A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

Pinker actually addressed this, but unfortunately I can't remember in which book/lecture/talk/article. Largely paraphrasing he said that we have to work for the gains, but that doesn't mean we can't have a positive attitude about these processes. (Such as comparative advantage resulting in trade resulting in cooperation and some degree of altruism - or we can just call it "counterparty risk management", or simply looking out for your buyers and suppliers.)

Simply put, Pinker and Gates have tricked much of the world into thinking neoliberalism is the best thing ever, even though the data actually shows that the majority of the improvement comes from other brands of economic policy and that most of the wins overall are going to a small number of extremely wealthy people. It’s not abjectly terrible but also not great, and when our capacity to improve poverty has improved so much, isn’t there a moral imperative to do better?

Here’s an episode of one of my favorite podcasts that features Hickel as a guest:

https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-58-the-neolib...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/citations-needed/id12585...

Do you believe that quality of life for a randomly chosen person has improved since 1820? My reading of Hinkel is that he does not believe it.

That's interesting, because the book does not contain any arguments.

It contains facts. Hard numbers gathered over generations.

It's not a discussion or an argument, it's simply facts about the state of the world.

>[After discussing 1.9$/day as a completely inhumane measure; the equivalent of 35 people living with a UK minimum wage, without any gifts, loans, donations, or help of any kind] the story changes quite a bit - and you know it. 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. 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.

>That’s proportions. Don’t get me wrong: proportions are an important indicator – and we should pay attention to it. But absolute numbers are equally important. In fact, that is the metric that the world’s governments first agreed to target in the Rome Declaration in 1996, the precursor to the Millennial Development Goals. The goalposts were shifted to proportions in the following years, which created the impression of faster progress. But really now it’s a moot point: if the goal is to end poverty, what matters is absolute numbers. Certainly that’s what matters from the perspective of poor people themselves.

>And if we look at absolute numbers, the trend changes completely. The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981, from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion, according to World Bank data. Six times higher than you would have people believe. That’s not progress in my book – that’s a disgrace. It is a crushing indictment of our global economic system, which is clearly failing the majority of humanity. Your claims about global poverty intentionally skate around this fact. Again, that is not responsible scholarship.

So yeah. Either you didn't read it or you wilfully ignored it, because comments such as "hat matters is that fewer people live on the wrong side of the line today than they did yesterday, and fewer people did yesterday than the day before" are incomprehensible otherwise.