become a farmer, hunter or a herder... live at subsistance-level. I think few people want that lifestyle, as is clear from occupancy stats. The benefits of having access to land and its cost (the specific lifestyle) may cancel each other.

huffmsa 8y ago
The difference of opinion between those who've lived through something and the opinion of bourgeoisie academics who've studied the same thing from an Ivory tower is usually quite different. Like how the advice and experience of a startup founder, regardless of success, is almost immeasurably more valuable than that of a consulting analyst.

jfnixon 8y ago

Needs more consistency: "There is nothing worth celebrating about a world where inequality is so extreme that 58% of people are in poverty, while a few dozen billionaires have more than all of their wealth combined." Followed later by: "Yes, life expectancy, mortality and education have improved – this is fantastic news that we should celebrate!"

zeroname 8y ago

TLDR; When the numbers don't fit the narrative, you need to pick out different numbers. "Here are a few points to keep in mind. Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty." It shows that "only" 700 million people live in extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank. "If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity, then it’s too low – period." Yeah, no shit. Extreme Poverty is extremely bad. "Remember: $1.90 is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011." Yes, it's bad. Really really bad. Let's drive that point home some more. "If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene." No it doesn't! The fact that the number of people that used to live in extreme poverty has gone down means that these people don't live in extreme poverty anymore. That's actually much more significant than the number of generally poor people that are now slightly less poor.

andrepd 8y ago
Wait a minute, how does that go one way but not the other? Why is using $7.4 "doctoring the data" to fit your narrative but $1.9 not? The author uses arguments such as >The USDA states that about $6.7/day is necessary for achieving basic nutrition. Peter Edwards argues that people need about $7.40 if they are to achieve normal human life expectancy. The New Economics Foundation concludes that around $8 is necessary to reduce infant mortality by a meaningful margin. to support his view that 1.9$ is a ridiculous measure promoted only to make the graphs look good and the narrative of "neoliberal progress" work. While on the other hand, the ~7$ figure, which he argues based on those references is the bare minimum, makes it all look rather drab (71%->58% in 40 years...)
- zeroname 8y ago
  I didn't say anyone is doctoring data. The data may well be true, but it may not fit your narrative. If your narrative is "people are getting poorer" you need to set the bar high, if your narrative is "people are getting richer", you need to set the bar low. In that sense it goes both ways. However, the difference between outright starving to death, being extremely poor and simply "being poor" is staggering. You wouldn't argue that a million people saved from starvation looks "rather drab when considering that the average poor person still can't afford to drive a car". You may say "1.90$ is ridiculous", but hundreds of millions of people actually do have to live on that. It's not like it's a fantasy number that nobody actually lives off.

allworknoplay 8y ago

Most people here seem to be missing the point: it’s not that poverty hasn’t been moderately improved over the past 30 years, but rather that Pinker’s work has had an incredibly outsized impact on policy and influence on media narratives. Simply put, Pinker and Gates have tricked much of the world into thinking neoliberalism is the best thing ever, even though the data actually shows that the majority of the improvement comes from other brands of economic policy and that most of the wins overall are going to a small number of extremely wealthy people. It’s not abjectly terrible but also not great, and when our capacity to improve poverty has improved so much, isn’t there a moral imperative to do better? Here’s an episode of one of my favorite podcasts that features Hickel as a guest: https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-58-the-neoliberal-optimism-industry https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-58-the-neolib... https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/citations-needed/id1258545975 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/citations-needed/id12585...

JanSt 8y ago
"even though the data actually shows that the majority of the improvement comes from other brands of economic policy" Can you expand on this? Genuinely interested.
- sedor123 8y ago
  They are referring to Chinese and other Southeast Asian policies, as Hickels said in his post. What they won't say is that those policies are fundamentally capitalist in nature. China's economy is capitalist at its core, with a super powerful state (that happens to be remarkably repressive to its citizens, an inconvenient fact Hickels simply ignores) that engages in protectionism for specific national industries. Hickels is trying to get us to implicitly assume that Chinese policies are socialist and that non-capitalist policy is responsible for their gains, but he won't say it directly because he knows that would be an outright lie.
  - allworknoplay 8y ago
    I didn’t say markets are a bad way to value goods, man, I said china’s state planned and financed approach to the market has produced the gains Pinker is saying neoliberalism should get credit for. What we’re talking about here is the false idea that America’s approach to capitalism is responsible for very much of the global reduction in poverty, and whether we should consider other modes instead.

