Newspapers do have a rather wide reach, especially compared with primary sources like the grandparent provided. This is because their content is not only designed to be shared, it's also promoted by the respective brands content platform.
That way they get more views and, by extension, get posted on HN/reddit/etc. with a higher frequency.
Does anyone know exactly why? I conjecture to say it's broadly the result of capitalism. I really feel like it's a shame that word is almost toxic in intellectual circles.
The personal attack is not necessay. The observation on lack of rigour stands.
The question of what actually precipitates, maintains, spreads, or limits growth has in fact been a central question of numerous economic schools of thought and/or ideology; the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, free-market fundamentalists, J.S. Mill's steady-state, Ricardo & George on rents, Schumpeter's creative destruction, Kondratieff's technological waves, North's institutionalsism.
Jevons, Adams, Lotke, Soddy, Boulding, Georgescu-Roegen, Meadows et al, Daly, Ayres, Klitgaard & Hall, Smil, and Keen all point to an overwhelmingly dominant role for energy, especially fossil fuels.
The full answer has multiple components. Simply chalking "capitalism fixed it" is beyond facile. Particularly when aggreement as to what that term even encompasses is at best exceptionally limited.
I also think that (some aspects of) capitalism play a role in this, but another large factor is probably improved access to education, especially education of girls.
Interesting that this is controversial here, but the reasoning goes like this: peace and fewer civil conflicts allow for stronger institutions, such as schools. Education amplifies this even more, and strenghtens trust in institutions. In some places, schools help keeping the children fully fed, making sure they get at least one meal a day. Furthermore, improving education for girls specifically is almost always followed by a reduction of the number of children later in life and a raise in childbearing age. With fewer children, each one gets access to more resources, including education and technology, breaking the cycle of poverty.
Capitalism and free markets aren't without their shortcomings, especially when left unchecked, but they are extremely important tools to successful government and society. Perhaps the criticisms you hear are aimed at unchecked, unregulated capitalism.
I think the better view of capitalism allows to both appreciate it for the unprecedented age of prosperity it brought to this world, as well as identify it as the major factor in the biggest problems of present day, from climate change to inequality-related social tensions. It's an extremely powerful tool that let us grow to where we are, but needs fine-tuning so that it won't shake our societies apart.
Most of the criticisms I hear are against the current system. Specifically, I hear many criticisms of "free market" healthcare and finance, among others. All of which are ironically the most regulated and checked industries.
I hear people blame "deregulation" for the financial crisis, when in reality government regulations and policies misaligning incentives hold a majority of the responsibility.
There is one thing “right” about capitalism and that is a huge increase in consumer goods. Shame it is also literally boiling the world we live on but hey, for a short while we could get new iPhones every two years!
Did the Communists not build tanks or burn coal? Is it Capitalism, or is it the human desire to take the path of least resistance; is it not human to consume ready-made energy that has been subsidized by the carbon capacity of the oceans and atmosphere?
Indeed. The Aral Sea being drained under Soviet Union was much more immediately catastrophic to the local environment that what the Capitalist world economy is doing that I know of. Of course, global warming, but it took decades if not centuries.
[0] http://www.columbia.edu/~tmt2120/introduction.htm
I'll bite. What other alternative(s) would you propose? We frequently see cheap shots at capitalism, where on the same issues the major alternatives attempted in the 20th century were all actually far, far worse. It would be nice to seem some positive contributions on this issue for a change.
There are different examples of radical socialist societies in history, too bad all of them were oppressed by all too powerful neighbours. If you like Orwell, you might like reading "Homage to Catalonia", his experience fighting for Republican Spain in the Civil War. The CNT-FAI supported a radical socialist society, in particular, an anarcho-syndicalist one. Another example is the Free Territory of Ukraine, during the russian civil war. In the early twenties it was conquered by the bolsheviks, since they didn't want Makhno, the military leader of this anarchist society, gaining popular support outside Ukraine. There are other examples: in Korea during the thirties... There are alternatives to both capitalism and Communism (in the Soviet Union sense). The fact that those alternatives aren't considered is caused by lots of propaganda against leftist ideal, take for example the two red scares.
He became seriously disillusioned with socialist ideals later on in his life. And famously said "Socialists don't care about the poor, they just hate the rich"
In "Why I write" (1946), Orwell states that “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” Could you mind explaining, if that's the case, how Orwell was disillusioned with socialism, unless you mean the socialists of the PSUC?
EDIT: Found this quora question: https://www.quora.com/What-s-the-full-Orwell-quote-that-is-o...
The quote you provided is a summary by a person that is definitely right or at least alt-right leaning, so he is definitely heavily biased. In any case, as you can read in the quoted passage (this time the real thing), Orwell criticizes the "book socialist" or the orthodox marxist, which he already did in Homage to Catalonia. He's criticizing the soviet union's socialism, not the CNT-FAI's one.
Maybe Orwell was just social democrat later on. I read "why I write" and Orwell was for equality and against aristocratic two tier society. It's a stretch to conclude anything further, as he even supported Churchill's war effort.
I don't think anyone disagrees that our current system has flaws, it's just that the switching cost is really, really high, and even that assumes the next system is a lot better.
Also, there's a huge difference between pointing out problems and pointing out solutions.
The point is, you are describing the outcome not the mechanism. Capitalism is a mechanism and so you must replace it with another mechanism, not a list of goals.
New intelligently designed systems/mechanisms aren't just created out of thing air like magic.
The first phase of the systems development life cycle requires you to define (and agree upon) high level goals/requirements/parameters, which is what I was doing.
It’s worth doing, but it’s not an “alternative” in any meaningful way. As the other commenter said it’s a wish list. It can’t be meaningfully compared to capitalism. You have no indication ther even exists a mechanism within which those values are compatible.
> The first phase of the systems development life cycle requires you to define (and agree upon) high level goals/requirements/parameters
Yes, but when people ask for a system, you can't just give them that list of goals as an answer. Not only is it not a system, but agreeing on goals doesn't make a system meeting all of them logically possible much less practical.
>when people ask for a system, you can't just give them that list of goals as an answer.
When someone asks for a satisfactory alternative that doesn't yet exist, intelligent creative people think about ways to make a new one. Are you suggesting we don't do that?
>agreeing on goals doesn't make a system meeting all of them logically possible much less practical.
False. Making sure users values align with the system goals is crucial for a successful, practical system that people want to use.
> When someone asks for a satisfactory alternative that doesn't yet exist, intelligent creative people think about ways to make a new one.
I think you'd have got a better response if you were clearer that that's what you were trying to do. "I don't know of a system but if we're to try and come up with one, [...]" or similar.
> >agreeing on goals doesn't make a system meeting all of them logically possible much less practical.
> False. Making sure users values align with the system goals is crucial for a successful, practical system that people want to use.
Making sure goals align with values is worthwhile, but it doesn't answer the question of whether a system that achieves all of those goals is possible.
In a different context, we can have as many meetings as we want where we all agree that maintaining complete consistency and availability while being robust to partitioning is very important and aligned with what we want out of our distributed system; that doesn't mean we're going to get a system that reaches those goals.
Of course, it's fair to say that the discussion of what goals to trade away against others should be a separate process from getting everything we might want on the table - but again, you should make it clear that that's what you're doing up front.
>I think you'd have got a better response if you were clearer that that's what you were trying to do. "I don't know of a system but if we're to try and come up with one, [...]" or similar.
Perhaps you're right, though I'm sure the responses would also have been better if the system in question was an actual objective, technical system and not an ideological system. Decades of propaganda has caused many to automatically attack anyone who dares question the status quo economic aparatus.
1. All economies run somewhere between a fully unregulated laissez faire economy to a fully managed economy.
2. “Socialism” is present and a fundamental part of (probably) every government on earth, in terms of public education, healthcare, and countless other public services.
3. The US could use some public services it is lacking right now, like national healthcare—our private costs are obscene.
You can frame socialism in terms of reduced shared costs. In my experience, this is an effective pitch to otherwise politically apathetic people.
> on the same issues the major alternatives attempted in the 20th century were actually far, far worse
Actually, I’d take national health care over the current situation in the US any day.
I’d hazard a guess that there are multiple places where most americans could appreciate socialist approaches to running public services.
I’m curious as to what specifically you’re talking about when saying capitalism did far better in every regard in every problem in the 20th century, because you seem emphatic.
> We frequently see cheap shots at capitalism, where on the same issues the major alternatives attempted in the 20th century were all actually far, far worse. I
The main alternatives to the system originally described as “capitalism” that was tried in states which already had developed capitalist economies in the 20th century were blends of elements of democratic socialism with capitalism that have since been dubbed the “modern mixed economy”; they were so successful compared to actual capitalism that they have essentially completely replaced it in the West, while there are persistent efforts (which sometimes succeed in driving some policy) from the capitalist class to drag the West back to (or at least toward) 19th Century capitalism.
