13 ms·

Against Hickelism

184 points by amrrs 6y ago

_Microft 6y ago
You might also want to read this thread by Max Roser, the one behind „Our World in Data“ about why he is done with Mr. Hickel: https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809 https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809 If you prefer blog-style formatted text over the Twitter UI, look here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1378730932308471809.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1378730932308471809.html
- jariel 6y ago
  This is interesting because Max Roser makes his case that he's implicitly not supporting colonialism because most economic expansion happened after colonialism. Except that the established colonies of Canada, Australia, NZ did exceedingly well, as did the long standing colony Hong Kong. Japan and South Korea (to some extent Taiwan), rebuilt after the war(s) under Anglo-American protection and reformation, also did very well, far better than most. Singapore? Continued it's colonial style operations. Vietnam? No so good. The more colonialism there 'was' the better they've done in recent years, unconditionally. Colonialism for the most part, was an early form of economic globalization, however unfair it was is a different issue. It's only be controversial to ideologues.
  - pm90 6y ago
    > Japan and South Korea (to some extent Taiwan), rebuilt after the war under Anglo-American protection and reformation, also did exceedingly well, far better than most. Japan and South Korea were never American colonies, unless you're going to twist the term until it makes no sense. They're definitely not independent from the US (as they can't really ask the US to remove its military bases) but they're not "colonies" either. > Canada, Australia, NZ These were sparsely inhabited lands populated by un-industrialized societies that were mostly wiped out. Compare that to India or SE Asia, regions with well developed societies and economies, which were brutally subjugated, prevented from industrializing and whose economies were reduced to relying on primary and extractive sectors. Colonialism absolutely hampered economic expansion in these societies.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > and whose economies were reduced to relying on primary and extractive sectors. Huh? India under the East India Company was the source of most of the world's manufactured cloth.
      - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
        > prevented from industrializing They're clearly talking about after the EIC under the British Raj. East India Company ended around the start of the industrial revolution.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    I think Hickel’s point looks something like “Roser claims colonialism was good because it supports his argument that poverty declined, but poverty was low before colonialism, therefore it was bad” (surely I’m missing something here?) I think Roser’s response is basically that “colonialism was bad and probably led to more poverty than there otherwise would have been. Also poverty was still high before colonialism compared to today, so I don’t need to rely on any heightened colonialism-induced poverty level to say that poverty has gone down” You seem to be replying to this with “well actually colonialism was good because blah blah blah blah blah blah.” This seems to be irrelevant to everything in scope but I guess you just wanted to get it out of your system. FWIW, I think the earlier inhabitants of the former colonies you claim as successful might not have such a rosy view of the consequences of colonialism, and while eg white farmers in Zimbabwe might have preferred colonial Rhodesia sticking around, the majority of the population are probably happier that the colony didn’t become more “established,” as you put it. Hong Kong is a pretty unique case as it was tiny, important, already somewhat developed when taken, and able to avoid taking part in the suffering of the communist revolution in China.
    - BelenusMordred 6y ago
      Why aren't non-colonised countries like Ethiopia, Nepal or Bhutan thriving then? I get it's easy to put things into a binary good/bad box and certainly easier to sing "colonialism is bad" in front of a crowd, but the world is a complex place. Hypothetically would India be in a better or worse position now if they never had the English language foisted upon them? The British colonialists tried to end centuries of rampant violent slavery on the Malayan peninsular, this made them incredibly unpopular with the Sultans and resulted in the assassination of an administrator, a war and resulting cessation of the practice. In certain cities like Melaka, slaves made up 30% of the population, were the British not to have intervened the use of slaves would have likely continued well into the 20th century. The world is rarely black and white.
      - selimthegrim 6y ago
        Vietnam and Thailand seem to be doing OK these days
  - vitus 6y ago
    These points look cherry-picked to support your argument. To cherry-pick a few more points: Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Pakistan. All of these were British colonies prior to Hong Kong (which was a British territory from 1841 to 1997). All of these have populations >150M (significantly greater than the UK itself!). All of these are in the bottom third of countries in terms of GDP per capita (and in fact worse off than Vietnam). (Well, okay, India hovers right around that 33%ile depending on your choice of measure.) Next on the list of Commonwealth of Nations by population are UK itself (wealthy, but wasn't a colony...), Tanzania (poor), South Africa (wealthy!), Kenya (poor), Uganda (very poor).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - jariel 6y ago
      They are not cherry picked, they are have a modern relation to colonialism. If the UK were to have been more deeply involved in India up until 1997 (i.e. a soft political distancing instead of sharp uprising) then India would be wealthier today than otherwise.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Talking about "colonialism" in general terms obscures the very real variation in outcomes. Colonies that were mainly influenced by English-like institutions did better than average because they tended to be more trade-oriented and inclusive, whilst other colonies were more extractive and those countries ended up with bad institutional arrangements that affect them to this day.
    - scaramanga 6y ago
      I think that's exactly right. Colonialism/imperialism do not imply a one-size-fits-all economic model. Empires are networks of interconnected components with different roles to play. Some places are integrated as sources of raw materials (in which case, all you need is a cheap workforce to extract the materials). Other places are trade routes, whose purpose is to host a garrison (eg. suez canal zone) so they need some level of infrastructure (ports, railways, air-strips, whatever). Other places are sources of markets required to stimulate industrial production, so there needs to be some level of disposable income to create demand for imports.
  - scaramanga 6y ago
    The relation between colonialism and outside interference and the economic development of the east asian region is an interesting and complex one. South Korea, along with Manchuria, was a Japanese colony. The region had been developed, along Stalinist economic lines, by Shinzo Abe's grandfather "the devil of showa" making heavy use of forced labour (more so than Stalin himself, perhaps). Korea (like much of Asia) faced the prospect of "decolonisation" after the atomic bombs were dropped, but instead the country fell in to an extremely destructive civil war. But their redevelopment did not happen until decades after the war. North Korea redeveloped rapidly due to Soviet assistance, by the 80's South Korea had caught up and by the 90's the soviet union had collapsed, terminating and even sharply reversing North Korea's growth, while the south had managed to work their own development plan with only the IMF crisis as a setback (which also served to totally discredit the Washington consensus in the political culture and has cemented the mixed model with effective state interventions as the South Korean model). The explanation for the differences in outcomes across Asia probably has a lot more to do with what role each nation played in the British/French/Japanese/etc. systems. Colonisation looked a lot different in Hong Kong than it did in India. Hong Kong was a city-state trading hub peopled with privileged elites whose role was to oversee the Imperial trade network in the region. India was a vast source of indentured agricultural labour and raw materials. Likewise in Korea, the north (and parts of Manchuria) were a manufacturing base in the Japanese system, linked in with nearby raw materials by railroads. South Korea was more a source of enslaved agricultural labour (concentrated in Jeolla province), with some exceptions like the strategically important port in Busan.
