A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

This is Jason Hickel's rebuttal to Steven Pinker's response [0] to Hickel's letter in the Guardian [1]. Pinker advocates that the quality of life for people is, on average, getting better worldwide. Hickel's responses are a little subtle but here's my interpretation:

    1. Hickel argues that Pinker's $1.7/day poverty
       line is too low to be used effectively as a
       standard of poverty and proposed a $7.4/day rate

    2. Excluding China from the period of 1981 to 2000 and
       using $7.4/day as a measure of the poverty line,
       the global poverty rate actually increased (from 62%
       to 68%) presumably because of exclusionary policies
       from the IMF

    3. Hickel argues that Pinker is a a capitalist and neo-liberal
       "apologist" and that Pinker is providing a more optimistic picture
       of reality than is warranted (and presumably things could be
       getting better faster with more realistic appraisals of the
       world state)

    4. The measure of success for poverty reduction should be our
       global ability to reduce poverty from our wealth rather than 
       absolute or relative numbers of poverty reduction

The point about the poverty increase from excluding China from 1981 to 2000 (point 2 above) is that this interpretation of data shows that poverty is not monotonically decreasing and that policy has drastic impacts on the rate of poverty reduction. I believe Hickel is arguing that pro capitalist or pro neo-liberal sentiment hides bad policy decisions, also presumably made with a pro capitalist or pretending to be done with a pro neo-liberal sentiment (IMF).

I think Pinker provides compelling evidence but I appreciate counter arguments like Hickel's as it provides a fuller picture of some finer points that might get lost. The IMF excluding the global south is information I hadn't known before and I imagine has drastic implications for the rate of poverty reduction worldwide. I think Hickel falls into the trap of reducing Pinker to a neo-liberal cheerleader when Pinker is trying to convey some very basic information but I also haven't read any of Pinker's books so the critique might be valid.

[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/is-the-w...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...

Enlightenment Now was easily Pinker's worst book. It took the counter-intuitive theme ("hey, things are not so bad when you look at the data") of Better Angels of Our Nature – which is a great book – and ran with it. Enlightenment Now is really two books: the first part deals with (chapter by chapter) a successive list of indicators of human progress. It's second part deals with the philosophical reasons behind human progress, what collectively are called enlightenment ideals.

Let's put to one side the second part of the book which is some of the worst material Pinker has put down on paper – not in terms of style of course, he writes like an angel, but in terms of philosophical content.

What struck me about the first part was where he deals with inequality. It is demonstrably true using Pinker's own metrics and datasets that economic progress is not distributed evenly. To put it very simply the data shows that the middle class is becoming hollowed out in the developed world. Where is that wealth flowing to? The rich in the developed world and the poor in the developing world. The argument goes like this: because the number of very poor and poor that are being lifted out of poverty in the developing world outnumbers the middle class that are losing their wealth in the developed world, then the current system is great because smaller overall numbers are better. QED.

You can attack this position from two angles. First, as Jason Hickel does by saying that the way poverty has been and is being measured is broken in some way. Second, in a way that is more compelling which is this: that the global and regional and national growth in wealth ought to be more evenly distributed. The current distribution is fundamentally and deliberately skewed. That would be the tack I would take. I would say, why do there have to be losers?

And isn't this what Brexit in the UK, the Yellow Vests in France, and the election of Trump in the US demonstrate? It shows that many feel squeezed and left behind. This was the first time I felt like saying to Pinker, "Well, look at you, a successful author in a developed country – do you not care about how your average countryman is doing?" Extreme and rising inequality is bad in and of itself. We know this because historically and in the present day when societies are more equal the knock on effects are felt in every sector of society. There's a reason people point to the Nordic model, they're not pulling this stuff out of their butts you know.

To Hickel's argument I would say this. Pinker is correct that where one draws the line of absolute poverty is irrelevant because the data shows that no matter where one draws the line (at that level of things) the numbers show poverty (at the global level, for the poorest of the poor) is decreasing. I think Hickel is correct in pointing out that all rich countries have protected their economies and continue to protect their domestic economies, Hickel lists a number of authors who pointed this out to which I would add How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor by Erik S Reinert. But that doesn't refute the data, it just refutes Pinker's ideology.

People like Hickel are basically anti-capitalist which for me is a non-starter. I'm opened to being proved otherwise. Don't get me wrong: crony capitalism can be critiqued, as can the excesses of capitalism – but I think people like Hickel would criticise capitalism itself which as I say for me doesn't fly. On the other hand people like Pinker either don't see or choose to downplay the ills of neoliberal globalist unfettered capitalism.

What bugs me about Hickel's take is that it feels like he's suggesting we can either have capitalism or public education, that we can have capitalism or public health programs. And so on. I don't think Pinker would be against such systems. All the most successful nations show that capitalism and some socialist policy can work hand-in-hand very well indeed. This is the debate we need to have I think, and urgently before skyrocketing inequality leads to violent social unrest and God knows who'll get into power then and God knows what cuckoo ideology they'll have. The wealthy have rigged the system in their favour. By the wealthy I mean, wealthy individual humans and wealthy corporations. We've allowed it to happen and now it must be addressed.

People like Hickel are awful. They rail against everything, scream that we're destroying the Earth (hint: we're not), and their proposed solutions are either socialist programs mostly _everybody_ agrees with and are implemented in _most_ nations or anti-growth solutions which are in a word 'bonkers'. Be very suspicious of people who say we're doing nothing right and who have a fundamentally pessimist view about humanity's growth.

Probably because those things are much harder to quantify or are depending on cultural factors that make difficult to establish a comparison.

You are badly mixing up sides in nuclear race a bit, we europeans were bystanders compared to US-Russia race and never really caught up with neither of them.