(The only other alternative tried in any significt way in the developed West in the 20th Century was autocratic fascist corporatism, which, yes, is far, far worse than liberal capitalism.)
And the main alternative to that regressive pro-capitalist drive proposed in the modern West (aside from simply preserving the status quo design of the mixed economy) is simply progressively implementing more elements of democratic socialism, not adopting Leninism or any of the other attempts made in the 20th century outside of the developed West that attempt to bypass rather than advance from capitalism.
Though, I guess, it's worth noting that autocratic fascist corporatism still seems to have some adherents.
Indigenous control of resources. The people who live in a place get to make decisions. You’re not allowed to control a mine 200 miles away from where you live and eat, without the permission of the people who do live and eat near the mine.
With this, right of return for anyone living in diaspora.
We can transition from capitalism to that via an intermediate stage of anarcho-syndicalism with syndicates that own property and pay taxes.
Capitalism isn’t “evil” or “useless” it’s just a temporary stage in our development.
> Indigenous control of resources. The people who live in a place get to make decisions.
This sounds like democratic socialism with some arbitrary restriction on polity scope.
> With this, right of return for anyone living in diaspora.
How do you concretely define this? This would be a big deal with existing scale polities, but it with your implied smaller polities, it becomes an even hotter issue.
> Capitalism isn’t “evil” or “useless” it’s just a temporary stage in our development.
> This sounds like democratic socialism with some arbitrary restriction on polity scope.
There's no implication of socialism, but yes I expect some form of democrasy could be involved.
All laws are "arbitrary restrictions on policy scope".
> How do you concretely define [right of return]?
I don't have any strong expectations about the details. In my head as a straw man is something like:
If you (A) were born in a place, or (B) lived there for 4 years before the age of 20, you can claim it as your homeland. You may claim up to two homelands. Half of every 10,000 hectare region on earth must be reserved to be split equally among indigenous people.
I agree it'd be a hot sell. I see it more as a guiding principle than a practical global policy proposal. I believe we will end up in a world that approximates that policy, through gradual embrace of caring policies in all locales.
Marx wrote about the theory of societal evolution; That there are certain phases civilization must pass through. The communism he wrote about would have to be very far down the road, 100+ years (IMO). This does not mean people sit back and do nothing, we still would have to work towards it. (Most) Capitalists profit from the status quo, and work to keep in place systems to maintain their spot in the hierarchy. Thus the antiquated electoral system in the USA, and the top heavy power/pay structures of business.
TL;DR: give the average person more of a say/choice in the world they live in (politics/workplace), and they will find their way forward. (IMO)
I think the point is: the problem might be more deep-seated than capitalism. If it were not possible to find this problem in any other societal system, then you could make a convincing argument that it might be exclusive to capitalism. But this is not the case. Other systems have been tried. Regardless of how you feel about these alternative systems, they were considerably different from capitalism and the problem occured there as well.
Capitalism was the cause of extreme poverty, from enclosure movements to slavery to industrialization to colonialism. To say that capitalism is to thank for lifting people out of the tragedy is hilarious. Especially as capitalism causes 8 individuals to be richer than half the world.
Sure but now we have a system that is very well optimized to allow a few people to get super rich at the cost of the whole world safey (them included).
And yet we choose to congratulate a system that willingly put people into extreme poverty for centuries for finally giving a few scraps back. We could have had a system which lifted people out of poverty, but no, we went for slavery and colonialism and all that fun stuff. And we continue to do that. Half of America is one missed paycheck away from financial ruin, and that is the richest country that has ever existed.
It's not hilarious to thank Capitalism for lifting people out of tragedy - It's what has happened. Coal power plants in low income countries; iPhone factories creating an economic explosion in China; T-Shirt factories in Bangladesh. All of these things are the result of Capitalism and the free market, and participating countries are doing well. They are accepting some environmental damage, though. Consider that the company making the most progress in sustainable energy is, well, a capitalist company.
Alternate systems have not worked out so well, as you know. Communist planned economies led to the starvation of tens of millions, and that number increases to hundreds of millions when you add the persecution, jailing, and sometimes immediate execution of citizens of Communists states that had a history of political activity of the wrong sort. Recall that in Soviet Russia it was beneficial for each individual to "inform" on their neighbours to the KGB, so that they could claim their apartment. And it's suspected that Vladmir Putin is actually the richest person in the world.
Colonialism and slavery are pretty rough, but they are not a product of capitalism as much as a product of human malevolence and brutality. I'm sure you would find evidence of colonialism and slavery in pre-civilization times and in non-capitalist societies, so that argument falls flat.
Also, regarding the 8 richest individuals - If the rest of the world is getting on OK, why should we not have a couple of super rich people around? Why is that inherently bad? Why do _you_ think you should have a say of where that money belongs, exactly?
"...and that number increases to hundreds of millions when you add the persecution, jailing, and sometimes immediate execution of citizens of Communists states that had a history of political activity of the wrong sort..."
Why is that not a product of human malevolence and brutality?
I'm sure you would find evidence of persecution, jailing and sometimes execution of citizens in pre-civilization.
That was the product of necessary ideological conformity for their proposed system to work. Everyone who is not on board with the communist system could bring it down, so they shot dissenters. In Capitalism you can believe whatever you want to believe so long as you respect the rights of the individuals around you, and you don't incite violence, and a couple of other conditions.
Communism is about centralized control of a population. The central authority determines what you get, what you pay, what you do, and so on. Capitalism, by contrast, is a decentralized system. What you pay for something is little more than a product of the market. And you're free to do anything you want, so long as there is a demand for it.
Imagine I want to send a rocket to Mars. And then I go and check the prices and see these companies want hundreds of millions of dollars to launch one. That makes me confused. The materials to make that rocket cost at most on the order of tens of millions of dollars, and labor certainly doesn't explain the rest. I bet I could make one for less. And it turns out I can. Then a couple of decades later, I'm the biggest rocket supplier on the planet. In a communist system your only option there would be to try to appeal to the bureaucracy, and if you're lucky you might eventually, some years later, get a reply to your filing of form FNE-34821.43-z: 'We disagree. Thanks for your input, comrade.' Of course this probably isn't a fair comparison. In a communist system nobody would ever have the resources to even dream of being able to do something like launch rockets to Mars. Instead you'd have to beg old entrenched government bureaucrats to do it. I'm wouldn't hold my breath.
This notion of an economic system being driven by the people instead of being driven by the government is why in a capitalist system you're generally free to argue for a communist system - with some unfortunate exceptions, yet in a communist system arguing for capitalism is often enough to get you 'disappeared' - with some fortunate exceptions. Maybe even more visibly in a capitalist system you could even start a communistic system. Want to buy 5000 acres of land and start communitopia? Feel free to! Want to buy 5,000 acres of land and start capitalitopia in a communist nation? It's simply not possible.
You bring up a good point, but I think this actually really nails the issue. The point is not that government bureaucracy cannot achieve great things. Our achievement of putting a man on the moon was supposed to be a product of the capitalist system. In reality it was mostly socialist in execution as a heavily publicly funded affair directed by a state level organization primarily with state employees to achieve a bureaucratically directed goal. The point is what happens when what the government thinks is good and what the people think is good differ?
And we also saw this exact scenario play out in space. We never really managed to bring space to into the capitalist system. And once the government 'won' the space race, their interests shifted from space. Not only did progress halt but we technologically regressed. We put a man on the moon in 1969. Today, half a century later, we're struggling just to try to send a man around the moon - let alone land on it. No human has left low earth orbit since 1972! But at the same time space has now been genuinely introduced into the capitalist system and so long as the people have a desire for more, the odds of us entering into another 50 year regression are rapidly approaching 0.
This is demonstrably false. Extreme poverty was simply the state of the world until a few centuries back. In 1820 more than 90% of the world was living in extreme poverty.
It's absurd to claim a single diffuse concept like capitalism was responsible for lifting people out of poverty, it's just as absurd to claim it was responsible for putting them there.
I believe just attributing it to capitalism is way to broad of a statement. It's not too uncommon to say that the "capitalist era" has existed for about 500 years, and the explosive growth of value has existed for a much shorter time. So to simply say that all our current growth comes from capitalism is way to simplistic.