  - dj_gitmo 6y ago
    It's difficult to pull apart Correlation vs causation. For example, European colonizers choose to colonize countries that they saw as economically valuable. India was very rich in gold and farm land pre-colonization, and the Europeans knew it. That's why it was the jewel of the British Empire. Ethiopia was ignored by Britain and France because it was perceived to be dryer and poorer. Some of the post-colonial success is tied to intrinsic value of the land itself.
  - ckarmann 6y ago
    Japan was never a colony, and Vietnam was a french colony for several generations. You are not getting your examples right.
    - Rule35 6y ago
      Vietnam was addressed as less successful. And Japan was treated like a colony after WW2, like Germany. Both lost most autonomy.
      - quonn 6y ago
        West Germany remained occupied for about 4 years and then quickly transitioned to a high degree of independence (because of Cold War strategy reasons). Additionally it had been fully developed for hundreds of years so there can be no comparison.
        Rule35 6y ago
        It still has American military bases. The war ended in 1945. It didn't get a choice in receiving them, unlike other countries.
        quonn 6y ago
        It absolutely has that choice now. There are various benefits to having them, mostly economic.
        Rule35 6y ago
        Yeah, 80 years of occupation and stabilization later they sure could. That's why we did it, to prepare them to support themselves again but from a more stable base. But what's your point? That colonization doesn't always work? Sure.
  - EdwardDiego 6y ago
    Well,as a Kiwi, it's... complicated. We did well when the "mother country" treated us and our exports as special. We pioneered frozen meat shipments as part of that. [1] When the UK started treating us less favourably as it moved towards the EEC, (And because we were outcompeting the UK's own farmers), our economy was hit hard. We had to pivot the entire structure of our economy, away from a government subsidised agricultural model (like the EU, UK, and US are still running) to a free market one in a manner rarely seen in so called free market countries - no tariffs, no subsidies. It caused a lot of pain, bankruptcies, and suicides. And once we no longer had preferential access to the UK market, we had to go out and find our own markets. So while we initially succeeded because of colonialism, once the apron strings were cut to suit the needs of the colonial master, we succeeded in spite of colonialism. [1]: https://teara.govt.nz/en/sheep-farming/page-5 https://teara.govt.nz/en/sheep-farming/page-5
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >It's only be controversial to ideologues. It is widely understood that a you can be a slave or subject and be better off financially than a free man. A slave in the US South probably had better nutrition, food, technology, etc than many tribesmen in Africa, for example. Is that an accurate description of your major point? Doesn't mean it's also preferable, or that everything is about having more money...
    - watwut 6y ago
      What do you base good nutrition of slave in south from?
      - coldtea 6y ago
        In that, first, they weren't subject to famines from natural causes, like tribesmen were (and still are). Second, there weren't just field slaves, but also house slaves, eating quite well. Third, their cooking is were a lot of "southern food" recipies originate from. But all this is neither here, nor there. You're focusing on the wrong detail. The point I'm making is illustrative, it's not about whether all/most slaves where better fed. It's about the opposite, that better fed/more wealth doesn't automatically equate to freedom/dignity etc. They were still slaves. In the same vein, "colonies were better off" is not the be-all end-all criterion.
        selimthegrim 6y ago
        Have you ever eaten chitterlings?
        watwut 6y ago
        > Second, there weren't just field slaves, but also house slaves, eating quite well. Where do you get house slaves eating well from? One of owner female duties was to guard keys from food storage - due to a lot of stealing. > Third, their cooking is were a lot of "southern food" recipies originate from. Slaves cooking also required a lot of supervision and instruction. Due to them not being allowed to eat that, due to them not being assumed competent. They did a lot of work there, but that does not imply them eating all that great stuff. > It's about the opposite, that better fed/more wealth doesn't automatically equate to freedom/dignity etc. Yes. But material conditions really were not all that great. And also beyond abstract freedom, there were things like child being sold away from parents young, your loved one, brother, etc being sold to never been seen again.
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    > Canada, Australia, NZ Had much less focus on resource extraction than typical colonies. They were used more as a place for their own population to go and live. > Japan and South Korea Those weren't colonies. Those were more of puppet states used as buffers against nearby powers. The focus wasn't on extracting wealth it was focused on having a strong ally in the region.
- hntrader 6y ago
  Hickel did a similar thing to Steven Pinker. He wrote a scathing article falsely claiming that the poverty rate was increasing (contra to Pinker's claim), when according to his own data in that same article - it was actually steadily decreasing. I've come to see him as a bad faith actor.
  - ttiurani 6y ago
    If you look at the below thread by Hickel, Roser is very uncivil (for an academic), childish and misdirecting. He also does not answer Allen's criticism. Hickel on the other hand remains very composed and courteous. Roser also keeps constantly misrepresenting degrowth with a straw man that the global South needs growth. He has been told time and time again that every degrowth demand is only for the rich countries and everyone agrees the poorest countries needs growth, but still he makes the same claim over and over. From this behavior, I've come to see Roser as a bad faith actor. https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1376097068251541504?s=19 https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1376097068251541504?s...
    - hntrader 6y ago
      The tone of these particular tweets should be parsed in context. If you think that someone has been operating in bad faith towards you for years, eventually you lose interest in engaging and choose the "block" option, which is what Roser did today. Also, Hickel himself has engaged in uncivil rhetoric previously, e.g an unprovoked accusation of "mansplaining" in 2019.
      - ttiurani 6y ago
        I understand that academics are just humans, and can lose their temper like the rest of us. However what I find very troubling is that the main point that Hickel raised in the blog post[1] – GDP data has the particular potentially crucial problems Allen has raised when used to assess historical poverty – Roser chooses to not actually address it, but instead throws blanket statements of there being continued discussion between academics of different datasets and their merits. However this particular graph of historical extreme poverty is used by the most powerful people in the world to advocate for continuing with the status quo. That is why it caught Hickel's attention. It is therefore very important that the heading of the graph is very well justified. As a layperson reading Allen's research, and knowing there is a discontinuation point in the graph 1981 when the dataset changes, I think the graph ought to be labelled very differently. Roser continuing to label it as "extreme poverty" knowing there is an ongoing debate about what data if any is a good proxy historical poverty, and not answering head on Allen's criticism, really makes me not trust Roser. 1: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-isnt-natural-it-is-created https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i...
