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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

#31

Post by sct202 »

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…

Yeah my parents are from one of those formerly poverty stricken places, and there was money, trade, and land ownership. So many people who are living today have experienced their lives improving rapidly within their memory, that it seems ridiculous to claim the opposite.

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

#32

Post by iguy »

cryoshon wrote: post #13

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 impres…

Indeed "organized work by the world" has little to do with it. The aid industry may sometimes do good in a crisis, but has nothing to do with the overall trajectory.

But while China is the poster-child for this (in the last 30 years), it's not just China. The life of many people in many smaller countries has been meaningfully improved.

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

#33

Post by tossaccount123 »

CamTin wrote: post #23
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

And now the poorest man in the world will die from the same infection because he can't afford the antibiotics, or has no access to a doctor who can prescribe them to him. What's the difference between something existing but being impossibly expensive vs not existing at all, except for the ultra rich?

Except all stats on infant mortality, life expectancy, etc show that's not true.

US and Europe have dumped over a trillion dollars in foreign aid to africa alone, 9x more than the Marshall plan post WWII.

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

#34

Post by neolefty »

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:…

I agree with both — I think it's a false dichotomy to say "either it's getting worse or it's getting better".

1. Yes, so much is getting better.

2. There are new injustices, and also we'd be even better off if wealth were more evenly distributed.

On the one hand, as long as things continue to improve, that's good! On the other hand, things will only improve if we make them improve.

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

#35

Post by whack »

> "The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard... Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty"

If living on $3 per day is so bad, imagine how much worse it would be to live on less than $2 per day. That's the entire point being made by the optimists. The percentage of people living on less than $2 per day has shrunk by ~80%. You'd have to be willfully cynical to deny that being a good thing.

> "Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the number of people in poverty gone up..."

Of course the "number of people" has gone up. The world population has exploded. That's a completely unrelated topic, unless the author is advocating forced sterilizations.

> "... the proportion of people in poverty has remained stagnant at about 60%"

Any idea where he's getting this 60% number from? He has not given any citation whatsoever.

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

#36

Post by gipp »

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…

And to whatever extent it was ever true, its erosion would be much more about the growth of population and the shrinking of the commons that results from that. Not some half-baked Marxist angle

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

#37

Post by avmich »

hannasanarion wrote: post #27
avmich wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income. We should expect poverty to be directly corellated with health, and the data agrees. Poke around on gapminder and see for yourself.

> Poke around on gapminder

What do you mean?

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

#39

Post by lm28469 »

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?

Easier access to data + negative bias[0] = people thinking the world is a shit show (don't get me wrong it probably is in a lot places).

That's what happens when you're blasted 24/7 with news about kidnappings / rapes / killings / terrorist attacks / natural disasters happening in far away places and which have 0 impact on your daily life & community.

[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200306/our-brain...

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

#40

Post by b_tterc_p »

CamTin wrote: post #23
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

And now the poorest man in the world will die from the same infection because he can't afford the antibiotics, or has no access to a doctor who can prescribe them to him. What's the difference between something existing but being impossibly expensive vs not existing at all, except for the ultra rich?

When you say ultra rich, you really mean not third world country poor.
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