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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

#71

Post by neaden »

paganel wrote: post #64
hannasanarion wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

You couldn't really live reasonably well and healthy though. For the vast majority of human history about 40% of people died before reaching adulthood.

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

#73

Post by trahn »

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:…

Well the author is from an institution called the University of London, and Max Roser, who's stats he is critiquing, from an institution called Oxford...

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

#74

Post by NeedMoreTea »

trahn wrote: post #73
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:…

Well the author is from an institution called the University of London, and Max Roser, who's stats he is critiquing, from an institution called Oxford...

Specifically Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and a fellow of the RSA.

https://www.gold.ac.uk/anthropology/staff/hickel-jason/

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

#75

Post by douglaswlance »

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?

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt are what get clicks. Optimism doesn't spread virally.

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

#76

Post by ackfoo »

Why do people listen to Bill Gates? He had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time and he cut a deal that has become the sine qua non of bad deals (for IBM).

Then he went on to produce the worst OS in history, held together by gum and bits of string. It was only successful initially because there was no other viable choice. Its later success was fuelled by inertia and predatory trade practices.

Windows created enormous suffering for an unprecedentedly large number of people because of poor design choices. Anyone trying to use a computer had to spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to fix that computer.

All of which resulted in a guy with billions but no particular insight into reality. If you want Bill Gates-level ideas, ask any other old family member around the table at Thanksgiving.

Getting lucky in business and having a lot of money doesn’t qualify you to run the world, and it doesn’t confer insight or wisdom.

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

#77

Post by CompelTechnic »

ackfoo wrote: post #76

Why do people listen to Bill Gates? He had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time and he cut a deal that has become the sine qua non of bad deals (for IBM). Then he went on to produce the worst OS in history, held together by gum and bits of string. It was only successful initially because there was no other viable choice. Its later success was fuelled by inertia and predatory trade practices. Wi…

Bill Gates is more well-informed than most people about the conditions of extreme poverty because he is actively attempting to fix it and is in charge of one of the largest charitable organizations ever assembled for this purpose.

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

#78

Post by whack »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #63
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...

That is a significant amount of progress to make in 23 years. Hiding this data and calling the numbers "stagnant" is concerted misrepresentation on Hickel's part

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

#79

Post by username90 »

coldtea wrote: post #48
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:…

> 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 Which is not really relevant to whether poverty is decreasing or not. You can have some better tools or preventions decreasing infant mortality without getting people out of poverty otherwise. You can also force peopl…

Life expectancy is a pretty good measure. The most important life expectancy raiser is not healthcare but access to food and clean water. Most deaths 100 years ago were caused by diseases which well fed people shrugs off. I'd argue that anyone who lacks food and clean water is poorer than even those who lives on the street in modern western nations.

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

#80

Post by Balgair »

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:…

Factfulness is available, for free, here: http://www.factfulness.science/

The late Dr. Rosling's website is fantastic and a good example of easy to use GUIs for data science. Play around with the data yourself here: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2018;;&ch...

Try taking the quiz here to see if you are smarter than a chimp: http://factfulnessquiz.com/

I'd encourage everyone to read Factfulness. It's fairly quick to churn through and very enlightening. The world really is getting better.

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