- ttiurani 6y ago
  If you do read Roser's thread, please also read Hickel's response: https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1380548416082735107 https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1380548416082735107
retrac 6y ago
I do wonder if there will ever be a reevaluation and integration of the Soviet Union in Western thought, one free of the context of needing to prove ourselves better than that system. For all its horrors and atrocities, the Soviet economy grew, and worked. Oh, not very well. But better than 0% growth. In 1910 the average Russian was an illiterate peasant. In 1980 the average Russian was a literate urban dweller with electricity and indoor toilets on their floor with twice the life expectancy of their great-grandparents. This is, again, not intended as a defence of that monstrous system. It can be condemned on purely moral grounds alone, in my opinion. And it was not as efficient by most analyses, either. Still, I bring it up because, as a counter-example, it complicates both of the commonly made assertions mentioned in the article: that poverty hasn't decreased in any meaningful sense, and that the capitalist system is the only means of greater than 0% growth in material production.
- lupire 6y ago
  The Soviet economy improved early in 20th Century, as did most thanks to industrialization, but by the end of the Cold War the economy was largely an illusion outside of the military spending. That's why the Cold War ended -- non-"revolutionary" leaders realized the Soviet Communist system was an utter failure economically.
  - retrac 6y ago
    You cannot ignore the military spending, though. It is wealth production as with anything else. I am not suggesting the wealth was fairly or reasonably distributed. (Then again, is it truly under any system?) I am pointing out that wealth was produced and existed. And that there was a fairly steady rate of growth sustained for about half a century in all. Of course the 70s onward stagnation was real, and coupled with unsustainable military spending, it eventually collapsed in on itself. Still. The USSR produced about a billion tonnes of steel or so while it existed, with production exponentially increasing over time. That fact is a serious problem for a theory that claims this cannot happen under such a system. And many popular wonks do effectively make such claims.
    - 6y ago
lupire 6y ago
Guardian is so predictable as a source of bad takes in its mad rush for leftist credentials. When Donald Trump was elected they saw dollar signs in becoming the paper of leftist resistance. And I say this as someone with rather left-wing economic beliefs, pro-reparations, tax the rich, etc.
lupire 6y ago
When people switch from barter to market (currency), does that count as "making more money" and poverty reduction in these stats? Some getting a job as a cleaner but paying someone else to cook their food, and paying for the commute, isn't a real improvement in quality of life and reduction in poverty. Specialization and economy of scale is great, but at the low end of labor skill, "dollarizing" work at the expense of home economics and barter, is a sham.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  If you were a historian trying to estimate things like historical poverty rate then this (and the “gdp” of subsistence farming or home crafts like spinning and weaving cloth for one’s own clothes) would, I hope, be one of the first things you would consider. Fortunately historians do consider this and work hard to produce results that don’t naively apply today’s economic systems and metrics to the past.
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  See the note above the distribution curves in the post: “None market income (e.g. through home production and subsistence farming) is taken into account.”
sacomo 6y ago
One general flaw with any of these historical graphs concerning poverty, standard of living, etc. is that we don't have good data for most countries going back that far. The graphs are making some big assumptions for the older, spotty data. > 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. > The data for 1820–1970 comes from a source (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002) that draws on the Maddison database on world GDP. That data was never intended to assess poverty, but rather the distribution of GDP — and that for only a limited range of countries. Data for the Global South is particularly thin, and there is very little that exists for prior to 1900. The data is not robust enough to draw meaningful conclusions about what was happening to people’s livelihoods during the colonial period.
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  Read this earlier, from the founder of Our World in Data: https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809 https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809
Supermancho 6y ago
> First of all, if you want to assess the change in global poverty in an ideologically neutral way, why on Earth would you exclude China? > is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation Concisely stated, these people are talking past one another about whether "extreme poverty" is a static or dynamic measure. Yes the UN tries to keep adjusting "extreme poverty" by inflation but as others have stated and common sense dictates, extreme poverty is a matter of lack-of-access. By that measure, the entire planetary population has slowly integrated, which makes Noah's view seem correct to him. This is heavily skewed by subsistence farming being counted as in the same kind of extreme poverty, which doesn't mean much sense to me. Not sure why anyone would care about this kind of finger-wagging.
- albatruss 6y ago
  Yes, and Noah Smith never seems to address Jason Hickle's point that the evidence based poverty line should be $7.40. And it seems that if that point holds, as Smith never actually challenges the point that the population beneath that line has actually gone up while "extreme poverty" has gone down (a point both agree on), then Smith isn't left with much of a position.
  - pm90 6y ago
    > And it seems that if that point holds, as Smith never actually challenges the point that the population beneath that line has actually gone up while "extreme poverty" has gone down (a point both agree on), then Smith isn't left with much of a position. One of the points that Smith is making is simply that using a fixed threshold for deciding on whether there has been meaningful progress in alleviating poverty is somewhat meaningless and misses what is actually going on. In the article, he shows how the distribution of per-capita income has changed, with larger parts of the population having more income than before, which seems to indicate that we are making progress in alleviating poverty. If you were to look at the fixed threshold, you would miss this "shift" in distribution and thus conclude that hardly any progress has been made. I think this is a meaningful argument, in that it points to us that we are "doing something right".
ttiurani 6y ago
> It seems to envision a world that is zero-sum, or close to it, with rich countries hoovering up the riches that should be flowing to the Global South. Hickel's research makes the argument that this hoovering is exactly what is happening, on a massive scale: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2021.1899153?journalCode=cnpe20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2021.18... If Noah Smith wants to rebuke this argument, he can't just "as if" it away. He needs to do the research that proves otherwise.
- calt 6y ago