A definition of capitalism I like is this: Capitalism is where the gains/profits are not just consumed. They are re-invested. That's where explosive growth comes from. You make some money. Instead of blowing it on wine, women, and song, you use it to buy better tools. So you are more productive, and so you make more money. You use that to buy even better tools. Spread that behavior over a large chunk of society, keep that up for several decades, and you'll get a pretty explosive growth of value.
It seems to be a question of timing. I can see two competing explanations, the spread of market economies and the demographic dividend.
Keep in mind most of this extreme poverty was eliminated in Asia, and in particular China. Unfortunately China began to liberalize its markets and realize its demographic dividend in the early 80s, at the same time, so I'm not sure about that case.
Again in India, liberalization and falling birthrates happened together in the 1990s.
25 years ago was 1993, two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It's an arbitrary time frame, perhaps conveniently selected. That said, market economies spread rapidly throughout the second world during the 90s, and the Soviet subsidies that had kept a number of command economy-leaning third world countries were cut off, forcing liberalization.
The most powerful effect of this was the widespread loss of belief in the effectiveness of command economies. With the end of the USSR the major ideological opponent of capitalism collapsed. World historical event -> world-wide change in outcomes is too big a correlation to dismiss.
That said it's tough to tease out what is driving what, economics or demographics. I do think that human flourishing occurs when ideology gets out of the way of individuals pursuing their own interests, whether their interests include opening a small business or not birthing children for the motherland.
So I am not able to say, "it's because of capitalism," or, "it's because of contraception and female education." I am confident that we can say, "ideology and authoritarianism make things worse."
Better technology, which has led to incredible productivity and increased quality of life.
This was in part natural advancement as it is exponential and we eventually just hit explosive growth, but the environment was helped along with capitalism, free markets, and major world wars which encouraged the spread of information and trade.
For all the criticism of how wages have stalled in the west, in the world as whole capitalism does pretty well :)
But the toxicity of capitalism often stems from the polarized debate, I don't actually think many wants capitalism without regulation, or communism without free property rights... but it's hard to argue for the sane middle ground when you're attacked from both sides.
Personally I think wage stagnation has largely been due to huge reserves of labour in the developing world coming into the market. The worst thing you can say about capitalism in that regard is that it's Capitalism that has enabled those people to raise themselves out of poverty and contribute and participate in the global economy. How terrible!
However those reserves of labour are largely getting tapped out. Wages for factory workers in China have been rising dramatically for a while now. There are other challenges coming , such as increased automation, but again that's not really directly the fault of capitalism. Meanwhile while wage growth has slowed, we've all benefited hugely from the cheap goods and services enabled by these changes. I really think it's much more about technological and demographic changes rather than capitalism per se. If anything, we've suffered from too much economic development, technological advances and global growth.
One of the things people often seem to overlook in the US is that at about the time the wage stagnation started, we also began the process of roughly doubling the workforce by removing barriers against women entering the labor market. Then, as you say, another labor surplus was generated as the developing world has come into the market.
It's rarely as simple as supply and demand, but there seems to me to be a correlation between stagnant wages and large increases in the labor pool.
And house prices as well, particularly here in the UK. Households increased their earning power through female employment, then used that capital to bid up house prices against each other.
>Capitalism that has enabled those people to raise themselves out of poverty and contribute and participate in the global economy.//
Huh, without non-capitalist moves (socialist, communistic) then we'd still have mills that pay in their own currency, that you can only spend in the shop that the rich owner also owns; we'd still have voting as a reserved right for rich landowners. That's capitalism.
All the good bits seem to be there only because of past riots and uprisings and only measured to subdue the population enough to keep us in our place.
Capitalism is assigning the resources of a 100,000 people to just one person because that person already has more than enough. How can you say that's a functional system? It's certainly not moral.
"Oh, but fascist dictatorships are worse"; well great. Eat your dogshit sandwich like a good prole because cat-shit tastes worse ... smh
> Huh, without non-capitalist moves (socialist, communistic) then we'd still have mills that pay in their own currency, that you can only spend in the shop that the rich owner also owns...
The non-capitalist moves that stopped that nonsense were union moves, not socialistic or communistic.
> ... we'd still have voting as a reserved right for rich landowners. That's capitalism.
That's feudalism, not capitalism. It was democracy that undid that nonsense, not socialism or communism.
The rest of your rant shows that you are very bitter, but it does nothing to either enlighten or persuade.
Indeed, fundamentally capitalism is about individual economic freedoms to own and invest capital. A private shop owner is just as much a capitalist as a corporate CEO.
Also capitalism is in no way in opposition to other individual freedoms such as unionism, liberal democracy, etc. You can have capitalism without them, just look at China, but I would argue that as a freedom, capitalism is most naturally aligned with other such personal freedoms.
As you point out rubber baron and oligarchic systems are based on suppressing freedoms, including often individual rights over capital. Corporate scrip isn’t capital, so clearly it’s iuse is actually anti-capitalist by restricting individual rights over capital.
Democracy, unions, they're anti-capitalist. They cause people to be valued above their worth as a tool to bring financial gain to the capital holders.
The distribution of resources according to what will make the rich richer is not the best way. The private ownership of means of production is simply theft, there's no need for it and no moral justification.
Ultimately we're greedy by nature; capitalism rewards that greed, feeds it and deifies it.
I haven't set out to persuade you; if you seek to persuade yourself of what is just I have no doubt you will reject capitalism.
> The private ownership of means of production is simply theft, there's no need for it and no moral justification.
If I have some money, and you have some money, and I buy a tool and you buy some beer, I have a tool and you don't - so I'm stealing from you? [Edit: Note that the "means of production" can be as simple as a wrench, or a sewing machine, or a welder.] Step away from the marxist koolaid, you've had a bit much...
And you're only a half step away from theft yourself. Stating that "the private ownership of means of production is theft" leads almost inevitably to "therefore the public need to take back the means of production from those who have them". That's theft.
> I haven't set out to persuade you
You sure haven't. Stating as fact things that are completely outrageous from the other person's perspective is not a very good tactic of persuasion.
> ... if you seek to persuade yourself of what is just I have no doubt you will reject capitalism.
You should doubt. You should also find a better line; "if you really seek truth and justice you'll agree with me" is a manipulative cop-out. You want me to be persuaded? Make a convincing argument that makes sense to someone who doesn't already agree with you.
Capitalism is about individual freedom and individual responsibility. The British giant Marks & Spencer started as a market stall, Michael Marks borrowed £5 to set it up, it now has revenue of £10bn and employs 84,000 people. He could have bet that money on a horse, but instead you would like to steal everything he and his later business parter worked for in the name of 'justice'. Communism and Marxism have been tried many times, they're supposed to be based on empirical evidence and scientifically based, but the experiment has been tried over and over again and it's failed every time.
It is important to consider total compensation and not just cash wages. I'm assuming when you say "wage stagnation" you are referring to cash wages. Here is some data that includes total compensation: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...
According to BLS-generated compensation cost indices,
total benefit costs for all civilian workers have risen
an inflation-adjusted 22.5% since 2001 (when the data
series began), versus 5.3% for wage and salary costs.
People can own property under communism, it's capital that cannot. Who owns the property where we do business? The workers, not the state (which IMO shouldn't even exist under communism).
It would be kind of bleak if there wasnt a reduction in extreme poverty if you consider at which speed we burn through not replenishable natural resources. Defacto free energy in form of fossil fuel and a lack of large wars in the population riches regions of the world can do wonders.
It's a million improvements in a million individual situations. It's public programs to raise health and educate people made feasible by economic growth. It's happened in countries with vastly different systems in very different parts of the world for the last century.
The biggest reason for reduction in extreme poverty over the last decades is the responsibility of the Chinese state. The fastest drop in family size ever was overseen by the totalitarian Iranian government.
...responsibility of Chinese state to adopt capitalist strategies of generating wealth. Thats the big thing they did different from soviet union. Everything else they do is pretty run of the mill geopolitical selfishness.
As a radical leftist, when im criticizing capitalism, im not saying that it's worse than what we had in the past, but that we are doing way less than we could to have a better system.
Hmm. Left-wing politics is about liberalism and equality, yes? I believe what you meant was as a radical progressive, which is more focused on reforming and improving society.
That liberalism is associated with progressivism seems to take away from progressive right-wingers which may believe in the inherent inequality of certain inevitable social structures, but work to abolish or reform broken regulation.
I do not intend to imply my political beliefs here. I'm simply saying perhaps you meant progressive.
> Left-wing politics is about liberalism and equality, yes?
No. Not in either of the sensed “liberalism” is currently used. Equality, yes, in a manner particularly opposed to the structural inequities of capitalism, but not liberalism, which is either about capitalism or a viewpoint which seeks to maintain capitalism a while moderating certain inequities within it, depending on which of th current usages of “liberalism” you refer to.