paulpauper 8y ago

The vast majority of gains against poverty have happened in one region: East Asia. As it happens, the economic success of China and the East Asian tigers – as scholars like Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade have long pointed out – is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation (the same measures that Western nations used to such great effect during their own period of industrial consolidation). They liberalized, to be sure – but they did so gradually and on their own terms. China's trade policy is consistent with neo liberalism. China's economy began its huge expansion in the 70's and 80's after opening up trade with the rest of the world, and especially the U.S. So that example fails. Trump is the one who began the tariff war, not china.

deleted 8y ago

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caiocaiocaio 8y ago

Medium grey text on a white background makes this almost unreadable. I don't know what point he was trying to make, because tow paragraphs gave me a headache.

yboris 8y ago

A fantastic overview of poverty across the history of humanity comes in a short book: The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality Paperback by economist Branko Milanovic, in which he compares wealth and poverty across millennia. And for a serious philosophical treatment about poverty, informed by numerous statistics comes in a long treatise World Poverty and Human Rights by philosopher Thomas W. Pogge who among other things points out the fudging of numbers by the international community. For example creating seeming amelioration of extreme world poverty by redefining malnutrition (how long it needs to persist for it to count), caloric deficit (for sedentary lifestyle rather than a hardworking farmer), redefining success (proportion of humanity rather than absolute numbers), etc. Link to relevant time in a talk by Dr. Pogge about this subject: https://youtu.be/Dsl9cyaIn-g?t=382 https://youtu.be/Dsl9cyaIn-g?t=382

mabbo 8y ago

It sounds to me like both sides are picking metrics that make their point the strongest. And the reality is, both can be right. The proportion of the world in extreme poverty (<$.190/day) can be going down while overall number of people in poverty (<$7.50/day) can be increasing. These aren't contradictory. And reducing both metrics are good goals! The problem, as I see it, is that both of these sides seem to be exploiting the problem of poverty to support political agendas that are perhaps unrelated to poverty. Pinker perhaps moreso than Hickel (but that may be because we literally just read Hickel's very well-written thoughts on it). The correct way forward, in my view, is to have both sides agree to a combined, single metric or a set of metrics that best capture the essence of the problem. When we agree on how to measure success, we can best see what works to improve it. I mean, presuming both sides actually care about reducing poverty and not just promoting their favorite political system, then coming together to come up with a better overall goal should be something everyone wants to do.

patientplatypus 8y ago

So this report came out yesterday: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti.... "The 2.5% rate of annual loss (of insect biomass) over the last 25-30 years is “shocking”, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.” So, in 100 years all insects will die. All of them. And therefore us, long beforehand. So this "reduction of poverty" through capitalist economic expansion has been achieved by the use of pesticides for cheap food, plastic, global warming etc. How can anyone claim that reduction of poverty is a good thing when it comes at the cost of the survival of the entire world ecosystem?

sedor123 8y ago
Needlessly apocalyptic thinking. No one knows what will happen as a result of this reduction in insect biomass, that is literally the definition of unprecedented... Every time some alarmist starts preaching apocalyptic nonsense because of a story like this, nature inevitably plugs the hole. Do you remember the climate alarmists telling us Florida would be underwater up to the panhandle by 2010? Yeah, we are still using those same models, just tweaked around the edges. Academics are not as smart as they would have you believe.
- patientplatypus 8y ago
  Having no more insects is needlessly alarmist? What would be worrying to you if not that? Yikes.

spandrew 8y ago

It's a bit frustrating to read his follow-up letter because it largely ignores the root counterpoints Pinker made in favour of pushing the data integrity angle. Hans spends an awful lot of time poking holes in the historical accuracy of income data. But Pinker states in very basic, understandable terms that the benchmark isn't the point — setting the benchmark at $7 or 100k doesn't stop the fact that wealthy has trended positively. Starting from 1981 or 1810 doesn't matter because it's relative: Do people have access to more wealth (things they desire) than before? The answer is yes. The other benchmarks of education and literacy round out the picture — wealth and money isn't the only thing being measured. As much as Hans paints a utopia of open fields and shared communal livestock we know people historically chose to pillage each other's resources. Without incentive to look beyond differences we went to war and took from each other's cultures to accumulate wealth.

falcor84 8y ago
I somewhat disagree, Hans does spend some time in this article refuting the claim that benchmark doesn't matter. In particular, he shows charts demonstrating how raising the benchmark changes the result.
- titanomachy 8y ago
  Who is Hans? Isn't this article by Jason Hickel?
  - falcor84 8y ago
    Apologies, yes, I was referring to Hickel. I can't seem to be able to edit the comment anymore.
throwaway47861 8y ago
> Do people have access to more wealth (things they desire) than before? The answer is yes. You lost all credibility right here. I suppose people living in their economically-alright bubbles will never be able to look objectively at how awful things are in so many places in the world. You just prefer the cozy illusion that it's all getting better. Statistical averages mean nothing to the millions of family barely making ends meet and not being able to pay for the kids' gyms and proper nutrition. But sure, "on average things are better" -- and even this outlandish claim is proven wrong by this article, with hard data.

throw2016 8y ago

We urgently need to jettison naive and simplistic models of the world that ignores centuries of history to deflect accountability, provide a comfort zone for some and perpetuate another fraud on the world. Look at the word fraud of 'aid' when it's loans and 'leverage' that are used to further the creditors interests in the region. Africa has suffered at the hands of global agendas for centuries now, some of these countries are barely 50-60 years of colonialism and were divided arbitrarily for reasons suited to colonialists. Yet we have narratives that seriously suggest all these invasive actions do not have consequences and these 'made up' countries after centuries of systemic exploitation and plunder will magically emerge developed in mere decades and if they don't its their own fault. That may suit a certain blame shifting worldview but has nothing to do with reality. Narratives that ignore the kind of effort, century scale timelines, political and religious conflicts, colonialism and context in which we grew and how the current world operates and ignores all that to point to statistics have to go because they are completely lacking depth and connection with reality. Look at the 'extraction' in pre-colonialism and post colonialism, the methods change but the objective is the same, corrupt the top leadership to benefit yourself and your companies, while 99% of the local country suffers. And if they don't fall in line organize coups, destabilize countries to get new despots who benefit you. This model is replicated efficiently in South America and across Africa and is happening right now. How can you 'develop' and improve the conditions of people across the world when your policies are actively and intentionally sabotaging them? You don't because that's just cover, conversations about statistics by pinker and his ilk then fall right into place to deflect, deceive and affect fake concern. South Korea and Taiwan have great stats but what those stats don't tell you is South Korea grew under a dictatorship with extreme western political and economic support that grew oligarchic chaebols for political reasons to counter the North and China. Can that context be replicated?

jbssm 8y ago

This letter is missing (willingly or unwillingly) the point of the original Pinker statement: Comparisons do exist and they indeed show us that we are better off, but are the comparisons numerically accurate? Probably not.

skybrian 8y ago

The part where he writes off East Asia as not really counting, somehow, while acknowledging its success, is rather strange: "As it happens, the economic success of China and the East Asian tigers – as scholars like Ha-Joon Chang and Robert Wade have long pointed out – is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation (the same measures that Western nations used to such great effect during their own period of industrial consolidation)." It's true that many of the countries there are state-led. (Some also have lots of corruption and many have extreme inequality.) But they also had spectacular growth via export-led economies. I don't know what "neoliberal" means other as a term of disparagement, but there's clearly a lot of capitalism and international trade going on. Participating in the global system has been a huge win there.

dash2 8y ago

The argument about the poverty line is a bit weird. It's completely reasonable that $1.90/day is still very low, and that we might want to take a higher point as a poverty line. But if the numbers below that line have decreased, that is still a huge win. Going from $1.80/day to $3.60/day, say, is a big improvement. That is true precisely because $1.90 is so low. Jason Hickel's argument seems to show that there is still a lot to do. But it does not show that we have not got much better.