  He didn't "as if" the zero-sum argument away. In the very next paragraph: > Rather than being drained dry, [the global south] are advancing, growing their share of the global pie even as they deliver better lives to their own poorest citizens. Unfairness isn't good. They probably agree that things are unfair and should be better. Hickel is saying ~you're wrong about poverty because the situation is unfair~ Noah Smith is saying ~OK. But I'm not wrong about the fact that poverty is decreasing and the situation is improving.~
  - ttiurani 6y ago
    This exactly is the much more important second point Hickel is making. Even if growing GDP does mean tiny scraps of wealth are left to lower the number of the extremely poor[1], it's nowhere near resource efficient enough to be feasible within constraints of climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and resource depletion. Pumping up GDP is not a sustainable way to reduce poverty. Gates and other people who benefit the most from the status quo continuing to advertise for this graph gives a very false sense of optimism. 1: $1.90/d is lower than the consumption level of slaves in the US in the 19th century. Helping people get slightly above the level of slaves is of course better than not doing that, but it is hardly enough.
    - calt 6y ago
      That's a good point, and I think that to a varying degree the relevant parties - Max Roser, Steven Pinker, and Noah Smith - all agree with it. I'm new to this controversy, but after reading these comments for entirely too long it appears in this thread that Hickel is writing numerous scathing articles misrepresenting the views of Max Roser, Steven Pinker, and Noah Smith to make this point. It's unfortunate.
jariel 6y ago
The author made the assertion that it was 'not due to free market capitalism' while essentially using facts to demonstrate that this was the case. When a nation is poor and backwards, due to, gosh, 50 years of 'Central Planning' inspired by Marx, well then it's not that hard for the state to do things like 'build roads'. But factories in China, Tencent, DiDi etc. are not state creations. State supported, yes, and ultimately 'state controlled' (i.e. they state can do as they please with them), but it's considerably more 'free market' than otherwise. It's ridiculous to split hairs by pointing out 'some of India's growth started in the 1980's' or that 'some things in China are state directed' when overwhelmingly the change was towards free markets, in some cases, with state oversight and control but not direction or planning by and large. China is one of the most 'free market' places on earth, lacking in all sorts of regulation - you just have to remember that 'for the important things', the CCP is in charge. (I should add that the banks are state owned and their loans are directed, however, they are backed by the Central Bank which is entirely politicized and is a primary driver of actual influence.) The answer is 80% capitalism.
- nabla9 6y ago
  His point is not free market capitalism. Industrial government controlled policy based capitalism is how all Asian Tigers became rich. Big Chinese companies grow in in government controlled financial environment that supports them.
- vidarh 6y ago
  > 'Central Planning' inspired by Marx, The Communist Manifesto starts with a chapter praising capitalism for bringing unheard of increases in productivity, growth. Even for trade serving as a "battering ram" that drives down xenophobia. Here's a quote praising capitalism: > The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? He goes on to praise the advances brought by "free competition". Then he turns the tables and argues that the reason capitalism will eventually fail is that it is too efficient: That it will eventually bring crises of simultaneous over-production and under-employment; that it will automate away employment to the point that the proportion who can afford to buy their products will be unable to consume all that it can produce. "Central Planning" has no basis in Marx. Central planning is a largely Stalinist conception, developed out of ashes of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War. Lenin saw how it failed, hence New Economic Policy, which re-opened some markets and allowed for a softening of planning similar to what Deng later did in China. It was Stalin who undid most of those reforms again after Lenins death, and who went even further in making centralised planning a dogma, and it was based on his wilful misinterpretation of Lenins ideas, not on Marx.
zuhayeer 6y ago
Also a good read linked to in the article: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/checking-in-on-the-global-south https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/checking-in-on-the-global-...
galaxyLogic 6y ago
Think about South Africa under apartheid. It was doing great financially. Much better than most (or all) African countries was it not? Yet much of its population didn't have a right to vote. What good is financial progress if most of it goes to a minority and much of the population can not make things better because they cannot even vote? And Southern States before Civil War, were also doing great financially. Is that all that's worth discussing?
- airstrike 6y ago
  You're arguing a separate point entirely, which I wager is why you're getting downvoted. It doesn't follow logically. The author isn't arguing that we should ignore all of the issues afflicting people across the globe and only look at the poverty line. He's countering the claim that people have not been lifted out of poverty.
  - galaxyLogic 6y ago
    I'm not arguing against the author. I'm just saying as a general notion that measuring only financial well-being is not the only thing we should care about. Not sure if logic has anything to do with that
    - airstrike 6y ago
      In your opening comment, you asked "Is that all that's worth discussing?" The answer is no, but then again nobody claimed that it was. This was just the one article about the poverty line, so discussing something other than the poverty line is off-topic (which I called "illogical" from a debate perspective, in perhaps too formal of a tone, in hindsight)
      - galaxyLogic 6y ago
        True. At the same time I don't think there is any rule set in stone that says everything that is not strictly explicitly in the article is "off-topic". Discussion can in my view include discussion about the discussion itself, its implicit preferences and assumptions. Putting too much effort into discussing what is off-topic and what is not, is kind of off-topic itself, I would say :-)
lallysingh 6y ago
Why is this here? Who is Hickel and why would a hacker care?
roenxi 6y ago
The reduction in poverty is linked to the overwhelming expansions of science and technology. Most of the modern economy was impossible due to knowledge constraints in 1700. And it isn't so much that capitalism is a cause, as all the things that aren't capitalism absolutely scupper technological progress. Eg, in extreme cases bureaucrats literally ban technological progress because it is too disruptive (see, for example, encryption).
- simiones 6y ago
  > all the things that aren't capitalism absolutely scupper technological progress This is wildly wrong. Technological progress has literally existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Even under capitalism, technological progress often happens in universities with government money, often for military or claimed military purposes. For example, everything to do with the base of computer science has been created in academia and the military sector, before it was donated by government to private corporations.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    > Technological progress has literally existed for thousands of years before capitalism. And it moved veeeeeeeery slowly [0]. We had two ages named after a metal and one after rock. Post capitalism there have been Space ages, various revolutions, computers, etc, etc. > For example, everything to do with the base of computer science has been created in academia and the military sector, before it was donated by government to private corporations. And, again, if they hadn't handed it over to the capitalists there would still be all of a few tens of thousands of people using the internet to swap academic papers and no more. Everyone made the right decisions on that one. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_technology

