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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

jasonhickel.org

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Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#81

Post by starchild_3001 »

I'm 40 years old. I remember the last 30 years in my home country (Turkey) very well. What happened in this period? Awesome things. Access to food, shelter, healthcare, cars, many many amenities and luxuries of life have expanded wildly.

The marxist dude is likely cherry picking data to make a bogus point. E.g. the charts in his letter aren't normalized by world population. Pinsker is presenting distributions, not absolute numbers, as world population has a tendency to grow.

He has one valid point. $1.90 might be too low to draw the poverty line. But as the whole distribution has shifted, that point seems moot.

He has another interesting point: People had access to land in the old age, although they didn't have cash. I think that makes sense. Land has some value... but but there's a big cost to utilizing it---it's a full time job :) Anyone can go back... become a farmer, hunter or a herder... live at subsistance-level. I think few people want that lifestyle, as is clear from occupancy stats. The benefits of having access to land and its cost (the specific lifestyle) may cancel each other.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#82

Post by Mirioron »

LaGrange wrote: post #43

So I went and read the Pinker's "rebuttal." He just casually avoided the claim about the entire base of their infographic being bogus, then went on to calling mild centre-left socialdemocrats "far leftists". Why is _anyone_ treating that guy seriously?

Because Pinker's rebuttal was initially supposed to be an email to somebody else. He recognized that Hickel was likely pushing an ideology and left it at that. Even in the email Pinker is saying that he's citing experts in the field.

>then went on to calling mild centre-left socialdemocrats

A central point in the criticism Hickel wrote was that markets don't work, but regulation, protectionism and state intervention does. I'm not sure that would qualify him as a "mild centre-left social democrat".

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#83

Post by almost_usual »

huffmsa wrote: post #78
benj111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's England got to do with this, and who's the naked Brexit lady? He isn't saying agrarian is better than industrialised. He's saying industrialisation was forced on them by colonialisation. Read about the Congo free state for example [1]. Also. The early stages of industrialisation aren't particularly good for a nations poorest, Britain's industrial revolution was not a land of plenty for the poor, they just went…

> 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. His argument is that you can't be poor if you don't have a concept of money, like in an agrarian society. You overlooked it because your brain knows it's not true. Quality of life is not a dollar amount. It's all of those graphs Gates shared. Not just the first one.

If quality of life isn’t a dollar amount then why aren’t more people comfortable distributing dollars amongst the public?

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#84

Post by huffmsa »

starchild_3001 wrote: post #81

I'm 40 years old. I remember the last 30 years in my home country (Turkey) very well. What happened in this period? Awesome things. Access to food, shelter, healthcare, cars, many many amenities and luxuries of life have expanded wildly. The marxist dude is likely cherry picking data to make a bogus point. E.g. the charts in his letter aren't normalized by world population. Pinsker is presenting distributions, not ab…

The difference of opinion between those who've lived through something and the opinion of bourgeoisie academics who've studied the same thing from an Ivory tower is usually quite different.

Like how the advice and experience of a startup founder, regardless of success, is almost immeasurably more valuable than that of a consulting analyst.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#85

Post by benj111 »

huffmsa wrote: post #78
benj111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's England got to do with this, and who's the naked Brexit lady? He isn't saying agrarian is better than industrialised. He's saying industrialisation was forced on them by colonialisation. Read about the Congo free state for example [1]. Also. The early stages of industrialisation aren't particularly good for a nations poorest, Britain's industrial revolution was not a land of plenty for the poor, they just went…

> 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. His argument is that you can't be poor if you don't have a concept of money, like in an agrarian society. You overlooked it because your brain knows it's not true. Quality of life is not a dollar amount. It's all of those graphs Gates shared. Not just the first one.

$1 a day if you're a factory worker needs to pay your rent, and your food, and your fuel, then your support network has gone, so grandparents cant look after kids etc, etc.

$1 a day for a farmer means they don't have those costs. Social networks are still in place, etc, etc.

As you say, Quality of life is not a dollar amount.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#86

Post by huffmsa »

almost_usual wrote: post #83
huffmsa wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. His argument is that you can't be poor if you don't have a concept of money, like in an agrarian society. You overlooked it because your brain knows it's not true. Quality of life is not a dollar amount. It's all of those graphs Gates shared. Not just the first one.

If quality of life isn’t a dollar amount then why aren’t more people comfortable distributing dollars amongst the public?

I'll rephrase. It's not purely a dollar amount. It's what's available for you to do and buy with those dollars.

Eventually we will just give everyone dollars. I firmly believe Pixar's WALL-E is our Marxist ideal future. But we're not there yet. Need better robots.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#87

Post by pas »

pizza234 wrote: post #67
grecy wrote: post #13

One of the most amazing things I learned reading the excellent "Factfullness" by Hans Rosling [1] is that the poorest countries in the world are currently improving faster than any country ever did, at any point in history. That's correct - countries like Lesotho and Central African Republic are improving faster than his home country of Sweden ever did, at any time. In only his lifetime Sweden went from having an inf…

> Those poor countries are improving faster than Sweden ever did... so in just one more lifetime they'll be where the world leaders are today. This is a very simplistic extrapolation. There are significant factors, primarily social/cultural ones, that will halt the relative development of those countries, sooner or later.

Why? What are those? Could you please explain this argument?

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#88

Post by pas »

goatlover wrote: post #21
hannob wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so in just one more lifetime they'll be where the world leaders are today. This is where you are probably wrong and which so often is used in the narrative of "things are getting better". You make an implicit assumption that this development will go on. It probably won't. The reason is climate change.

> It probably won't. The reason is climate change. But as is the case with automation predictions and massive net job destruction, it hasn't happened yet. So it's possible we're wrong about such predictions. We've been wrong in the past about environmental doom and job loss. Or maybe not this time, but we should keep that in mind and be a little bit skeptical about our current state of knowledge when predicting the f…

Climate change is not necessarily a doomsday for humanity. Just as great agriculture projects required a civilizational innovation, and just as Netherlands' constant work with the water led to a strong tradition of cooperation and responsibility sharing, climate change mitigation might motivate similar social and institutional changes elsewhere.

Or not. After all populism and demagoguery is extremely powerful (see religions).

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#89

Post by jfnixon »

Needs more consistency:

"There is nothing worth celebrating about a world where inequality is so extreme that 58% of people are in poverty, while a few dozen billionaires have more than all of their wealth combined."

Followed later by:

"Yes, life expectancy, mortality and education have improved – this is fantastic news that we should celebrate!"

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#90

Post by zeroname »

TLDR; When the numbers don't fit the narrative, you need to pick out different numbers.

"Here are a few points to keep in mind. Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty."

It shows that "only" 700 million people live in extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank.

"If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity, then it’s too low – period."

Yeah, no shit. Extreme Poverty is extremely bad.

"Remember: $1.90 is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011."

Yes, it's bad. Really really bad. Let's drive that point home some more.

"If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene."

No it doesn't! The fact that the number of people that used to live in extreme poverty has gone down means that these people don't live in extreme poverty anymore. That's actually much more significant than the number of generally poor people that are now slightly less poor.

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