A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty

I didn’t say markets are a bad way to value goods, man, I said china’s state planned and financed approach to the market has produced the gains Pinker is saying neoliberalism should get credit for. What we’re talking about here is the false idea that America’s approach to capitalism is responsible for very much of the global reduction in poverty, and whether we should consider other modes instead.

During the same period, we have put presidents in jail immediately after the end of their term, others have fled with billions, another has committed suicide, and it's open knowledge that corruption is rampant and a handful of conglomerates own the country. Our very last president was impeached and thrown directly in jail due to a popular uprising. We had dictator presidents for decades. Park Chung Hee, widely credited with the Miracle on the Han, was a dictatorial strongman with little grand plan except that knew protectionist policies would allow Korea to trade favorably, and trade up the industrial ladder from textiles to shipbuilding.

Gates and Pinker are giving ground on marginal issues like healthcare, but pushing the core agenda of "free markets make everyone's lives better".

> PS: maybe whoever is downvoting all these comments can take a break and get some fresh air.

Thanks for saying that. I wish people would tell me what they take issue with so I could debate them.

Hickel has not correctly identified the flaws of capitalism. He has identified the flaws in human nature. Particularly greed and lack of empathy for others not in your situation. But we all know those anyway. What he's doing is blaming capitalism because that's an easy cheap shot that everyone agrees with. Distributing some of the profit of a company to the shareholders and bosses is not morally wrong. Doing so to the detriment of the workers is. If, as in the example in the article, JP Morgan and the general stock market dump on you for worker-friendly moves then double-down and let JP Morgan and general stock market dump on you. Ordinary people will respect you and choose to use your company. Change the culture.

And blaming the Grenfell Tower disaster in London on capitalism?! That's just naked greed, that's all that is – saving a few thousand for your pocket. May that decision forever weigh on their consciences. It's an insult to everyone who died in that fire to blame what happened on capitalism.

> Any political system can become harmful to individuals and society when pushed to its extremes, as it's happening now in western societies, but especially in the US.

Capitalism is an economic system, not a political system. Look, don't be hoodwinked by these people. They are ideologues. Why can't Hickel say that he's for curbing the excesses of capitalism? Because it doesn't tap into your lizard brain, it's not emotive enough. Read it again and see that Hickel never says that he's against the extremes of capitalism, he's against capitalism itself – ask yourself why that is … he's either an ideologue, a bad faith actor, or economically not at the races or a combo of all three. Even Piketty, who has written the most cogent critique of capitalism in many a year, doesn't push an essentially anti-capitalist position.

Why I really dislike people like Hickel is because we're never allowed to give ourselves some praise or credit for doing the right thing. Lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty? Sorry, gotta exclude China from my graph. Why? Because it looks too good and invalidates my argument. That's why Hickel pushes against Pinker, because Pinker had the audacity to point out that maybe we're doing something right. You didn't hear a peep from Hickel when Pinker was talking about rates of violence (though he got it in the neck from people like John Gray for other reasons) but when Pinker starts saying that some of our policies against poverty are working Hickel's right there waiting to rain on his parade.

Like I say, there are a couple of serious problems with Pinker's book but Hickel has not identified one of them.

It only appears self-contradictory because we're told day in and day out that labour protections are anti-capitalist. They're not. If you think about it, labour protections are pro-capitalist because they agree the current model works and just want to make the wealth flow fairly to everybody rather than to those who initially control the capital. Labour protections would be about dismantling capitalism if they were anti-capitalist.

> Capitalism and Public programs are in conflict because underlying public efforts is progressive taxation (aka Redistribution)

With respect, that sentence makes no sense. Progressive taxation (aka Redistribution, aka something I completely agree with) does not underlie public efforts. Taxation alone underlies all public efforts. Taxation comes in many stripes: regressive, flat, progressive. Progressive taxation makes sure the rich shoulder a fair portion of the tax burden rather then the less well off. Who tries to roll back progressive tax policies? The rich. Not all the rich are capitalists, many are but many by the same token are not. Many of the rich have wealth going back centuries to times which preceded capitalism. The wealthy, many of whom are capitalists, oppose progressive taxation. This does not imply that capitalism and progressive taxation are in conflict. Many people point to the post-war years in the US when progressive taxation was very, um, progressive and the economy was booming. As taxation has become less progressive over the years inequality has skyrocketed and investment in infrastructure has tanked which actually works against the interests of the capitalists. So, properly speaking capitalism and progressive taxation make great bedfellows, but the rich don't like it because they like all of us are self-interested and greedy.

IMF debt trap for developing countries during the is well documented. Till the 90s, there were very high interest rates. So yes, they could access debt, but it was impossible to repay. The nature of the lending has become less exploitative in recent years but not necessarily long enough for these places to recover.

Sure, there are cases where corrupt leaders have embezzled the funds. However, it was also a practice that governments be given funds only on condition of structuring their economies in ways that benefit western investors over the local population. So their "dysfunctionality" was not always a choice - not democratically anyway. There are also cases where corrupt leadership was put into power in developing countries by Western forces, after compromising democratically elected regimes, e.g. by the CIA in Panama, Chile, or Iran.

If former colonies had been offered the kinds of reparations and assistance that say the people founding the state of Israel got, then it seems reasonable to think that these places could be doing very well like Israel is doing now. But places like say Haiti were completely ruined with debt from damages they were forced to repay after their independence struggle, to make an example of them and discourage other liberation efforts. And they have never been given the chance to negotiate on equal terms since.

I think there is plenty of evidence for a story where there was an abuse of Western geopolitical influence in these places. There is lots of productive gain to be made in these places. It just happens to largely go to the West, rather than to the people living there. In Africa, on average, more money leaves the continent in the form of repatriation of profits by multinationals than was invested/lent that year [1]. So the modern version of colonialism is still an effective form of wealth extraction. This is not to mention the nasty tactics that such companies have been found to use in order to maintain this kind of profiteering, such as by funding rebel militias in civil wars to keep control of valuable resource extraction sites [2].

It's terrible how we are led to blame the people in these countries and resign them to what could be pretty horrible fates, when there are far more powerful and sinister actors that are on "our side" who are usually holding more of the blame.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/24/w...

[2] https://projects.icij.org/fatalextraction/