184 points by amrrs 6y ago

You might also want to read this thread by Max Roser, the one behind „Our World in Data“ about why he is done with Mr. Hickel: https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809 https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809 If you prefer blog-style formatted text over the Twitter UI, look here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1378730932308471809.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1378730932308471809.html

jariel 6y ago
This is interesting because Max Roser makes his case that he's implicitly not supporting colonialism because most economic expansion happened after colonialism. Except that the established colonies of Canada, Australia, NZ did exceedingly well, as did the long standing colony Hong Kong. Japan and South Korea (to some extent Taiwan), rebuilt after the war(s) under Anglo-American protection and reformation, also did very well, far better than most. Singapore? Continued it's colonial style operations. Vietnam? No so good. The more colonialism there 'was' the better they've done in recent years, unconditionally. Colonialism for the most part, was an early form of economic globalization, however unfair it was is a different issue. It's only be controversial to ideologues.
- pm90 6y ago
  > Japan and South Korea (to some extent Taiwan), rebuilt after the war under Anglo-American protection and reformation, also did exceedingly well, far better than most. Japan and South Korea were never American colonies, unless you're going to twist the term until it makes no sense. They're definitely not independent from the US (as they can't really ask the US to remove its military bases) but they're not "colonies" either. > Canada, Australia, NZ These were sparsely inhabited lands populated by un-industrialized societies that were mostly wiped out. Compare that to India or SE Asia, regions with well developed societies and economies, which were brutally subjugated, prevented from industrializing and whose economies were reduced to relying on primary and extractive sectors. Colonialism absolutely hampered economic expansion in these societies.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > and whose economies were reduced to relying on primary and extractive sectors. Huh? India under the East India Company was the source of most of the world's manufactured cloth.
    - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
      > prevented from industrializing They're clearly talking about after the EIC under the British Raj. East India Company ended around the start of the industrial revolution.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I think Hickel’s point looks something like “Roser claims colonialism was good because it supports his argument that poverty declined, but poverty was low before colonialism, therefore it was bad” (surely I’m missing something here?) I think Roser’s response is basically that “colonialism was bad and probably led to more poverty than there otherwise would have been. Also poverty was still high before colonialism compared to today, so I don’t need to rely on any heightened colonialism-induced poverty level to say that poverty has gone down” You seem to be replying to this with “well actually colonialism was good because blah blah blah blah blah blah.” This seems to be irrelevant to everything in scope but I guess you just wanted to get it out of your system. FWIW, I think the earlier inhabitants of the former colonies you claim as successful might not have such a rosy view of the consequences of colonialism, and while eg white farmers in Zimbabwe might have preferred colonial Rhodesia sticking around, the majority of the population are probably happier that the colony didn’t become more “established,” as you put it. Hong Kong is a pretty unique case as it was tiny, important, already somewhat developed when taken, and able to avoid taking part in the suffering of the communist revolution in China.
  - BelenusMordred 6y ago
    Why aren't non-colonised countries like Ethiopia, Nepal or Bhutan thriving then? I get it's easy to put things into a binary good/bad box and certainly easier to sing "colonialism is bad" in front of a crowd, but the world is a complex place. Hypothetically would India be in a better or worse position now if they never had the English language foisted upon them? The British colonialists tried to end centuries of rampant violent slavery on the Malayan peninsular, this made them incredibly unpopular with the Sultans and resulted in the assassination of an administrator, a war and resulting cessation of the practice. In certain cities like Melaka, slaves made up 30% of the population, were the British not to have intervened the use of slaves would have likely continued well into the 20th century. The world is rarely black and white.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      Vietnam and Thailand seem to be doing OK these days
- vitus 6y ago
  These points look cherry-picked to support your argument. To cherry-pick a few more points: Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Pakistan. All of these were British colonies prior to Hong Kong (which was a British territory from 1841 to 1997). All of these have populations >150M (significantly greater than the UK itself!). All of these are in the bottom third of countries in terms of GDP per capita (and in fact worse off than Vietnam). (Well, okay, India hovers right around that 33%ile depending on your choice of measure.) Next on the list of Commonwealth of Nations by population are UK itself (wealthy, but wasn't a colony...), Tanzania (poor), South Africa (wealthy!), Kenya (poor), Uganda (very poor).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jariel 6y ago
    They are not cherry picked, they are have a modern relation to colonialism. If the UK were to have been more deeply involved in India up until 1997 (i.e. a soft political distancing instead of sharp uprising) then India would be wealthier today than otherwise.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Talking about "colonialism" in general terms obscures the very real variation in outcomes. Colonies that were mainly influenced by English-like institutions did better than average because they tended to be more trade-oriented and inclusive, whilst other colonies were more extractive and those countries ended up with bad institutional arrangements that affect them to this day.
  - scaramanga 6y ago
    I think that's exactly right. Colonialism/imperialism do not imply a one-size-fits-all economic model. Empires are networks of interconnected components with different roles to play. Some places are integrated as sources of raw materials (in which case, all you need is a cheap workforce to extract the materials). Other places are trade routes, whose purpose is to host a garrison (eg. suez canal zone) so they need some level of infrastructure (ports, railways, air-strips, whatever). Other places are sources of markets required to stimulate industrial production, so there needs to be some level of disposable income to create demand for imports.
- scaramanga 6y ago
  The relation between colonialism and outside interference and the economic development of the east asian region is an interesting and complex one. South Korea, along with Manchuria, was a Japanese colony. The region had been developed, along Stalinist economic lines, by Shinzo Abe's grandfather "the devil of showa" making heavy use of forced labour (more so than Stalin himself, perhaps). Korea (like much of Asia) faced the prospect of "decolonisation" after the atomic bombs were dropped, but instead the country fell in to an extremely destructive civil war. But their redevelopment did not happen until decades after the war. North Korea redeveloped rapidly due to Soviet assistance, by the 80's South Korea had caught up and by the 90's the soviet union had collapsed, terminating and even sharply reversing North Korea's growth, while the south had managed to work their own development plan with only the IMF crisis as a setback (which also served to totally discredit the Washington consensus in the political culture and has cemented the mixed model with effective state interventions as the South Korean model). The explanation for the differences in outcomes across Asia probably has a lot more to do with what role each nation played in the British/French/Japanese/etc. systems. Colonisation looked a lot different in Hong Kong than it did in India. Hong Kong was a city-state trading hub peopled with privileged elites whose role was to oversee the Imperial trade network in the region. India was a vast source of indentured agricultural labour and raw materials. Likewise in Korea, the north (and parts of Manchuria) were a manufacturing base in the Japanese system, linked in with nearby raw materials by railroads. South Korea was more a source of enslaved agricultural labour (concentrated in Jeolla province), with some exceptions like the strategically important port in Busan.
