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Let's not forget we also lifted millions to billions out of poverty since the 70s. If you cherry pick any statistics you can often get any type of result. But I

Let's not forget we also lifted millions to billions out of poverty since the 70s. If you cherry pick any statistics you can often get any type of result. But I bet it makes a lot of people feel good about reading the essay...

FranzFerdiNaN 7y ago
After we first made sure they were in poverty. I'm generally not impressed by this statistic, because those millions if people shouldn't have ever been in poverty, but were placed there thanks to some combination of capitalism, colonialism, slavery, racism, politics and probably a few more of such fun things.
- nl 7y ago
  All of these things still exist. But there are less people in poverty now, so... that seems like a good thing?
  - CaptArmchair 7y ago
    Yes and no. This is about which frame of reference you use to look at the world. And how that can severely distort your view. Consider isolated amazonian tribes, or tribes on islands in the South Pacific. By our standards, they live in abject poverty: no electricity, no clean water, no jobs,... Then again, these tribes do not know anything else. They have lived like this since the dawn of humanity. Then consider native tribes in America, Alaska, Greenland. People whose traditional way of living have been replaced by the affordances of modern technology. And that hasn't been for the better, necessarily. We are talking about fundamental lifestyle changes that happened over the course of less then a generation. And that's even without the historical violence we tend to discuss / guilt trip over in the modern world: such as traditional colonization, imperialism and such-like. Take Inuit tribes. Just 2 generations ago - some 50 years - these people lived in small traditional fishing communities, mostly secluded from the world. The lived according to their own ancestral culture and that worked out fine for them. Today, their way of living has entirely upended. Sure, they still fish, but they now have social security numbers, salaried yet often low-wage jobs, Internet and television, pollution and noise from cars, snowmobiles and so on. The net result is that unemployment among the active population is a serious issue, as it also causes mental and physical health issues including crime and substance abuse. When native tribes protest against oil pipelines, that's not a take against the benefits modernity itself. It's a protest against the fact that the arrival of modernity literally implies the disappearance of an environmental and cultural context in which they have been rooted for thousands of years. To them, the benefits of electricity, healthcare, modern jobs and cars also come with a great cost: giving up their identity, their way of life and the risk of ending up in abject poverty due to the dynamics inherent to modern economic systems rooted in Western / European values and morals. As such, when we talk about progress, it's presumptuous to assume that anyone who doesn't have access to modern affordances is "living in poverty" and "more progress" is the only answer going forward. The big thing that traditional tribal cultures have going for them is sustainability. Sure, individuals lived precarious lives and relied on magical thinking to explain the world, but these communities as a whole have persisted for many generations with a low impact on their environment. From their frame of reference, their way of life totally make sense. Assuming that their way of thinking is backwards or obsolete, or assuming that them ending up unemployed or struggling with modernity is them not pulling their weight in "accepting progress", well, that's just our own superiority bias clouding our thinking.
    - nl 7y ago
      I agree with all that (and indeed I don't think financial poverty measures make much sense in that context). However, the OP said millions if people shouldn't have ever been in poverty, but were placed there thanks to some combination of capitalism, colonialism, slavery, racism, politics and probably a few more of such fun things which of course isn't much like the "traditional tribe" scenario. Additionally, the traditional tribe scenario never supported large numbers of people, which is what is measured by the average life expectancy. Large numbers of people are associated with cities, and financial poverty is reasonable proxy for quality of life in a city context, on average.