> I believe what you meant was as a radical progressive
“Radical progressive” is a phrase used in US politics go refer to a certain range of left-wing positions.
> That liberalism is associated with progressivism
It's not, though one of the senses of liberalism is adjacent to progressivism.
> seems to take away from progressive right-wingers
While the term “progressive right-wingers” may not be
nonsensical in some historical usages of “progressive”, it is simply oxymoronic in the current usage.
> which may believe in the inherent inequality of certain inevitable social structures, but work to abolish or reform broken regulation.
You seem to be using “progressive” as simply anyone who seeks change from the status quo to realize their political values, which is a novel use.
Problem is, the "system" you would "design" to replace capitalism would include charming attributes like exit visas and quite possibly conclude that the "people" would be better off if 10% of them were liquidated for the benefit of the others.
>Problem is, the "system" you would "design" to replace capitalism would include charming attributes like exit visas and quite possibly conclude that the "people" would be better off if 10% of them were liquidated for the benefit of the others.
If you're just going to debate a strawman instead of the actual poster and their actual comment, why bother showing up?
> Does anyone know exactly why? I conjecture to say it's broadly the result of capitalism.
This is a tricky question. Easily the biggest factor is china. China being the most populous nation was the largest source of poverty a few decades ago and now is the largest source of reduction of poverty. They lifted 680 million people out of poverty by 2010. Today, that number is probably approaching 800 or 900 million due to their economic growth.
So do we credit the "communism" of the chinese communist party? Do we credit capitalism? Do we credit chinese communism management of capitalism? Do we credit foreign investment? Chinese entrepreneurship? It all depends on your political bias. Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan.
Also, poverty is a very political/strange concept. A poor city dweller struggling to make ends but who has a smartphone and nice sneakers will not be in poverty. But a farmer who owns his land, is independent and grows enough food to live comfortably but has no smartphones or sneakers would be seen as being in exreme poverty. Ultimately, reduction of poverty is simply a result of moving farmers and stuffing them into large cities and how dependent they are on the "state". The less poverty you are in, the more you are dependent on society for life's essentials.
Also, poverty decreasing is great, but in the same time period, wealth inequality has increased drastically. Imagine poverty of weapons. Both of us are in extreme weapons poverty ( we have no weapons ). You get a nerf gun and I get a shotgun. Weapons poverty is wiped out. We should celebrate right? It's "great" that poverty decreased, but the differential in power between me and you skyrocketed.
Look at china. Their poverty has decreased dramatically. But the power differential between the powerful and everyone else has increased dramatically as wealth inequality skyrocketed. Is this really a good thing? The wealth inequality funding "digital dictatorship" and tyranny?
This is the same diversion tactic some people use about wealth not being a zero sum game. In purely terms of wealth, it is not a zero sum game. But wealth translates into power. And power certainly is a zero sum game. So if you got $10 and I got $10,000,000, in terms of wealth, both of us are doing better. But in terms of power, my power increased drastically while yours barely budged.
> I really feel like it's a shame that word is almost toxic in intellectual circles.
It is because it's opinions based on political biases. But economists and political "scientists" do a great job lying to us that their field is a "science" with the same credibility of physics. It is not. There is no objective truth because it's not in the realm of the empirical but societal/political. You'd have less toxicity in a debate between a christian, jew and muslim on who is the one true god.
That's a really interesting comment, thanks. In particular your note about the decrease in poverty but the vast new wealth differential. I think China is moving towards a government that can never be overthrown, which has some scary implications. I think there's two main things driving that: the large wealth differential as you said, and the improvement of technology. Eventually, China will get to the point of being able to stop even the idea of revolution: people could be reeducated at the slightest hint of revolutionary ideas.
> I think China is moving towards a government that can never be overthrown
We've seen that before. The Thousand-year Reich lasted 12 years. Communism in Russia was untouchable... until it wasn't. Right now the government of North Korea looks unchangeable, and China and Iran look close. But I predict that, in a generation, at least two out of the three will be gone.
The thing is that this time it's different. A revolution has to form somewhere. How will it form when every single citizen can be monitored for compliance 24/7? Everywhere you go, everyone you talk to, everything you do is tracked and analyzed. In the past, the government can't do anything to stop a revolutionary until they've become known as one. But in China they'll be able to stop revolutionaries before they become revolutionaries. At the first hint of anti-establishment sentiment someone can be instantly reeducated.
Say there's mass economic strife, and people want to revolt. Ten people suddenly get the idea to overthrow the government. They organize a get together in the woods, with no technology allowed. Facial recognition can tell the ten of them joined as a group, logs showed they all did not use any technology for a period of hours, they weren't seen in any camera or microphone database for hours... Hmm, very suspicious. An automated system can and will recognize these factors and the group will be quickly sent for reeducation.
Once the technology passes a tipping point, there's simply no way back. The technology enables the existing power structure to be maintained forever.
And that's assuming human soldiers are involved. At some point - maybe 50 or maybe 150 years from now - robotics will be advanced enough that you won't even need cooperation of soldiers, and at that point the entire population can be controlled with the push of a button.
It’s due to return on energy investment going up due to new productive technologies, aka “capital”. “Capitalism” is an orthogonal issue. To put it in Marxian terms, you can have a socialist community with a capitalist mode of production.
The way new capital reaches the third world can be attributed to globalization of market circuits, for instance, China is currently investing into Africa much like the first world did to China in the past.
Of course, if you define the terminology differently, say you’re an Austrian Economist, the above explanation might appear unintelligable.
On the other hand, consider that the world population in the 1800s was about 1/7th what it is today, so the total number of people in extreme poverty probably hasn't changed much between then and now.
What has changed is our idea of what wealth is, and what poverty is, and I think these notions will continue to change.
Extreme poverty is very clearly defined since 1995. Quoting Wikipedia[0]:
> Extreme poverty, abject poverty, absolute poverty, destitution, or penury, was originally defined by the United Nations in 1995 as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services."
In 2018, "extreme poverty" widely refers to earning below the international poverty line of $1.90/day (in 2011 prices, equivalent to $2.07 in 2017), set by the World Bank. This measure is the equivalent to earning $1.00 a day in 1996 US prices, hence the widely used expression, living on "less than a dollar a day".
To be clear, if you earn $760 a year, by the World Bank’s definition, you’re not extremely poor. By that definition homeless beggars in the US don’t live in extreme poverty, because they make more than that panhandling.
I really do think it’s worth considering the degree to which this definition is designed primarily to produce “victories” like the ones being celebrated here.
@carlosdp: So one of the richest humans of all time approves of a book telling people that the world he helped to create is better than they think? Hm.
This is the book by Hans Rosling right? The one that cherry picks data shamelessly to make the point he clearly wanted to make before he researched it? The one panned by Business Insider, not the most notably loon left publication ever?
According to Business Insider, Rosling "misses critical wrinkles in the data" and has not presented "the whole story".
From Wikipedia:
Although Rosling argues that the future will be better than expected because birth rates are stabilizing, life expectancy around the world is increasing, the gender gap is nearly closed, and the extremely impoverished population is shrinking, others point out that populations are still expanding (with many still under-nourished), life expectancy in the US is decreasing, the gender gap is only nearly closed in education and not in employment, and extreme wealth has become more extreme.
It seems like being a bit skeptical of people selling Panglossian visions, given how much people want to believe them, might not hurt. That’s not to advocate the kind of doom and gloom which forgets that we have antibiotics, indoor plumbing, and electric lights. It is however worth keeping an eye on worrying trends like antibiotic resistance, climate change, and just how many people don’t have indoor plumbing, safe water, and electric lights.
There is a huge difference between homeless in the US and people in the “extreme poverty” category. For one, homeless in the US can generally access free clean water at public drinking fountains, whereas those in extreme poverty have to walk for miles to fill buckets with mud water.
In a different example, a Buddhist monk in Thailand may take a vow of poverty, earn $0 a day, but nonetheless be well-supported by the community. This is why a qualitative definition like the one cited above ("a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services") is probably a better way to define poverty than a dollar amount.
A homeless person in a civilized country has access to a lot more than the actual cash represented by that $1.90. Many times they have access to free water, food, shelter, even medical care. These could be worth hundreds normally.
You can tell from the percentage of the labour force who worked on farms that most people couldn't have been wealthy, and the industrial revolution changed everything.
Didn't living conditions actually worsen for a while after the industrial revolution though due to rapid urbanisation and slums and a lack of workers rights.
I’m also wondering to what degree this represents a triumph of economic, political and social reform, and to what extent it might be a triumph of massaging the definition of “extreme poverty” and other accounting or semantic fuckery.