- dj_gitmo 6y ago
  It's difficult to pull apart Correlation vs causation. For example, European colonizers choose to colonize countries that they saw as economically valuable. India was very rich in gold and farm land pre-colonization, and the Europeans knew it. That's why it was the jewel of the British Empire. Ethiopia was ignored by Britain and France because it was perceived to be dryer and poorer. Some of the post-colonial success is tied to intrinsic value of the land itself.
- ckarmann 6y ago
  Japan was never a colony, and Vietnam was a french colony for several generations. You are not getting your examples right.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    Vietnam was addressed as less successful. And Japan was treated like a colony after WW2, like Germany. Both lost most autonomy.
    - quonn 6y ago
      West Germany remained occupied for about 4 years and then quickly transitioned to a high degree of independence (because of Cold War strategy reasons). Additionally it had been fully developed for hundreds of years so there can be no comparison.
      - Rule35 6y ago
        It still has American military bases. The war ended in 1945. It didn't get a choice in receiving them, unlike other countries.
        quonn 6y ago
        It absolutely has that choice now. There are various benefits to having them, mostly economic.
        Rule35 6y ago
        Yeah, 80 years of occupation and stabilization later they sure could. That's why we did it, to prepare them to support themselves again but from a more stable base. But what's your point? That colonization doesn't always work? Sure.
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  Well,as a Kiwi, it's... complicated. We did well when the "mother country" treated us and our exports as special. We pioneered frozen meat shipments as part of that. [1] When the UK started treating us less favourably as it moved towards the EEC, (And because we were outcompeting the UK's own farmers), our economy was hit hard. We had to pivot the entire structure of our economy, away from a government subsidised agricultural model (like the EU, UK, and US are still running) to a free market one in a manner rarely seen in so called free market countries - no tariffs, no subsidies. It caused a lot of pain, bankruptcies, and suicides. And once we no longer had preferential access to the UK market, we had to go out and find our own markets. So while we initially succeeded because of colonialism, once the apron strings were cut to suit the needs of the colonial master, we succeeded in spite of colonialism. [1]: https://teara.govt.nz/en/sheep-farming/page-5 https://teara.govt.nz/en/sheep-farming/page-5
- coldtea 6y ago
  >It's only be controversial to ideologues. It is widely understood that a you can be a slave or subject and be better off financially than a free man. A slave in the US South probably had better nutrition, food, technology, etc than many tribesmen in Africa, for example. Is that an accurate description of your major point? Doesn't mean it's also preferable, or that everything is about having more money...
  - watwut 6y ago
    What do you base good nutrition of slave in south from?
    - coldtea 6y ago
      In that, first, they weren't subject to famines from natural causes, like tribesmen were (and still are). Second, there weren't just field slaves, but also house slaves, eating quite well. Third, their cooking is were a lot of "southern food" recipies originate from. But all this is neither here, nor there. You're focusing on the wrong detail. The point I'm making is illustrative, it's not about whether all/most slaves where better fed. It's about the opposite, that better fed/more wealth doesn't automatically equate to freedom/dignity etc. They were still slaves. In the same vein, "colonies were better off" is not the be-all end-all criterion.
      - selimthegrim 6y ago
        Have you ever eaten chitterlings?
      - watwut 6y ago
        > Second, there weren't just field slaves, but also house slaves, eating quite well. Where do you get house slaves eating well from? One of owner female duties was to guard keys from food storage - due to a lot of stealing. > Third, their cooking is were a lot of "southern food" recipies originate from. Slaves cooking also required a lot of supervision and instruction. Due to them not being allowed to eat that, due to them not being assumed competent. They did a lot of work there, but that does not imply them eating all that great stuff. > It's about the opposite, that better fed/more wealth doesn't automatically equate to freedom/dignity etc. Yes. But material conditions really were not all that great. And also beyond abstract freedom, there were things like child being sold away from parents young, your loved one, brother, etc being sold to never been seen again.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  > Canada, Australia, NZ Had much less focus on resource extraction than typical colonies. They were used more as a place for their own population to go and live. > Japan and South Korea Those weren't colonies. Those were more of puppet states used as buffers against nearby powers. The focus wasn't on extracting wealth it was focused on having a strong ally in the region.
hntrader 6y ago
Hickel did a similar thing to Steven Pinker. He wrote a scathing article falsely claiming that the poverty rate was increasing (contra to Pinker's claim), when according to his own data in that same article - it was actually steadily decreasing. I've come to see him as a bad faith actor.
- ttiurani 6y ago
  If you look at the below thread by Hickel, Roser is very uncivil (for an academic), childish and misdirecting. He also does not answer Allen's criticism. Hickel on the other hand remains very composed and courteous. Roser also keeps constantly misrepresenting degrowth with a straw man that the global South needs growth. He has been told time and time again that every degrowth demand is only for the rich countries and everyone agrees the poorest countries needs growth, but still he makes the same claim over and over. From this behavior, I've come to see Roser as a bad faith actor. https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1376097068251541504?s=19 https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1376097068251541504?s...
  - hntrader 6y ago
    The tone of these particular tweets should be parsed in context. If you think that someone has been operating in bad faith towards you for years, eventually you lose interest in engaging and choose the "block" option, which is what Roser did today. Also, Hickel himself has engaged in uncivil rhetoric previously, e.g an unprovoked accusation of "mansplaining" in 2019.
    - ttiurani 6y ago
      I understand that academics are just humans, and can lose their temper like the rest of us. However what I find very troubling is that the main point that Hickel raised in the blog post[1] – GDP data has the particular potentially crucial problems Allen has raised when used to assess historical poverty – Roser chooses to not actually address it, but instead throws blanket statements of there being continued discussion between academics of different datasets and their merits. However this particular graph of historical extreme poverty is used by the most powerful people in the world to advocate for continuing with the status quo. That is why it caught Hickel's attention. It is therefore very important that the heading of the graph is very well justified. As a layperson reading Allen's research, and knowing there is a discontinuation point in the graph 1981 when the dataset changes, I think the graph ought to be labelled very differently. Roser continuing to label it as "extreme poverty" knowing there is an ongoing debate about what data if any is a good proxy historical poverty, and not answering head on Allen's criticism, really makes me not trust Roser. 1: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-isnt-natural-it-is-created https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i...
ttiurani 6y ago
If you do read Roser's thread, please also read Hickel's response: https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1380548416082735107 https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1380548416082735107