      - CaptArmchair 7y ago
        > Large numbers of people are associated with cities, and financial poverty is reasonable proxy for quality of life in a city context, on average. Exactly. Thing is, cities didn't emerge out of themselves. The underlying dynamic is the Agricultural Revolution of 12.000 years ago. Moreover, I argue that we're with billions today less because of our own individual volition, but thanks to the invention of another agricultural revolution spawned by the Industrial Revolution: synthetic fertilizer, machinery, etc. The emergence of cities and metropolitan areas is caused by another dynamic: specialization. If you don't have to gather / hunt food, you can become a specialist. Money and finance are belief systems that helped galvanize that dynamic. As such, urbanization is the collective result of an individual adaptation strategy: get close to a large group of people with lots of demands for specialists. This ranges from doctors to factory workers. The fundamental problem with poverty, then, is that the survival of an individual doesn't depend on social cohesion in a small tribe. It depends largely on market dynamics of supply and demand for specialist labour. Moreover, the cost of switching between specialisms is prohibitively high (i.e. factory worker becomes lawyer). Yuval Harari laments the emergence of agriculture and cities as a disaster for Humanity in his seminal work "Sapiens". He makes a worthwhile point to consider. > Additionally, the traditional tribe scenario never supported large numbers of people, which is what is measured by the average life expectancy. Ultimately, there is absolutely no moral argument or reason, outside of our own thinking, to be found in nature that obligates us to become a multi-billion species of which each individual should live according to European / Western living standards. Equally, there's no argument, outside of our own thinking, to be found in nature that says each and everyone is entitled to live at least 80 years; or have biological kids. One can aspire and hope that will happen, but reality just doesn't give out any guarantees. That type existential precariousness and uncertainty is well understood in small tribes and deeply ingrained in their cultures. Now, to be clear, I don't want to make that case that living in small tribes is better then living in cities. Absolutely not. My point is that both are vastly different ways of living life and comparing them from the vantage point "one is better then the other", simply doesn't make much if any sense. What we can do is try to understand that tribal / traditional living is just as valid as a survival strategy and comes with it's own advantages and downsides. Hence why I vehemently disagree with Harari when he laments agriculture and cities. That's just one-sided value attribution. If we want to live in a society that forcefully favors large metropolitan cities, large industries, optimized specialization and so on: fine. But then we have to accept that poverty will be a thing and there will always be large swathes of the living who have to make do with the left-overs.
- valesco 7y ago
  They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands of years. Not being poor and victimized was a significant accomplishment, everywhere. Buddhism comes from the point of view that nobody can do much against that and the suffering that it brings. But... we did. Don't minimize it.
  - CaptArmchair 7y ago
    > They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands of years. That's textbook example of biased thinking. You're comparing the historical and present condition of other cultures by your own present condition. When you study history or sociology, the first lesson you will be taught is that you will need to question your own frame of reference, before you can make factual statements about the historical record. If anything, there are ample examples of traditional tribal communities who are struggling with modern problems - health, addiction, crime - which they didn't have just 50 years ago. Ask any traditional fishing community within the Northern polar circle, for instance. What you consider as "poverty" is the baseline way of living. Isolated tribes simply don't know any better. The modern concept of "poverty" you try to apply, makes absolutely zero sense from their frame of reference. If these tribes act resentful or hostile towards modernity, then it's because they see "progress" as an existential threat to a way of living that worked out for them for thousands of years. And that's a totally valid way of reasoning about how a human could live their lives.
    - mantap 7y ago
      Do isolated tribes generally want to stay isolated? There certainly are examples of tribes forcefully isolating themselves, such as the baduy dalam in indonesia. However in many cases it's the reverse, and tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money, and it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history.
      - CaptArmchair 7y ago
        > However in many cases it's the reverse Beware of generalization. > tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money Beware of switching cause and and effect. Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? > it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history. That's projection. And it's not even "our past", so that would be cultural appropriation. If anything, the developed world isn't a homogeneous society of like-minded individuals either. Most ethnological collections in Western museums don't have anything to do with Western culture, beyond the fact that these objects were taking out of context out of sheer curiosity. There's an ongoing discussion to return objects to traditional communities, or what's left of them, as they carry particular cultural value. It's a debate which is hugely controversial because it forces us to recognize that our Western sense of "progress" hasn't benefited other cultures in absolute terms. Case in point: Read Heart of Darkness and wonder why Ben Affleck's present endeavour to film that book is making certain European countries quite uncomfortable.