Edit: Evidence suggests thst it is indeed, semantic fuckery. The World Bank is really only saying that three quarters of a billion people earn less than $757 a year.
Without knowing if that's the case, these metrics are definitely easy to manipulate. For example in calculating purchasing power parity, the "basket" of items you choose can significantly misrepresent the common, basic needs of people in poor countries. And it should be remembered that the World Bank's global poverty line is only 1.90$ a day.
Based on my own experience of living in a poor neighborhood in a very poor country for a long time now, I am always skeptical of these claims for reasons that would be too long to list out. Inflation and increases in the cost of food and rent here have far outpaced the World Bank metrics ($1.25 in 2005, $1.90 as of 2015) and the incomes of the average person (~$100-150 a month).
It is quite a lot, considering that the world economy could easily spend enough money to fix this and in relative terms it would cost so little there would be zero practical effect on anyone else's income.
But it's also ethically skewed. I have friends who have travelled through the poorest parts of Africa, and they universally return with stories about how "poor" Africans are some of the happiest, friendliest, most generous, and most contented people they've met.
That may be rose-tinted, but it's naive to dismiss it out of hand.
Economic metrics aren't necessarily humane, and the Western economic treadmill - with its precariousness, acquisitiveness, and narcissism - isn't necessarily the ideal destination for any culture.
This is complicated topic - I can confirm that seeing countless dalits/untouchables in India (cca 160 millions), or generally poor people there, they are super friendly, helpful, and will often invite a lost traveler to their homes to share their meal with them.
But - their lives are incredibly hard. No protection from the state, no future, at mercy of anybody more rich than them (=anybody else), it doesn't matter how good you are, you will never be given a fair chance to achieve anything in society. Nobody cares if you live or die, how you suffer, how unfair your life is. There isn't even such a basic mentality that 'I deserve more in life than this', because countless generations before never achieved anything.
And specifically for India, the effin' idiotic caste system makes all others content with the situation, because 'this is how things are supposed to be', 'they accrued bad karma in their previous lives' and so on. It's extremely good that this system is slowly dying, but it will take far too long in my opinion, especially in rural areas.
Their life is reduced to day-to-day survival, which makes everything simpler. They don't have lofty goals for life, and surviving OK yet another day is a success. Is this a simplicity you want to have compared to western style of life? I don't think so.
And here in the US, we are all encouraged to form lofty goals that are hard to reach (and often don't). And if we do, it's time to form yet another lofty goal. No wonder our levels of anxiety are sky high despite having so much more material wealth.
Perhaps part of where the western outlook on poverty goes wrong is that we almost exclusively define our economic metrics by material, quantifiable means.
However, people can be rich in relationships and materially poor, or incredibly wealthy and yet have a string of broken relationships. Look at divorce rates, or even simply people living together, then breaking up and finding new partners in the United States, where economically speaking people live in one of the richest countries in the world.
Does anyone know of economic metrics that attempt to measure and/or account for relational and/or community richness or poverty?
This is incredibly misleading though. There is nothing humane about high infant mortality and a single infection being life threatening because you don't have transport to the nearest hospital hundreds of miles away.
There is a huge difference between making 2 dollars a day and making 4 or 8. This is long before we get to the rich end of the scale.
A lot of people seems to be skeptical about this. There is a wonderful book called Factfullness which is written exactly for this kind of audience. In his book, Rosling suggests the vast majority of human beings are wrong about the state of the world. He believes his test subjects think the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it is. Bill gates sponsored this book for all the students graduating from college and I can exactly see why by going through this thread.
Well I thought it was quite obvious, but yes. It’s us.
As everyone knows, fear sells. Nice good stories about how much better off we are now? Mmm, not so much.
This doesn’t mean that huge problems don’t exist in the world.
We have the duty to report on them.
I personally try to do things differently than this, and I cover tech, so it’s easier and more neutral. If anything good stories about tech and progress still sell.
I feel very detached from the trends of my industry, and so do many colleagues of mine with no power to take policy or business decisions.
I would say both, to some extent. It appears that climate change is driving more extreme weather events such as hurricanes. And when natural disasters do occur, it's a lot easier to report on them when people almost anywhere on the planet can provide a video of it.
I suspect the effect of natural disasters is also greater because of more people. A larger global population means more people are likely to be in the vicinity of natural phenomena, and higher population density means more people can potentially get into trouble at one time.
Despite the apparent increases in tropical cyclone
activity in recent years, shown in Figures 2 and 3,
changes in observation methods over time make it
difficult to know whether tropical storm activity has
actually shown an increase over time.
It is therefore surprising to discover that by all the
various real world data considered here, the weather in
the first half of the 20th century was, if anything,
more extreme than in the second half. I have not found
any data, including in SREX, that contradicts these
trends. Furthermore there are no signs of this trend
changing (i.e. lessening and reversing) in recent years."
I would suspect the former. There are so many 24/7 news/weather outlets that need to fill air time and draw in viewers with something. Natural disasters are easy ratings.
30+ years ago (pre-CNN), an earthquake in Jakarta, or a typhoon reaching Thailand might get a blurb on an inner page of the NY Times. Those events certainly wouldn't have something like Weather Channel reporters on site pretending to brace themselves in the wind to dramatize the shot...
Beyond "if it bleeds it reads" media reporting, we now have exponentially more ways to observe the occurrence of natural disasters globally than we did even 20 years ago. Statistically these things should probably be observed and compared over climatological and geological scales before we can determine if there are abnormally more or less natural disasters.
I find this similar to how the over-reporting of child abductions and other black swan crimes led to helicopter parenting. Hyper awareness of every single one of these events, rare though they may be statistically, gives the appearance of "a lot more".
I second this, Factfulness is a must read and is what I immediately thought of when I saw this headline. It’s crazy how wrong I was about the state and direction of the world.
You shouldn't be surprised about it. Public perception of all non-newsworthy stuff (and good news are not newsworthy, only creepy ones are) is mostly formed in schools, so it is late by about as much as the average person is past his or her school graduation, i.e. now it is stuck in mid-1990s. Mostly reflecting reality of that day.
I am a huge fan of Rosling and just finished his book. He doesn't just suggest/believe that people are systematically wrong (worse than random!), he measured it.
For most people the problem is making the difference between poverty and extreme poverty. They draw the line below which differences stop mattering a lot higher. Below a certain quality of life level it's hard for them to imagine anything else can make a significant difference for the worse... or extreme.
One of my favourite talks is Rosling on washing machines. He makes the case that to have washing machines is a good indicator of middle class as it frees up a lot of time that can be spent well in education and quality of life improvements (payed jobs, home improvement and so on). The availability of washing machines in developing nations has risen dramatically over the last decades. There is now a huge bulge of people around the median world income, and the tail-end is getting smaller, i.e. between the world's poor and middle class the inequality seems to be shrinking actually. It's only the super-rich that appear to be out of control.
I had a maid in Thailand who did laundry for us, and her favorite person in the world was a previous employer who found and provided a washing machine.
I haven't yet read the book, but I recently heard opposing statistics that washing machines don't necessarily free up much time, but they dramatically increase the amount of laundry done and expected cleanliness of clothing. (Jevons paradox)
I suspect the truth is mixed, and that at lower income levels, it probably saves a lot of time, and at higher income levels, "consumption" of clean clothing dominates.
Probably yes. In a culture with 8 kids per family on average the time saving must be huge, but once you are at 2 kids per family (e.g. India now btw.!) it becomes more a quality of life thing.
I've heard similar reports. Hoovers (vacuum cleaners) mean fitted carpets rather than a rug you take out and shake off, or mopped floors, so time savings get eaten up. But "luxury" levels increase.
Rosling does a great job in the book to drive this point home. He has a logarithmic scale centered on 2, 8, 16, and 64$ a day, and shows just how much of an improvement in life it is to go from 2 to 8. It means a massive drop in child mortality, access to health care, small families, educated children, etc....
I've been driving around Africa for over 2 years now. 25 countries in West and Southern Africa.
There is a lot more development, infrastructure, happiness and success here than the majority of "First Worlders" have any notion of. Even when I tell my family directly they don't really believe me.
4G Internet, chip n pin (or contactless) Credit card payments, multi lane freeways, high rise buildings and of course electricity and drinking water. That's not just South Africa either, all of those exist in Rep. Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Zambia just to name a few examples of where people think of "poverty".
I have come to the conclusion that anyone who hasn't actually set food on this continent (and ventured outside a guided "safari") has no way to discover the truth about this place. There is no media outlet that actual portrays an accurate picture, I have never even seen one that gets close.