retrac 6y ago

I do wonder if there will ever be a reevaluation and integration of the Soviet Union in Western thought, one free of the context of needing to prove ourselves better than that system. For all its horrors and atrocities, the Soviet economy grew, and worked. Oh, not very well. But better than 0% growth. In 1910 the average Russian was an illiterate peasant. In 1980 the average Russian was a literate urban dweller with electricity and indoor toilets on their floor with twice the life expectancy of their great-grandparents. This is, again, not intended as a defence of that monstrous system. It can be condemned on purely moral grounds alone, in my opinion. And it was not as efficient by most analyses, either. Still, I bring it up because, as a counter-example, it complicates both of the commonly made assertions mentioned in the article: that poverty hasn't decreased in any meaningful sense, and that the capitalist system is the only means of greater than 0% growth in material production.

lupire 6y ago
The Soviet economy improved early in 20th Century, as did most thanks to industrialization, but by the end of the Cold War the economy was largely an illusion outside of the military spending. That's why the Cold War ended -- non-"revolutionary" leaders realized the Soviet Communist system was an utter failure economically.
- retrac 6y ago
  You cannot ignore the military spending, though. It is wealth production as with anything else. I am not suggesting the wealth was fairly or reasonably distributed. (Then again, is it truly under any system?) I am pointing out that wealth was produced and existed. And that there was a fairly steady rate of growth sustained for about half a century in all. Of course the 70s onward stagnation was real, and coupled with unsustainable military spending, it eventually collapsed in on itself. Still. The USSR produced about a billion tonnes of steel or so while it existed, with production exponentially increasing over time. That fact is a serious problem for a theory that claims this cannot happen under such a system. And many popular wonks do effectively make such claims.
  - 6y ago

lupire 6y ago

Guardian is so predictable as a source of bad takes in its mad rush for leftist credentials. When Donald Trump was elected they saw dollar signs in becoming the paper of leftist resistance. And I say this as someone with rather left-wing economic beliefs, pro-reparations, tax the rich, etc.

lupire 6y ago

When people switch from barter to market (currency), does that count as "making more money" and poverty reduction in these stats? Some getting a job as a cleaner but paying someone else to cook their food, and paying for the commute, isn't a real improvement in quality of life and reduction in poverty. Specialization and economy of scale is great, but at the low end of labor skill, "dollarizing" work at the expense of home economics and barter, is a sham.

dan-robertson 6y ago
If you were a historian trying to estimate things like historical poverty rate then this (and the “gdp” of subsistence farming or home crafts like spinning and weaving cloth for one’s own clothes) would, I hope, be one of the first things you would consider. Fortunately historians do consider this and work hard to produce results that don’t naively apply today’s economic systems and metrics to the past.
Ma8ee 6y ago
See the note above the distribution curves in the post: “None market income (e.g. through home production and subsistence farming) is taken into account.”

sacomo 6y ago

One general flaw with any of these historical graphs concerning poverty, standard of living, etc. is that we don't have good data for most countries going back that far. The graphs are making some big assumptions for the older, spotty data. > 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. > The data for 1820–1970 comes from a source (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002) that draws on the Maddison database on world GDP. That data was never intended to assess poverty, but rather the distribution of GDP — and that for only a limited range of countries. Data for the Global South is particularly thin, and there is very little that exists for prior to 1900. The data is not robust enough to draw meaningful conclusions about what was happening to people’s livelihoods during the colonial period.

lwansbrough 6y ago
Read this earlier, from the founder of Our World in Data: https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809 https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809

Supermancho 6y ago

> First of all, if you want to assess the change in global poverty in an ideologically neutral way, why on Earth would you exclude China? > is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation Concisely stated, these people are talking past one another about whether "extreme poverty" is a static or dynamic measure. Yes the UN tries to keep adjusting "extreme poverty" by inflation but as others have stated and common sense dictates, extreme poverty is a matter of lack-of-access. By that measure, the entire planetary population has slowly integrated, which makes Noah's view seem correct to him. This is heavily skewed by subsistence farming being counted as in the same kind of extreme poverty, which doesn't mean much sense to me. Not sure why anyone would care about this kind of finger-wagging.

albatruss 6y ago
Yes, and Noah Smith never seems to address Jason Hickle's point that the evidence based poverty line should be $7.40. And it seems that if that point holds, as Smith never actually challenges the point that the population beneath that line has actually gone up while "extreme poverty" has gone down (a point both agree on), then Smith isn't left with much of a position.
- pm90 6y ago
  > And it seems that if that point holds, as Smith never actually challenges the point that the population beneath that line has actually gone up while "extreme poverty" has gone down (a point both agree on), then Smith isn't left with much of a position. One of the points that Smith is making is simply that using a fixed threshold for deciding on whether there has been meaningful progress in alleviating poverty is somewhat meaningless and misses what is actually going on. In the article, he shows how the distribution of per-capita income has changed, with larger parts of the population having more income than before, which seems to indicate that we are making progress in alleviating poverty. If you were to look at the fixed threshold, you would miss this "shift" in distribution and thus conclude that hardly any progress has been made. I think this is a meaningful argument, in that it points to us that we are "doing something right".

ttiurani 6y ago

> It seems to envision a world that is zero-sum, or close to it, with rich countries hoovering up the riches that should be flowing to the Global South. Hickel's research makes the argument that this hoovering is exactly what is happening, on a massive scale: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2021.1899153?journalCode=cnpe20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2021.18... If Noah Smith wants to rebuke this argument, he can't just "as if" it away. He needs to do the research that proves otherwise.

