Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
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Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
#2This sounds like fantasy to me:
"Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. 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."
They still fought over resources and hunting grounds. They even had slaves. I don't understand how that is a robust system of sharing and reciprocity.
Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
#3This sounds like fantasy to me: "Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. 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." They still fought over resources and hunting grounds. T…
It's the 21st century and we are still propagating the noble savage stereotype.
Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
#4Unfortunately, the author of this piece seems to suffer from the delusion that subsistence life is ideal.
He makes a valid point that our data about poverty prior to 1981 is lacking; however, he completely ignores more telling data, such as infant mortality rates correlated with infrastructure development.
Short version: life _is_ improving for the majority of people on the planet.
Recommended reading on the subject:
- _Factfulness_ by Hans Rosling, et al.
- The WHO's health trend data: http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/en/
Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
#5I wonder why it is so hard for so many people to accept that the world is better than it ever has been, and is still getting better. You see this from every side of the political spectrum. Is being super cynical just a bug in our nature?
Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
#6This sounds like fantasy to me: "Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. 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." They still fought over resources and hunting grounds. T…
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Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
#7Unfortunately, the author of this piece seems to suffer from the delusion that subsistence life is ideal. He makes a valid point that our data about poverty prior to 1981 is lacking; however, he completely ignores more telling data, such as infant mortality rates correlated with infrastructure development. Short version: life _is_ improving for the majority of people on the planet. Recommended reading on the subject:…
It's also really hard to find people in the population that do not have a cell phone or quick access to one.
Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
#8100 years ago the richest man in the world could die from a simple infection because there were no such thing as antibiotics.
People take for granted so many things we have in the modern world, they want some form of utopia right now. Perfect is the enemy of good
Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
#9I wonder why it is so hard for so many people to accept that the world is better than it ever has been, and is still getting better. You see this from every side of the political spectrum. Is being super cynical just a bug in our nature?
The opinion piece was pointing out the flaws in the infographic's depiction of poverty, not any other metric. The poverty graph was clearly flawed as it made assumptions about most of the timeline. Recasting the data from 1981 failed to account for China, another point clearly made in the article.
Re: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
#10The article claims that a large number of people formerly lived cashless lives, but now live a lower-quality life that depends on cash. This claim doesn't have a lot of data for it, but is maybe believable. A data-driven discussion of quality of life, regardless of cash income, would clear this up. Looks like other commenters are dispelling the notion pretty quickly.
Regarding cash income though, I feel that this article disrespects the actual data by cherry-picking. For a less sensationalized presentation of it, I recommend reading about the elephant curve. Most of the world's poor are doing much better in terms of cash income than they used to be.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-wo...