I can believe that. Among those people in the west who even think about it, many are vested in the idea of African nations being hopelessly impoverished.
I have found it to be so ingrained in people it's like an automatic response. The TV ads with all the starving "African" children of the 80s and 90s have sunk in, and stuck. Convincing people otherwise will be a herculean task.
I’m an African, I’ve lived all over the continent (until very recently). What you say is correct. By many metrics life has improved, and that is to be celebrated. But internally, I’m a bit conflicted because for sure this development has also come at a cost: (1) some of us now have electricity, but we’ve poisoned our city air, (ii) some of us have running water, but we’ve destroyed our watersheds and the severity of droughts is increasing, (iii) we have better roads (thanks China!), but we’re extensifying our farm land into forest because we’ve been caning our soils, (iv) we’ve got 4g and mobile money, but man, our leaders still brutalize us if we step out of line.
In conclusion, I don’t dispute what you say, there is a great deal of wonderful progress on the continent, but the narrative should not be either/or, and of course varies by country, but it’s neither dystopian famine, or development utopia.
It seems as if the onset of development is always coupled with horrible environmental problems. Another 20 years in the future, Africa will have more money to mitigate them.
The gyst of Grantham’s essay which I posted below (also at the bottom of this comment), throws into question that optimism. With evidence, Grantham demonstrates the possibility that a nexus of climate change, soil degradation and population growth threatens Africa’s development trajectory. My view is that this will happen within 20 years as banks pull credit lines from farmers at risk of weather shock. Indeed this is already happening and farmer’s production goes off a cliff when they can’t get loans for good seed and fertiliser.
I don’t write this because I’m a doom and gloom merchant. It’s because we need to get real about investing sufficiently to course correct.
I certainly am not pro-development at all costs. Heck, I choose to live in the Yukon precisely because it's not Vancouver or Toronto.
I hope "Africa" can see what the West has done, learn from it, and do a better job instead of just blindly going down the same path and screwing things up in the same ways.
> There is a lot more development, infrastructure, happiness and success here than the majority of "First Worlders" have any notion of.
For ages, I've been trying to think of way to monetize this ignorance (or information asymmetry, if you're feeling generous). The only advantage I know is that this ignorance results is lack of first-world competition, which can be huge advantage
The only ones that get close are the ones on the ground. With the exception of Congo (French speaking), nearly every major city has an English language newspaper online. Yes, they are heavily biased, but the headlines give one at least some degree of information about what is going on. Twitter is also a goldmine for getting a view of Africa, grisly as that can be (municipalities will livestream corporal punishment at times). I tend to use: http://www.congoindependant.com/ , https://dailytimes.ng/category/news/ , https://dailynews.co.tz/tags/local.aspx , https://twitter.com/chismaiocity?lang=en (example, some NSFL content there recently, fyi) , and https://www.aljazeera.com/ (better than BBC at least) .
Related: Some fun questions I like to lead with when discussing Africa and the coming miracle there are:
Where is the Great Wall of Africa/Nigeria? Hint: It's not on dry land ;)
In numbers of Californias, how many people will live in Kinshasa by 2099?
How fast is the bullet train from Nairobi to Mombasa? Who financed it?
Rosling, Pinker and Gates are right to point out that there have been absolute improvements in living standards across the globe.
However as Jeremy Grantham (the British Warren Buffet) warns, these current improvements may have been bought at the expense of future losses as we have destabilized the climate and mined the soils to achieve the gains of recent years.
Grantham projects 40% loss in soil productivity in a much more populated world.
This is not to knock these fantastic advances, but we now need to double down on ensuring they are sustainable.
Here’s Grantham’s paper. It’s a long but fascinating and wel-written read.
Added to my reading list. But I do find something interesting about your synopsis. Something that Rosling touched on in his book as well. And that is that people from traditionally developed countries look at the more recently developed countries and can only seem to point out that they developed at the expense of the environment...by burning coal, mining the earth, etc. conveniently forgetting that their own country previously did, and still does, all those same things! We look at CO2 production of China and India and its way more than say, the US. But if you look at it per capita it’s still nowhere near the US.
I can only speak for myself (originally from a developing country), but I would not have overlooked that developed nations spent down their natural capital to achieve their modern prosperity. Where did all the trees in Scotland go? I can obviously only speak for myself, but I wonder if it’s a strawman argument.
Re CO2 production, as per Grantham’s paper, there is a radical increase in renewable energy supply taking place. It still only gets us 1/3 of the way to avoiding 2 degree warming.
" He believes his test subjects think the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it is" People aren't idiots, they aren't wrong. Its Rosling who is wrong. Rosling is a propaganda machine for the crony capitalists who have destroyed nations in middle east and Asia, continue to do so even in "oh so rich" United States. After a century of decolonization and continuing war in the middle east, and palestine for oil and natural gas, Rosling is just telling us its getting better. Thank god!
IMO that only works when it's coupled with progress in governance. Compare Venezuela to India over the last 30 years, and extrapolate into the near future what will happen there.
Edit: Just to anticipate the obligatory "Venezuala communist -> bad outcome" comment: Yes, but why are they communist?
Even in its deepest crises, India's army did not play kingmaker. Furthermore, India's federated structure–while annoying to reformers–checks the power of aspiring dictators. Every uneducated population, it seems, elects populists from time to time. The damage they can do in India appears to be more limited than the damage done to Venezuela by Chavez and Maduro. Venezuela will probably be an impoverished nation for decades; India has a chance of becoming a middle-income or even developed country by 2050.
I think it should go to nukes. Bear with me, I'm serious. When you look back at history war is nearly always the cause for the greatest suffering. It causes starvation, 'involuntary migration', and so many other things. Whatever has been built up in an area, it does a wonderful job of tearing down. Look at Libya for one of the most stark examples. Libya was steadily developing and seeing increased prosperity. Now, it's been reduced to neglected, unstable, and impoverished rubble since we 'freed' them.
And this didn't used to just be a story of Mideastern nations. This was the story of the world. The one thing that changed this was nukes. Mutually assured destruction is why the Cold War is now called the Cold War, and not World War 3. And it's why direct confrontation between developed nations has really become a thing of the past. Countries like China would never have been able to develop if not for the peace and stability that nuclear weapons have enabled. We can even look to nations like India. It's surreal to imagine that until 1947 that entire nation was just a property of the British Empire. Even the notion of a British Empire is surreal! But now that they have gained their independence and are a nuclear nation, they are also gradually increasing in prosperity as Indian decisions are being made to put Indians first. And as a nuclear power their decisions, independence, and developments are all effectively guaranteed, at least until we develop technology that can effectively render nukes harmless.
This is an amazing and thought provoking point. Nation states seem to go through two major phases on the road to a high level of development; the first is Peace & Health where violent conflict declines and some basic health/education/etc. infrastructure can be put into place. The second is Economy where the economy liberalizes and local producers gradually become smarter and more productive and climb the value chain through exports.
Possessing nuclear weapons is a powerful Peace hack. Once you have them no one can really invade you without the threat of suffering massive collateral damage.
If we want to talk about the raw numbers of people getting out of extreme poverty, it follows that India and China acquiring a nuclear deterrent specifically had the biggest impact as their populations are so large.
Nukes were a terrible gamble, though. The Cold War may be remembered as cold, but it was only couple of button presses away from burning all industrialized nations to the ground, and for good. It's boggles the mind that we got to the point where we are today.
That article should come out of Delhi or Beijing, not Washington. Thanks to the western world, for stopping their evil doing in Asia (excluding Near East). When US/France/UK get their ass out of Africa and Middle East, expect further decline of global poverty. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-brought-271-mi... Expecting a lot of downvotes in the HN crowd.
174 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadNon pay wall link with the same info
Newspapers do have a rather wide reach, especially compared with primary sources like the grandparent provided. This is because their content is not only designed to be shared, it's also promoted by the respective brands content platform.
That way they get more views and, by extension, get posted on HN/reddit/etc. with a higher frequency.
With this stunning level of rigor, it's astonishing that you'd be baffled by the discourse in actual intellectual circles.
The question of what actually precipitates, maintains, spreads, or limits growth has in fact been a central question of numerous economic schools of thought and/or ideology; the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, free-market fundamentalists, J.S. Mill's steady-state, Ricardo & George on rents, Schumpeter's creative destruction, Kondratieff's technological waves, North's institutionalsism.
Jevons, Adams, Lotke, Soddy, Boulding, Georgescu-Roegen, Meadows et al, Daly, Ayres, Klitgaard & Hall, Smil, and Keen all point to an overwhelmingly dominant role for energy, especially fossil fuels.