calt 6y ago
He didn't "as if" the zero-sum argument away. In the very next paragraph: > Rather than being drained dry, [the global south] are advancing, growing their share of the global pie even as they deliver better lives to their own poorest citizens. Unfairness isn't good. They probably agree that things are unfair and should be better. Hickel is saying ~you're wrong about poverty because the situation is unfair~ Noah Smith is saying ~OK. But I'm not wrong about the fact that poverty is decreasing and the situation is improving.~
- ttiurani 6y ago
  This exactly is the much more important second point Hickel is making. Even if growing GDP does mean tiny scraps of wealth are left to lower the number of the extremely poor[1], it's nowhere near resource efficient enough to be feasible within constraints of climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and resource depletion. Pumping up GDP is not a sustainable way to reduce poverty. Gates and other people who benefit the most from the status quo continuing to advertise for this graph gives a very false sense of optimism. 1: $1.90/d is lower than the consumption level of slaves in the US in the 19th century. Helping people get slightly above the level of slaves is of course better than not doing that, but it is hardly enough.
  - calt 6y ago
    That's a good point, and I think that to a varying degree the relevant parties - Max Roser, Steven Pinker, and Noah Smith - all agree with it. I'm new to this controversy, but after reading these comments for entirely too long it appears in this thread that Hickel is writing numerous scathing articles misrepresenting the views of Max Roser, Steven Pinker, and Noah Smith to make this point. It's unfortunate.

jariel 6y ago

The author made the assertion that it was 'not due to free market capitalism' while essentially using facts to demonstrate that this was the case. When a nation is poor and backwards, due to, gosh, 50 years of 'Central Planning' inspired by Marx, well then it's not that hard for the state to do things like 'build roads'. But factories in China, Tencent, DiDi etc. are not state creations. State supported, yes, and ultimately 'state controlled' (i.e. they state can do as they please with them), but it's considerably more 'free market' than otherwise. It's ridiculous to split hairs by pointing out 'some of India's growth started in the 1980's' or that 'some things in China are state directed' when overwhelmingly the change was towards free markets, in some cases, with state oversight and control but not direction or planning by and large. China is one of the most 'free market' places on earth, lacking in all sorts of regulation - you just have to remember that 'for the important things', the CCP is in charge. (I should add that the banks are state owned and their loans are directed, however, they are backed by the Central Bank which is entirely politicized and is a primary driver of actual influence.) The answer is 80% capitalism.

nabla9 6y ago
His point is not free market capitalism. Industrial government controlled policy based capitalism is how all Asian Tigers became rich. Big Chinese companies grow in in government controlled financial environment that supports them.
vidarh 6y ago
> 'Central Planning' inspired by Marx, The Communist Manifesto starts with a chapter praising capitalism for bringing unheard of increases in productivity, growth. Even for trade serving as a "battering ram" that drives down xenophobia. Here's a quote praising capitalism: > The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? He goes on to praise the advances brought by "free competition". Then he turns the tables and argues that the reason capitalism will eventually fail is that it is too efficient: That it will eventually bring crises of simultaneous over-production and under-employment; that it will automate away employment to the point that the proportion who can afford to buy their products will be unable to consume all that it can produce. "Central Planning" has no basis in Marx. Central planning is a largely Stalinist conception, developed out of ashes of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War. Lenin saw how it failed, hence New Economic Policy, which re-opened some markets and allowed for a softening of planning similar to what Deng later did in China. It was Stalin who undid most of those reforms again after Lenins death, and who went even further in making centralised planning a dogma, and it was based on his wilful misinterpretation of Lenins ideas, not on Marx.

zuhayeer 6y ago

Also a good read linked to in the article: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/checking-in-on-the-global-south https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/checking-in-on-the-global-...

galaxyLogic 6y ago

Think about South Africa under apartheid. It was doing great financially. Much better than most (or all) African countries was it not? Yet much of its population didn't have a right to vote. What good is financial progress if most of it goes to a minority and much of the population can not make things better because they cannot even vote? And Southern States before Civil War, were also doing great financially. Is that all that's worth discussing?

airstrike 6y ago
You're arguing a separate point entirely, which I wager is why you're getting downvoted. It doesn't follow logically. The author isn't arguing that we should ignore all of the issues afflicting people across the globe and only look at the poverty line. He's countering the claim that people have not been lifted out of poverty.
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  I'm not arguing against the author. I'm just saying as a general notion that measuring only financial well-being is not the only thing we should care about. Not sure if logic has anything to do with that
  - airstrike 6y ago
    In your opening comment, you asked "Is that all that's worth discussing?" The answer is no, but then again nobody claimed that it was. This was just the one article about the poverty line, so discussing something other than the poverty line is off-topic (which I called "illogical" from a debate perspective, in perhaps too formal of a tone, in hindsight)
    - galaxyLogic 6y ago
      True. At the same time I don't think there is any rule set in stone that says everything that is not strictly explicitly in the article is "off-topic". Discussion can in my view include discussion about the discussion itself, its implicit preferences and assumptions. Putting too much effort into discussing what is off-topic and what is not, is kind of off-topic itself, I would say :-)

lallysingh 6y ago

Why is this here? Who is Hickel and why would a hacker care?

roenxi 6y ago

The reduction in poverty is linked to the overwhelming expansions of science and technology. Most of the modern economy was impossible due to knowledge constraints in 1700. And it isn't so much that capitalism is a cause, as all the things that aren't capitalism absolutely scupper technological progress. Eg, in extreme cases bureaucrats literally ban technological progress because it is too disruptive (see, for example, encryption).

simiones 6y ago
> all the things that aren't capitalism absolutely scupper technological progress This is wildly wrong. Technological progress has literally existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Even under capitalism, technological progress often happens in universities with government money, often for military or claimed military purposes. For example, everything to do with the base of computer science has been created in academia and the military sector, before it was donated by government to private corporations.
- roenxi 6y ago
  > Technological progress has literally existed for thousands of years before capitalism. And it moved veeeeeeeery slowly [0]. We had two ages named after a metal and one after rock. Post capitalism there have been Space ages, various revolutions, computers, etc, etc. > For example, everything to do with the base of computer science has been created in academia and the military sector, before it was donated by government to private corporations. And, again, if they hadn't handed it over to the capitalists there would still be all of a few tens of thousands of people using the internet to swap academic papers and no more. Everyone made the right decisions on that one. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_technology