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

That's complete and utter nonsense. Capitalism works on slave labor plain and simple. The reason everything is made in third world countries is because they have no worker protections. Your clothing is made by some kids in Pakistan, your phone parts are made by suicidal workers at Foxconn, and so on. This is slavery in anything but name. Any countries that don't want to play in this system are systematically destroyed by US interventions. Just look at the history of South America as an example. It's a continuous stream of brutal coups and dictatorships instigated by CIA. Even domestically US now has a huge prison labor force that's become its own economy. You likely never experienced any of this personally, and never really wondered about the human cost of your lifestyle.

A rational person would understand that a system where 1% of the population owns 99% of the wealth is not working for the common people around the world.

The first chart in Gates's tweet (which is what the article is all about) is based on the idea that all incomes are converted into money for comparison reasons, otherwise I have no idea how they managed to compare incomes going back 200 years from different types of societies. How do you assign income for shared grazing grounds? Or for shared forests? Or for rotating ownership of the agricultural fields? (btw, rotating ownership is an idea very alien to capitalism, if you propose it today you'll be treated as a communist). You basically can't do all that, because these things don't have a very easily computable money equivalent.

And, as such, comparing the rate of poverty in a capitalist society to the rate of poverty from a pre-capitalist society is bogus. Again, this is what the article is all about.

> you're bedridden with tuberculosis.

No, you can't, but your wife/uncle/cousin/aunt can until you get better. While living in a capitalist society mostly means an atomic family unit where, if you happen to be bed-ridden, you're basically on your own. Again, charts like the ones tweeted by Gates don't assign any monetary value to this type of close human relations, even though those close human relations greatly improve our well-being. Afaik nobody has assigned yet any money value to the ease of mind provided by thoughts like "hey, I'm not alone in this world, I'm not on my own".

right. I agree with most of what you said.

Altho all this is the result of human activity resulting from exponential increase in our population. And hence consumption.

It’s not capitalism. It is uncurtailed procreation. Altho’ one might suggest that there is some correlation between capitalism and decrease in crushing poverty(leading to higher survivability) ..which will result in our eventual demise of our species(and others).

The planet..however..will carry on.

It's both though. Growth is the core tent of capitalism, and it promotes consumerism that in turn requires consumers. This ethos is what's killing us. And just to contrast for you. I grew up in USSR, and the focus there was on sustainability. Products were built to last because it cost the state a lot of resources to produce them. There was no drive to make products for the sake of making them, or to introduce insane ideas like planned obsolescence. A lot less resources were devoted to frivolousness as well. So for all its faults it was actually a much better system in this regard.

It's also perfectly possible to aim for sustainability and to manage our population. Just look at how China managed to put a stop to its population growth. The problem is that the capitlist economic system is completely at odds with that because it requires constant growth.

>but it seems like USSR didn’t stand a chance

I don't really see how that follows. The primary cause of USSR collapse was NATO, which chipped away at it on every front until the collapse. However, it looks like USA isn't really going to outlast USSR by a big margin. Having lived through the collapse I see many of the same signs, and I think the US is much worse prepared to deal with it than USSR due to lack of public infrastructure and services.

>It did not create a better life for its citizens.

It certainly did for me, and what's more USSR created decent life for most citizens without exploitation. Everybody had access to housing, food, medicine, and education. There was no concept of homelessness for example. I have very fond memories of living in USSR.

>People leave communist countries for survival while Americans threaten to leave their capitalist paradise because they are embarrassed by their first term President. The priorities are very stark.

With all due respect, I don't think you have any idea of what you're talking about here. Having actually lived in the soviet union, I can tell you that the quality of life was very high for great many people. We had more free time, better education, and the basic needs taken care of.

In the capitalist system, you have a large pool of people who are struggling to survive and have no access to things like basic medicine. People die all the time from preventable causes in the USA. People die because they can't get things like insulin that cost nothing to make. Then you have places like Flint where people don't even have drinking water.

It's also important to note that slave labor plays a very big role in the capitalist system where large portion of the population produces goods for the middle class to consume in horrible conditions.

This is reflected in the prison labor system in the states, as well as what's effectively indentured servitude of many workers in third world countries who have to work insane hours in horrific conditions to produce the goods consumed in US.

>I think population control should still have the element of ‘free choice’.

I don't agree when the risk of 'free choice' is the whole species going extinct.

>Capitalism will certainly have to change its flavor now especially with automation., but it has done a great job building a foundation. We are already fast approaching a world where there will be more people than jobs.

That doesn't make sense. The more jobs are automated the less people are able to do meaningful work. The insane premise of capitalism is that everybody has to work to live. Automation is completely at odds with capitalism. Nowadays it's not just automation of manual labor either, machine learning is quickly encroaching on many jobs in fields like medicine, law, and journalism. The amount of jobs that people can do better than machines is rapidly shrinking.

>I sometimes feel like we should step away from limiting labels like communism and socialism and capitalism. I think those times are long gone..what we need now is a new structure. A sustainable structure based on all that we learnt from capitalism AND communism. Everything is going to change now ..not just with automation but also with climate change.

I think the new system has to be much closer to communism than to capitalism. We need something that's sustainable and not rooted in materialism if we are to survive as a species.

>Capitalism can and will morph. I doubt if communism can..it’s just too rigid because it’s a philosophy of conformity for all while capitalism is a philosophy of freedom for the majority.(not all)

Not really sure what you mean there to be honest. I think you might be conflating communism and totalitarianism which are orthogonal concepts.

So, to sum up I'm not really convinced by the argument. I think that capitalism is fundamentally at odds with long term survival of humanity as a species.