The full answer has multiple components. Simply chalking "capitalism fixed it" is beyond facile. Particularly when aggreement as to what that term even encompasses is at best exceptionally limited.
I think the better view of capitalism allows to both appreciate it for the unprecedented age of prosperity it brought to this world, as well as identify it as the major factor in the biggest problems of present day, from climate change to inequality-related social tensions. It's an extremely powerful tool that let us grow to where we are, but needs fine-tuning so that it won't shake our societies apart.
I hear people blame "deregulation" for the financial crisis, when in reality government regulations and policies misaligning incentives hold a majority of the responsibility.
We should be careful to condemn too quickly a current system.
It reminds me of when a new developer comes to a code base and says it needs to be thrown out and rewritten completely.
Rewrites and revolutions are costly and shortsighted.
Let's first try to figure out what is right with what's here because usually it's like it is for a reason.
He became seriously disillusioned with socialist ideals later on in his life. And famously said "Socialists don't care about the poor, they just hate the rich"
EDIT: Found this quora question: https://www.quora.com/What-s-the-full-Orwell-quote-that-is-o... The quote you provided is a summary by a person that is definitely right or at least alt-right leaning, so he is definitely heavily biased. In any case, as you can read in the quoted passage (this time the real thing), Orwell criticizes the "book socialist" or the orthodox marxist, which he already did in Homage to Catalonia. He's criticizing the soviet union's socialism, not the CNT-FAI's one.
How about a system which:
1. Acknowledges the realities of automation and globalization
2. Does not have maximum employment and perpetual growth as primary goals
3. Does not create artificial scarcity
4. Understands the broken window fallacy
Also, there's a huge difference between pointing out problems and pointing out solutions.
Climate change says the cost of not switching is far greater. Also, that's what phased roll outs are for.
>there's a huge difference between pointing out problems and pointing out solutions.
Obviously... But we can't find a solution without first defining and understanding the problem.
The first phase of the systems development life cycle requires you to define (and agree upon) high level goals/requirements/parameters, which is what I was doing.
Yes, but when people ask for a system, you can't just give them that list of goals as an answer. Not only is it not a system, but agreeing on goals doesn't make a system meeting all of them logically possible much less practical.
When someone asks for a satisfactory alternative that doesn't yet exist, intelligent creative people think about ways to make a new one. Are you suggesting we don't do that?
>agreeing on goals doesn't make a system meeting all of them logically possible much less practical.
False. Making sure users values align with the system goals is crucial for a successful, practical system that people want to use.
I think you'd have got a better response if you were clearer that that's what you were trying to do. "I don't know of a system but if we're to try and come up with one, [...]" or similar.
> >agreeing on goals doesn't make a system meeting all of them logically possible much less practical.
> False. Making sure users values align with the system goals is crucial for a successful, practical system that people want to use.
Making sure goals align with values is worthwhile, but it doesn't answer the question of whether a system that achieves all of those goals is possible.
In a different context, we can have as many meetings as we want where we all agree that maintaining complete consistency and availability while being robust to partitioning is very important and aligned with what we want out of our distributed system; that doesn't mean we're going to get a system that reaches those goals.
Of course, it's fair to say that the discussion of what goals to trade away against others should be a separate process from getting everything we might want on the table - but again, you should make it clear that that's what you're doing up front.
Perhaps you're right, though I'm sure the responses would also have been better if the system in question was an actual objective, technical system and not an ideological system. Decades of propaganda has caused many to automatically attack anyone who dares question the status quo economic aparatus.
2. “Socialism” is present and a fundamental part of (probably) every government on earth, in terms of public education, healthcare, and countless other public services.
3. The US could use some public services it is lacking right now, like national healthcare—our private costs are obscene.
You can frame socialism in terms of reduced shared costs. In my experience, this is an effective pitch to otherwise politically apathetic people.
> on the same issues the major alternatives attempted in the 20th century were actually far, far worse
Actually, I’d take national health care over the current situation in the US any day.
I’d hazard a guess that there are multiple places where most americans could appreciate socialist approaches to running public services.
I’m curious as to what specifically you’re talking about when saying capitalism did far better in every regard in every problem in the 20th century, because you seem emphatic.
The main alternatives to the system originally described as “capitalism” that was tried in states which already had developed capitalist economies in the 20th century were blends of elements of democratic socialism with capitalism that have since been dubbed the “modern mixed economy”; they were so successful compared to actual capitalism that they have essentially completely replaced it in the West, while there are persistent efforts (which sometimes succeed in driving some policy) from the capitalist class to drag the West back to (or at least toward) 19th Century capitalism.
(The only other alternative tried in any significt way in the developed West in the 20th Century was autocratic fascist corporatism, which, yes, is far, far worse than liberal capitalism.)
And the main alternative to that regressive pro-capitalist drive proposed in the modern West (aside from simply preserving the status quo design of the mixed economy) is simply progressively implementing more elements of democratic socialism, not adopting Leninism or any of the other attempts made in the 20th century outside of the developed West that attempt to bypass rather than advance from capitalism.
Though, I guess, it's worth noting that autocratic fascist corporatism still seems to have some adherents.
With this, right of return for anyone living in diaspora.
We can transition from capitalism to that via an intermediate stage of anarcho-syndicalism with syndicates that own property and pay taxes.
Capitalism isn’t “evil” or “useless” it’s just a temporary stage in our development.
This sounds like democratic socialism with some arbitrary restriction on polity scope.
> With this, right of return for anyone living in diaspora.
How do you concretely define this? This would be a big deal with existing scale polities, but it with your implied smaller polities, it becomes an even hotter issue.
> Capitalism isn’t “evil” or “useless” it’s just a temporary stage in our development.
Agreed.
There's no implication of socialism, but yes I expect some form of democrasy could be involved.
All laws are "arbitrary restrictions on policy scope".
> How do you concretely define [right of return]?
I don't have any strong expectations about the details. In my head as a straw man is something like:
If you (A) were born in a place, or (B) lived there for 4 years before the age of 20, you can claim it as your homeland. You may claim up to two homelands. Half of every 10,000 hectare region on earth must be reserved to be split equally among indigenous people.
I agree it'd be a hot sell. I see it more as a guiding principle than a practical global policy proposal. I believe we will end up in a world that approximates that policy, through gradual embrace of caring policies in all locales.
Corporate structure: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Electoral system:
What we have now - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
Range voting - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFG0sXIig
Alternative vote - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE
Single transferrable vote - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
Marx wrote about the theory of societal evolution; That there are certain phases civilization must pass through. The communism he wrote about would have to be very far down the road, 100+ years (IMO). This does not mean people sit back and do nothing, we still would have to work towards it. (Most) Capitalists profit from the status quo, and work to keep in place systems to maintain their spot in the hierarchy. Thus the antiquated electoral system in the USA, and the top heavy power/pay structures of business.
TL;DR: give the average person more of a say/choice in the world they live in (politics/workplace), and they will find their way forward. (IMO)
But sure, lets praise capitalism!
Alternate systems have not worked out so well, as you know. Communist planned economies led to the starvation of tens of millions, and that number increases to hundreds of millions when you add the persecution, jailing, and sometimes immediate execution of citizens of Communists states that had a history of political activity of the wrong sort. Recall that in Soviet Russia it was beneficial for each individual to "inform" on their neighbours to the KGB, so that they could claim their apartment. And it's suspected that Vladmir Putin is actually the richest person in the world.
Colonialism and slavery are pretty rough, but they are not a product of capitalism as much as a product of human malevolence and brutality. I'm sure you would find evidence of colonialism and slavery in pre-civilization times and in non-capitalist societies, so that argument falls flat.
Also, regarding the 8 richest individuals - If the rest of the world is getting on OK, why should we not have a couple of super rich people around? Why is that inherently bad? Why do _you_ think you should have a say of where that money belongs, exactly?
Why is that not a product of human malevolence and brutality?
I'm sure you would find evidence of persecution, jailing and sometimes execution of citizens in pre-civilization.
Imagine I want to send a rocket to Mars. And then I go and check the prices and see these companies want hundreds of millions of dollars to launch one. That makes me confused. The materials to make that rocket cost at most on the order of tens of millions of dollars, and labor certainly doesn't explain the rest. I bet I could make one for less. And it turns out I can. Then a couple of decades later, I'm the biggest rocket supplier on the planet. In a communist system your only option there would be to try to appeal to the bureaucracy, and if you're lucky you might eventually, some years later, get a reply to your filing of form FNE-34821.43-z: 'We disagree. Thanks for your input, comrade.' Of course this probably isn't a fair comparison. In a communist system nobody would ever have the resources to even dream of being able to do something like launch rockets to Mars. Instead you'd have to beg old entrenched government bureaucrats to do it. I'm wouldn't hold my breath.
