Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 94 posts

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

#61

Post by iguy »

watwut wrote: post #46
sct202 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your parents are from "prior to colonization"? That is unlikely. Regardless of original claim of before colonization, your parents might see end of it.

Sure, but "money, trade, and land ownership" were common in lots of places, long long before Europeans showed up. I mean we have Sumerian tax records!

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

#62

Post by neolefty »

iguy wrote: post #32
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.

And the effort in China was definitely deliberate.

Maybe not having world wars for 70 years has helped — Steven Pinker's renaming of the Cold War to the Long Peace resonates!

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

#63

Post by bryanlarsen »

whack wrote: post #35

> "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…

"About 60%" means 71.8% in 1990 and 58.1% in 2013.

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-egregio...

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

#64

Post by paganel »

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.

> It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income

That's the author's (main) point, i.e. that using money/income in order to compare today's capitalist world with the one that came before it is pointless, because money wasn't that much of a thing in a pre-capitalist world and you could live reasonably well (and healthy) without having any access to "income".

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

#65

Post by ricw »

bko wrote: post #49
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 specific passage from the article where the author romanticizes subsistence economies: > 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 po…

This.

Most people in developed countries typically don’t know that in poor countries subsistence farmers are the poorest of them all, literally starving for months when their crops are done. Without trade or refrigeration you simply can’t subsist. On the other hand people don’t know that people in cities, even if they live in slums, are much better nourished than people in the country side, who are mostly subsistence farmers. In short, typically cities are rich and the country side is poor, as much as that may go against a romanticised view of older days.

Valid point may be that a dollar value may not be the best way to describe poverty. Nourishment, healthcare access and life expectancy are likely much better indicators.

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

#66

Post by iguy »

dragonwriter wrote: post #47
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:…

> Unfortunately, the author of this piece seems to suffer from the delusion that subsistence life is ideal. That does not seem to be the argument. The argument seems to be that money-based measures that might be valid for comparing poverty within fully capitalist, money-oriented societies are not sensible ways of comparing societies across a continuum from not-at-all money-oriented or capitalist to fully capitalist,…

The simplest measures of past wealth do simply look at money. We know what unskilled building day-labor earner in Delhi in 1600, and converting this to calories of the staple diet gives a reasonable measure by which you can compare them to workers in (say) Amsterdam. Because both were paid in cash, and spent most of their income on food.

The countryside is more complicated, but people do work out similar things.

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

#67

Post by avmich »

hannasanarion wrote: post #56
avmich wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any income. It's easier for me to imagine sick person doing some work for himself or his family than sick person doing many kinds of work for others in monetary economy. If you have society with little use of money, I think relationship between health and poverty is different than in modern capitalism.

What makes you think that day laboring in a field is any easier to do while sick than driving or serving or knowledge work? How you are paid for your work is irrelevant when you are too sick to do it. Also, why are we treating money like a colonial invention?

> What makes you think that day laboring in a field is any easier to do while sick than driving or serving or knowledge work?

The fact that doing work for yourself allows you to structure it to your needs. You may till the garden early in the morning or late at night, when you feel like it, you can make decision on the spot and you don't need to coordinate with others. Or you can switch to home-centered work which you postponed before.

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

#68

Post by coldtea »

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…

>They still fought over resources and hunting grounds. They even had slaves.

Western powers fought (and still fight) over resources and zones of interest, so there's that.

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

#69

Post by coldtea »

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.

As if it was "refuted" conclusively (as opposed to merely replaced by the opposite myth of monotonic progress)

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

#70

Post by bogle »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #52

Note that the author uses absolute numbers rather than relative numbers, nor does he give the value of the increase. Hint: the increase is measured in millions rather than billions. The relative numbers are 71.8% in 1990 vs 58.1% in 2013 https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-egregio...

That is a really interesting article, thanks. Through asking good questions about the relationships between the relative and absolute numbers it casts an uncomfortable spotlight onto our current responses to inequality.
Post reply on HN