Hickels 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 s…
To be fair, that's only a very small part of his rebuttal, dealing specifically with the period prior to 1970, as well as the fact that GDP estimates for this period "take little if any account of the goods and resources that people may have acquired from their land, from trees, from forests, from rivers and the sea, and in the form of gifts from relatives." From 1981 onward, I would summarize his argument as being t…
Name a measure of human suffering that has not improved. Healthy lifespan, deaths in childbirth, infant mortality, they’ve all gotten better.
> - Using $1.90 as the baseline to beat is too low for what we would consider as being out of poverty.
The trend is the same regardless of which poverty line you pick. Poverty is decreasing, education, literacy and health are rising.
> - Most economic successes have not been due to neoliberal markets but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation.
Indeed, in every state where they’ve followed an industrial policy of “Let’s do capitalism.” poverty has decreased, whether with heavy handed government economic intervention like Japan or Korea or just leaving business alone like Hong Kong. If protectionism worked Argentina would have a car industry. They tried for 30 years. It doesn’t.
> - Most quality of life improvements have not been due to neoliberal globalization but simple public interventions including free healthcare and education.
The UN’s human development index is 70% explained by GDP per capita. Poor countries can’t afford good policy and capitalism is the proven way to escape poverty.
> - Progress is slowing relative to the resources available to tackle the problem.
As far as absolute poverty goes, maybe, kind of. The countries that have shown no real improvement are the ones with no real government or state capacity. Everywhere else is in the process of escaping absolute poverty or has done so. These are the countries that do not work, mostly in Africa. We just have to work towards integrating them into the global economy so they can grow. One hopes the nearby example of Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa or Nigeria will help, as they grow their way out of poverty.