A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
jasonhickel.org
A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
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Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
#2Can anyone summarize what is going on here? It seems like a flamewar with graphs, and not interesting enough to invest the time in reading.
Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
#3Can anyone summarize what is going on here? It seems like a flamewar with graphs, and not interesting enough to invest the time in reading.
TL;DR: anything that looks good is an oversimplification. We're all going to die miserable.
Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
#4> Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless.
Just like for global warming you expect reasonable proxies.
Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
#5All of the books on Hickel’s reading list are historians and none of them are economic historians because it’s impossible to make the case he wants to make if you use data gathered by economic historians. Hickel references Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, which, whatever its many virtues does not accord with economic history at all. The other books he referenced are similarly useless for answering what is a question of economic history. He criticises the extreme poverty measure as being beneath human dignity when that’s the point. This is the natural inheritance of man, wretched poverty for almost everyone and what we would regard as poverty for the tiny elite. Hickel also ignores the other indicators that show enormous progress, education, literacy, lifespan, healthy lifespan and the fact that with population growth as rapid as it the decline in absolute poverty ex-Africa is a substantial achievement.
Finally, neoliberalism delivered China from poverty. If it’s brought to the rest of the poor areas of the world it’ll do it there too.
To neoliberalism! To the end of extreme poverty!
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/06/16/eoc/
> Note: the following are NOT my thoughts. It’s my summary of Beckert’s book.
> {Summary begins}
> The West got rich by impoverishing the Rest.
> “War capitalism” was the violent exploitation of the non-West through piracy, enslavement, theft of natural resources, and the physical seizure of markets. It was not caused by superior technology or organisation. Nor did it rest on “offering superior goods at good prices”, such as you find in the la-la-land of economics textbooks, but on the “military subjugation of competitors and a coercive European mercantile presence in many regions of the world”.
Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
#6Can anyone summarize what is going on here? It seems like a flamewar with graphs, and not interesting enough to invest the time in reading.
[deleted]
Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
#7Can anyone summarize what is going on here? It seems like a flamewar with graphs, and not interesting enough to invest the time in reading.
I followed this a little bit when it popped up on Twitter last week.
The fight appears to be about whether rising global prosperity is helping poor people or mostly just poor people in China; and around the edges, about whether your definition of poor is simply GDP, or includes other harder to quantify things like commons, or if you want to measure it against the US poverty line at purchasing power parity dollars.
It's a kind of oblique attack on neoliberal globalist capitalism's potential to increase living standards for people at the bottom of the global income distribution. Hickel reckons Pinker and Gates and friends have been too self-congratulatory on the merits of neoliberalism.
IMO globalist capitalism has increased living standards for the poorest people in countries that were well-run enough to take advantage of it, China in particular. But there's still lots of improvement possible and we shouldn't feel too smug about the current situation.
Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
#8Sam Hyde’s 2070 Paradigm Shift [1] to solve world hunger. Link in references.
Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
#9Hickels rebuttal in the letter is that GDP cannot be used to gauge poverty which he claims has only been measured directly by the UN since 1981. But if you look around the world today, GDP/head is a remarkaby strong indicator of the level of poverty in a country. Nevermind that all the other quality of life stats: life expectency, child morality, average working hours, literacy, education levels, food affordability support Pinker's argument.
Actually here is a fairly convincing (in my opinion) response which covers this and more: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/is-the-w...
Slightly off-topic: as I get older I get more and more suspisious of promoters of apocalyse narratives. Both hard left and hard right both require people to believe the "world getting worse and worse" in order to promote their opposition to the liberal democratic multilateral global world order. Apocalypse stories are one of the oldest "hacks" against human judgment and have been exploited by the religious, cults and political extremists for millennia.
Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
#10> Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless. Just like for global warming you expect reasonable proxies.
To say that going back to 1820 is meaningless is already deceptive. At that stage the only parts of the world that weren’t in extreme poverty are those that are now first world and that’s marginal.
In 1750 in 1990 dollars GDP per capita in the first world was 804 dollars according to Paul Bairoch. In 1830, in 1960 dollars the richest country in the world, the highly monestised Netherlands which we have excellent records for had a GDP per capita of 347.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...