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Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

theguardian.com

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Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

#11

Post by michaelscott »

tdrgabi wrote: post #2

This sounds like fantasy to me: "Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor." They still fought over resources and hunting grounds. T…

Indeed. Most societies across the planet were either also invading and conquering their neighbours or at the least systems in place that were analogous to those of colonists.

Mongolia, China, Japan, India and many other Asian nations had been in and out of well documented wars for millenia, and even "primitive" cultures such as the Yurok had a working currency and trade economy, and the Iroquois a now well-known federation of tribes with a strong governmental structure.

Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

#13

Post by cryoshon »

the perspective that i think is missing from the article is that a lot of the drop in extreme poverty isn't the result of organized work by the world to curb misery. it's a result of the chinese economic boom which created the world's biggest middle class while also nearly erasing extreme poverty in the world's biggest country.

a lot of the numbers we see regarding "world poverty" are misleading because of how impressive china has been able to do over the last 20 years. "world poverty reduction" data sans china looks much worse than any of us would like.

i'm parroting these thoughts from a talk that i attended by the former secretary of the UN, ban ki-moon. he said the world had failed to reduce poverty, but that china had succeeded, giving the rest of the world a chance to feel good when it hadn't done much.

now, directly to the article's point: yeah, forced participation as a laborer in the neoliberal world economy could be considered coercive and detrimental. but subsistence living is very far from desirable for many reasons. i don't think this is an argument we can really have in good faith -- there's no putting globalization back in the box at this point, so we need to make the best of it for the people who are doing the worst.

Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

#14

Post by agurk »

It is probably worth noting that the author of this piece is also the author of a book about global inequality and his solutions to it [0].

While I haven't read his book, I recently completed Factfulness by Hans Rosling, which paints a more nuanced picture of how things are changing for people, and how small increases in wealth at the bottom can bring about life-changing differences.

Claiming that people lived in a situation where they didn't need money as the author does, is taking the view that there are no benefits of the modern world. It reminds me of the noble savages that previous generations praised.

I think the trend of bringing more people fresh water and access to healthcare is something to be celebrated. Trying to bundle this with the ills of modern society instead feels forced.

[0] The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

#15

Post by iguy »

makerofspoons wrote: post #3
tdrgabi wrote: post #2

This sounds like fantasy to me: "Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor." They still fought over resources and hunting grounds. T…

It's the 21st century and we are still propagating the noble savage stereotype.

Right!

Not to mention erasing the pre-colonial civilisations of half the world. Delhi is what, the 9th city on that site? The Guardian believes that none of those palace builders employed tax-collectors?

Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

#16

Post by blattimwind »

tryptophan wrote: post #5

I wonder why it is so hard for so many people to accept that the world is better than it ever has been, and is still getting better. You see this from every side of the political spectrum. Is being super cynical just a bug in our nature?

People that are 20-30 years old right now have always lived in a world where everyone told them that everything (food, economy, climate, pensions, planet, the middle east, ...) is going to shit and is getting worse and worse, even though this is patently not the case. (Just one example: when you have all these articles about how BAD food today is, consider that today you get clean + nutritious foods for very little money; malnutrition is actually hard to do! I can go out right now in winter and buy vegetables and fruits that prior generations simply did not have at all at this time of year -- but clearly everything's worse now!).

This is pretty much the original form of clickbait.

Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

#17

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

tryptophan wrote: post #5

I wonder why it is so hard for so many people to accept that the world is better than it ever has been, and is still getting better. You see this from every side of the political spectrum. Is being super cynical just a bug in our nature?

The only case I can see is that as material suffering has decreased, psychological suffering has (possibly) increased.

I know many people who make a lot of money, have abundant food, access to shelter, medicine, education, entertainment. And their self-reported emotional and psychological experience of life is hellish misery.

I’m not disputing that by many metrics the world is much better now. But it does seem that we apply a certain set of assumptions about the subjective importance of some types of suffering vs others. Sometimes that’s justified, sometimes we are noseblind to how modern society foments a hellish introspective existence.

Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

#18

Post by bogle »

tossaccount123 wrote: post #8

100 years ago the richest man in the world could die from a simple infection because there were no such thing as antibiotics. People take for granted so many things we have in the modern world, they want some form of utopia right now. Perfect is the enemy of good

10 years from now the richest man in the world could die from a simple infection because there will be no such thing as antibiotics. A possible future with some basis in our current situation.

As the financial world has it, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. It would be foolish to take for granted anything we have now which is why we should keep watching where things are possibly going, evaluate the risks, and take action to correct where we may be going wrong.

Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

#19

Post by justaman »

tryptophan wrote: post #5

I wonder why it is so hard for so many people to accept that the world is better than it ever has been, and is still getting better. You see this from every side of the political spectrum. Is being super cynical just a bug in our nature?

Personal anecdote here. Socialists seem to reject the idea that capitalism has brought more general prosperity to the world more often than not when speaking in terms of life longevity and food availability. Its as if they don't want to admit the upsides of capitalism at the cost of rationality. I personally haven't seen this from the far right as I have the far left.

Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

#20

Post by avmich »

bovermyer wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, the author of this piece seems to suffer from the delusion that subsistence life is ideal. He makes a valid point that our data about poverty prior to 1981 is lacking; however, he completely ignores more telling data, such as infant mortality rates correlated with infrastructure development. Short version: life _is_ improving for the majority of people on the planet. Recommended reading on the subject:…

The author discusses poverty, not health. We can argue that health is more achievable in modern world, but the picture of poverty isn't changed by that.
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