This notion of an economic system being driven by the people instead of being driven by the government is why in a capitalist system you're generally free to argue for a communist system - with some unfortunate exceptions, yet in a communist system arguing for capitalism is often enough to get you 'disappeared' - with some fortunate exceptions. Maybe even more visibly in a capitalist system you could even start a communistic system. Want to buy 5000 acres of land and start communitopia? Feel free to! Want to buy 5,000 acres of land and start capitalitopia in a communist nation? It's simply not possible.
And we also saw this exact scenario play out in space. We never really managed to bring space to into the capitalist system. And once the government 'won' the space race, their interests shifted from space. Not only did progress halt but we technologically regressed. We put a man on the moon in 1969. Today, half a century later, we're struggling just to try to send a man around the moon - let alone land on it. No human has left low earth orbit since 1972! But at the same time space has now been genuinely introduced into the capitalist system and so long as the people have a desire for more, the odds of us entering into another 50 year regression are rapidly approaching 0.
This is demonstrably false. Extreme poverty was simply the state of the world until a few centuries back. In 1820 more than 90% of the world was living in extreme poverty.
It's absurd to claim a single diffuse concept like capitalism was responsible for lifting people out of poverty, it's just as absurd to claim it was responsible for putting them there.
Keep in mind most of this extreme poverty was eliminated in Asia, and in particular China. Unfortunately China began to liberalize its markets and realize its demographic dividend in the early 80s, at the same time, so I'm not sure about that case.
Again in India, liberalization and falling birthrates happened together in the 1990s.
25 years ago was 1993, two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It's an arbitrary time frame, perhaps conveniently selected. That said, market economies spread rapidly throughout the second world during the 90s, and the Soviet subsidies that had kept a number of command economy-leaning third world countries were cut off, forcing liberalization.
The most powerful effect of this was the widespread loss of belief in the effectiveness of command economies. With the end of the USSR the major ideological opponent of capitalism collapsed. World historical event -> world-wide change in outcomes is too big a correlation to dismiss.
That said it's tough to tease out what is driving what, economics or demographics. I do think that human flourishing occurs when ideology gets out of the way of individuals pursuing their own interests, whether their interests include opening a small business or not birthing children for the motherland.
So I am not able to say, "it's because of capitalism," or, "it's because of contraception and female education." I am confident that we can say, "ideology and authoritarianism make things worse."
This was in part natural advancement as it is exponential and we eventually just hit explosive growth, but the environment was helped along with capitalism, free markets, and major world wars which encouraged the spread of information and trade.
But the toxicity of capitalism often stems from the polarized debate, I don't actually think many wants capitalism without regulation, or communism without free property rights... but it's hard to argue for the sane middle ground when you're attacked from both sides.
However those reserves of labour are largely getting tapped out. Wages for factory workers in China have been rising dramatically for a while now. There are other challenges coming , such as increased automation, but again that's not really directly the fault of capitalism. Meanwhile while wage growth has slowed, we've all benefited hugely from the cheap goods and services enabled by these changes. I really think it's much more about technological and demographic changes rather than capitalism per se. If anything, we've suffered from too much economic development, technological advances and global growth.
It's rarely as simple as supply and demand, but there seems to me to be a correlation between stagnant wages and large increases in the labor pool.
Huh, without non-capitalist moves (socialist, communistic) then we'd still have mills that pay in their own currency, that you can only spend in the shop that the rich owner also owns; we'd still have voting as a reserved right for rich landowners. That's capitalism.
All the good bits seem to be there only because of past riots and uprisings and only measured to subdue the population enough to keep us in our place.
Capitalism is assigning the resources of a 100,000 people to just one person because that person already has more than enough. How can you say that's a functional system? It's certainly not moral.
"Oh, but fascist dictatorships are worse"; well great. Eat your dogshit sandwich like a good prole because cat-shit tastes worse ... smh
The non-capitalist moves that stopped that nonsense were union moves, not socialistic or communistic.
> ... we'd still have voting as a reserved right for rich landowners. That's capitalism.
That's feudalism, not capitalism. It was democracy that undid that nonsense, not socialism or communism.
The rest of your rant shows that you are very bitter, but it does nothing to either enlighten or persuade.
Also capitalism is in no way in opposition to other individual freedoms such as unionism, liberal democracy, etc. You can have capitalism without them, just look at China, but I would argue that as a freedom, capitalism is most naturally aligned with other such personal freedoms.
As you point out rubber baron and oligarchic systems are based on suppressing freedoms, including often individual rights over capital. Corporate scrip isn’t capital, so clearly it’s iuse is actually anti-capitalist by restricting individual rights over capital.
The distribution of resources according to what will make the rich richer is not the best way. The private ownership of means of production is simply theft, there's no need for it and no moral justification.
Ultimately we're greedy by nature; capitalism rewards that greed, feeds it and deifies it.
I haven't set out to persuade you; if you seek to persuade yourself of what is just I have no doubt you will reject capitalism.
If I have some money, and you have some money, and I buy a tool and you buy some beer, I have a tool and you don't - so I'm stealing from you? [Edit: Note that the "means of production" can be as simple as a wrench, or a sewing machine, or a welder.] Step away from the marxist koolaid, you've had a bit much...
And you're only a half step away from theft yourself. Stating that "the private ownership of means of production is theft" leads almost inevitably to "therefore the public need to take back the means of production from those who have them". That's theft.
> I haven't set out to persuade you
You sure haven't. Stating as fact things that are completely outrageous from the other person's perspective is not a very good tactic of persuasion.
> ... if you seek to persuade yourself of what is just I have no doubt you will reject capitalism.
You should doubt. You should also find a better line; "if you really seek truth and justice you'll agree with me" is a manipulative cop-out. You want me to be persuaded? Make a convincing argument that makes sense to someone who doesn't already agree with you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
I think it's disingenuous to think the only way workers can own the means of production is to take them from someone else.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
I think it's disingenuous to think the only way workers can own the means of production is to take them from someone else.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
The biggest reason for reduction in extreme poverty over the last decades is the responsibility of the Chinese state. The fastest drop in family size ever was overseen by the totalitarian Iranian government.
Beware easy one line explanations.
That liberalism is associated with progressivism seems to take away from progressive right-wingers which may believe in the inherent inequality of certain inevitable social structures, but work to abolish or reform broken regulation.
I do not intend to imply my political beliefs here. I'm simply saying perhaps you meant progressive.
No. Not in either of the sensed “liberalism” is currently used. Equality, yes, in a manner particularly opposed to the structural inequities of capitalism, but not liberalism, which is either about capitalism or a viewpoint which seeks to maintain capitalism a while moderating certain inequities within it, depending on which of th current usages of “liberalism” you refer to.
> I believe what you meant was as a radical progressive
“Radical progressive” is a phrase used in US politics go refer to a certain range of left-wing positions.
> That liberalism is associated with progressivism
It's not, though one of the senses of liberalism is adjacent to progressivism.
> seems to take away from progressive right-wingers
While the term “progressive right-wingers” may not be nonsensical in some historical usages of “progressive”, it is simply oxymoronic in the current usage.
> which may believe in the inherent inequality of certain inevitable social structures, but work to abolish or reform broken regulation.
You seem to be using “progressive” as simply anyone who seeks change from the status quo to realize their political values, which is a novel use.
The grandparent used “radical leftist” correctly.
Asssuming the wiki you are referring to is Wikipedia, you seem to have paid attention only to the first sentence of each article.
If you're just going to debate a strawman instead of the actual poster and their actual comment, why bother showing up?
This is a tricky question. Easily the biggest factor is china. China being the most populous nation was the largest source of poverty a few decades ago and now is the largest source of reduction of poverty. They lifted 680 million people out of poverty by 2010. Today, that number is probably approaching 800 or 900 million due to their economic growth.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/06/01/towards-the-end...
So do we credit the "communism" of the chinese communist party? Do we credit capitalism? Do we credit chinese communism management of capitalism? Do we credit foreign investment? Chinese entrepreneurship? It all depends on your political bias. Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan.
Also, poverty is a very political/strange concept. A poor city dweller struggling to make ends but who has a smartphone and nice sneakers will not be in poverty. But a farmer who owns his land, is independent and grows enough food to live comfortably but has no smartphones or sneakers would be seen as being in exreme poverty. Ultimately, reduction of poverty is simply a result of moving farmers and stuffing them into large cities and how dependent they are on the "state". The less poverty you are in, the more you are dependent on society for life's essentials.
Also, poverty decreasing is great, but in the same time period, wealth inequality has increased drastically. