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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

#121

Post by igravious »

hannob wrote: post #17
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…

> 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.

Climate change is going to cause hardship, and aren't people going to respond? People respond to changing conditions all the time. In responding to change won't that cause economic activity? Where I live there are many flood relief schemes that have an overall budget in the 100s of millions. Multiply that by all the schemes needed the world over and you have a lot of economic activity.

I know this is very close to the broken window fallacy but assuming that climate is a gradual process and not a cataclysmic one (and there's no evidence that it is) then mere capital will be deployed or destroyed and deployed. Humans can rebuild their capital. Sure, if it wasn't for climate change that capital would have been invested elsewhere but we're not talking about all capital everywhere. I think it extremely unlikely that the effects of climate change will put the breaks on human progress. However I do think it very possible that climate alarmists might cause policies to be put into place that would put the breaks on human progress.

It'd be nice if we could come back here in a generation, in 2050 say, and see what the near-term outcomes were.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#122

Post by barry-cotter »

andrepd wrote: post #102
barry-cotter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - While some measures have improved, the picture is no where near as good as it is represented. 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 d…

>The trend is the same regardless of which poverty line you pick. Poverty is decreasing, education, literacy and health are rising. 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…

You say that African poverty is obscene, and it is. But that obscenity is not for a lack of effort to help. Aid has been a constant in Africa and in other formerly more dreadfully poor places since WWII when the Soviet Union and the US sought to buy influence and it’s never stopped. Development aid hasn’t helped Africa much though it has far, far surpassed aid to Europe after WWII. Absent colonialism you need a functioning state if you’re going to help. Aid doesn’t work unless the government does. Ghana was richer than South Jorea in 1951. Now Ghana looks promising, like maybe it will develop over he next thirty years but South Korea is developed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/29/opinion/the-politics-of-a...

> By comparison, Africa is already relatively flooded with aid. The continent as a whole receives development assistance worth almost 8 percent of its gross domestic product. Exclude South Africa and Nigeria, and aid jumps to more than 13 percent of GDP — or more than four times the Marshall Plan at its height — for the other 46 African countries.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#123

Post by LUmBULtERA »

andrepd wrote: post #102
barry-cotter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - While some measures have improved, the picture is no where near as good as it is represented. 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 d…

>The trend is the same regardless of which poverty line you pick. Poverty is decreasing, education, literacy and health are rising. 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…

A global decline from 71% to 58% over 30 years would be tepid and mediocre? In the scheme of the history of the human race? This is subjective, of course, but if $7.40/day is the standard, this looks like significant progress relative to our history.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#124

Post by barry-cotter »

blub wrote: post #117
barry-cotter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - While some measures have improved, the picture is no where near as good as it is represented. 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 d…

Protectionism does work, every rich country protected its domestic production until it was able to compete on a global level. Doing otherwise would just result in the internal industry being bought out for pennies or being obliterated by advanced competitors. Protectionism doesn't guarantee that a country will be successful at building cars, but they should at least bloody try to before giving up. And yes, capitalism…

Not Hong Kong. It started from a good port, good government and lots of poor people and now it’s rich. Free trade all the way.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#126

Post by empath75 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #120
empath75 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who say stuff like this forget that Europe nearly destroyed itself through war twice in just the last hundred years— and followed it up with an arms race that put the entire planet at risk of extinction. It was only the threat of nuclear annihilation that stopped Europeans from murdering each other on an industrial scale.

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.

France and the UK both built nuclear weapons. They didn’t have the resources to build more than they did or they would have. But that wasn’t really my point. I was merely pointing out that the so called civilized west is responsible for far more misery and death than any nation in the developing world could even aspire to at this point.

It’s not that the Europeans are uniquely horrible people, only that the current era of peace and cooperation in the west is a historical aberration.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#127

Post by ar0 »

zeroname wrote: post #111
andrepd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a minute, how does that go one way but not the other? Why is using $7.4 "doctoring the data" to fit your narrative but $1.9 not? The author uses arguments such as > The USDA states that about $6.7/day is necessary for achieving basic nutrition. Peter Edwards argues that people need about $7.40 if they are to achieve normal human life expectancy. The New Economics Foundation concludes that around $8 is necessary…

I didn't say anyone is doctoring data. The data may well be true, but it may not fit your narrative. If your narrative is "people are getting poorer" you need to set the bar high, if your narrative is "people are getting richer", you need to set the bar low. In that sense it goes both ways. However, the difference between outright starving to death, being extremely poor and simply "being poor" is staggering. You woul…

To be fair, Hickel is discussing the different poverty lines because he is refuting an explicit argument from Pinker in his letter:

> "2. The level at which one sets an arbitrary cutoff like “the poverty line” is irrelevant — the entire distribution has shifted, so the trend is the same wherever you set it."

Hickel argues (using data) that this statement is at least not qualitatively true, as the trend is quite different if you set the poverty line at higher level.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#128

Post by sooheon »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #22
colechristensen wrote: post #2

Can anyone summarize what is going on here? It seems like a flamewar with graphs, and not interesting enough to invest the time in reading.

Gates and Pinker are promoting the idea that the world is getting better overall, economically, and that poverty reduction is a real thing. They point to advances in economic development as a major driver of this. The 'rebuttal' is a little tricky. Hickel argues that the data is bad (at least before 1980's). Moreover, he argues that it's really only in China that people have dramatically 'come out of poverty' and tha…

> Hickel accuses Gates/Pinker et. al. of promoting 'hard neoliberal' (i.e. strong free market) ideals. I don't believe this characterization is fair.

Gates/Pinker are selling exactly the antidote to potential guilt for "kicking away the ladder". History makes clear that "free market" ideals never apply to ourselves, only to those colonies and developing nations the IMF and World Bank can coerce into line. Argentina had 2~3x Korea's GDP per capita in 1970, and now the relation has almost exactly flipped. You should know which country had stronger protectionist policies and which was sold out to the World Bank.

Pinker is marketing these harmful policies as "enlightenment", and lying with statistics to ease affluent intellectual guilt.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#129

Post by sooheon »

barry-cotter wrote: post #5

All 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 e…

Protectionism and controlled liberal policies brought China and the rest of the Asian Tigers to prosperity. Forced neoliberal policies is a curse on nascent economies.

Re: A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

#130

Post by sooheon »

padobson wrote: post #33

The process of forcibly integrating colonized peoples into the capitalist labour system caused widespread dislocation (a history I cover in The Divide). Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labour system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died – half the population. This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population o…

> as economies become more free, they become more prosperous

This is a bald faced lie. Enacting protectionist policies for you own country, and kicking away the ladder from those poorer than you is the historically proven way to prosperity. Compare Argentina and South Korea.

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