FranzFerdiNaN 7y ago

After we first made sure they were in poverty. I'm generally not impressed by this statistic, because those millions if people shouldn't have ever been in poverty, but were placed there thanks to some combination of capitalism, colonialism, slavery, racism, politics and probably a few more of such fun things.

nl 7y ago
All of these things still exist. But there are less people in poverty now, so... that seems like a good thing?
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  Yes and no. This is about which frame of reference you use to look at the world. And how that can severely distort your view. Consider isolated amazonian tribes, or tribes on islands in the South Pacific. By our standards, they live in abject poverty: no electricity, no clean water, no jobs,... Then again, these tribes do not know anything else. They have lived like this since the dawn of humanity. Then consider native tribes in America, Alaska, Greenland. People whose traditional way of living have been replaced by the affordances of modern technology. And that hasn't been for the better, necessarily. We are talking about fundamental lifestyle changes that happened over the course of less then a generation. And that's even without the historical violence we tend to discuss / guilt trip over in the modern world: such as traditional colonization, imperialism and such-like. Take Inuit tribes. Just 2 generations ago - some 50 years - these people lived in small traditional fishing communities, mostly secluded from the world. The lived according to their own ancestral culture and that worked out fine for them. Today, their way of living has entirely upended. Sure, they still fish, but they now have social security numbers, salaried yet often low-wage jobs, Internet and television, pollution and noise from cars, snowmobiles and so on. The net result is that unemployment among the active population is a serious issue, as it also causes mental and physical health issues including crime and substance abuse. When native tribes protest against oil pipelines, that's not a take against the benefits modernity itself. It's a protest against the fact that the arrival of modernity literally implies the disappearance of an environmental and cultural context in which they have been rooted for thousands of years. To them, the benefits of electricity, healthcare, modern jobs and cars also come with a great cost: giving up their identity, their way of life and the risk of ending up in abject poverty due to the dynamics inherent to modern economic systems rooted in Western / European values and morals. As such, when we talk about progress, it's presumptuous to assume that anyone who doesn't have access to modern affordances is "living in poverty" and "more progress" is the only answer going forward. The big thing that traditional tribal cultures have going for them is sustainability. Sure, individuals lived precarious lives and relied on magical thinking to explain the world, but these communities as a whole have persisted for many generations with a low impact on their environment. From their frame of reference, their way of life totally make sense. Assuming that their way of thinking is backwards or obsolete, or assuming that them ending up unemployed or struggling with modernity is them not pulling their weight in "accepting progress", well, that's just our own superiority bias clouding our thinking.
  - nl 7y ago
    I agree with all that (and indeed I don't think financial poverty measures make much sense in that context). However, the OP said millions if people shouldn't have ever been in poverty, but were placed there thanks to some combination of capitalism, colonialism, slavery, racism, politics and probably a few more of such fun things which of course isn't much like the "traditional tribe" scenario. Additionally, the traditional tribe scenario never supported large numbers of people, which is what is measured by the average life expectancy. Large numbers of people are associated with cities, and financial poverty is reasonable proxy for quality of life in a city context, on average.
    - CaptArmchair 7y ago
      > Large numbers of people are associated with cities, and financial poverty is reasonable proxy for quality of life in a city context, on average. Exactly. Thing is, cities didn't emerge out of themselves. The underlying dynamic is the Agricultural Revolution of 12.000 years ago. Moreover, I argue that we're with billions today less because of our own individual volition, but thanks to the invention of another agricultural revolution spawned by the Industrial Revolution: synthetic fertilizer, machinery, etc. The emergence of cities and metropolitan areas is caused by another dynamic: specialization. If you don't have to gather / hunt food, you can become a specialist. Money and finance are belief systems that helped galvanize that dynamic. As such, urbanization is the collective result of an individual adaptation strategy: get close to a large group of people with lots of demands for specialists. This ranges from doctors to factory workers. The fundamental problem with poverty, then, is that the survival of an individual doesn't depend on social cohesion in a small tribe. It depends largely on market dynamics of supply and demand for specialist labour. Moreover, the cost of switching between specialisms is prohibitively high (i.e. factory worker becomes lawyer). Yuval Harari laments the emergence of agriculture and cities as a disaster for Humanity in his seminal work "Sapiens". He makes a worthwhile point to consider. > Additionally, the traditional tribe scenario never supported large numbers of people, which is what is measured by the average life expectancy. Ultimately, there is absolutely no moral argument or reason, outside of our own thinking, to be found in nature that obligates us to become a multi-billion species of which each individual should live according to European / Western living standards. Equally, there's no argument, outside of our own thinking, to be found in nature that says each and everyone is entitled to live at least 80 years; or have biological kids. One can aspire and hope that will happen, but reality just doesn't give out any guarantees. That type existential precariousness and uncertainty is well understood in small tribes and deeply ingrained in their cultures. Now, to be clear, I don't want to make that case that living in small tribes is better then living in cities. Absolutely not. My point is that both are vastly different ways of living life and comparing them from the vantage point "one is better then the other", simply doesn't make much if any sense. What we can do is try to understand that tribal / traditional living is just as valid as a survival strategy and comes with it's own advantages and downsides. Hence why I vehemently disagree with Harari when he laments agriculture and cities. That's just one-sided value attribution. If we want to live in a society that forcefully favors large metropolitan cities, large industries, optimized specialization and so on: fine. But then we have to accept that poverty will be a thing and there will always be large swathes of the living who have to make do with the left-overs.
valesco 7y ago
They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands of years. Not being poor and victimized was a significant accomplishment, everywhere. Buddhism comes from the point of view that nobody can do much against that and the suffering that it brings. But... we did. Don't minimize it.
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  > They were in poverty because that's been the normal condition for thousands of years. That's textbook example of biased thinking. You're comparing the historical and present condition of other cultures by your own present condition. When you study history or sociology, the first lesson you will be taught is that you will need to question your own frame of reference, before you can make factual statements about the historical record. If anything, there are ample examples of traditional tribal communities who are struggling with modern problems - health, addiction, crime - which they didn't have just 50 years ago. Ask any traditional fishing community within the Northern polar circle, for instance. What you consider as "poverty" is the baseline way of living. Isolated tribes simply don't know any better. The modern concept of "poverty" you try to apply, makes absolutely zero sense from their frame of reference. If these tribes act resentful or hostile towards modernity, then it's because they see "progress" as an existential threat to a way of living that worked out for them for thousands of years. And that's a totally valid way of reasoning about how a human could live their lives.
  - mantap 7y ago
    Do isolated tribes generally want to stay isolated? There certainly are examples of tribes forcefully isolating themselves, such as the baduy dalam in indonesia. However in many cases it's the reverse, and tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money, and it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history.
    - CaptArmchair 7y ago
      > However in many cases it's the reverse Beware of generalization. > tribes want to come into the modern world and experience the creature comforts of money Beware of switching cause and and effect. Would they still have wanted to "experience the create comforts of modernity" if modernity hadn't presented itself to their doorstep? > it is us in the developed world who push back against it because of a desire to maintain a connection to our past, a living history. That's projection. And it's not even "our past", so that would be cultural appropriation. If anything, the developed world isn't a homogeneous society of like-minded individuals either. Most ethnological collections in Western museums don't have anything to do with Western culture, beyond the fact that these objects were taking out of context out of sheer curiosity. There's an ongoing discussion to return objects to traditional communities, or what's left of them, as they carry particular cultural value. It's a debate which is hugely controversial because it forces us to recognize that our Western sense of "progress" hasn't benefited other cultures in absolute terms. Case in point: Read Heart of Darkness and wonder why Ben Affleck's present endeavour to film that book is making certain European countries quite uncomfortable.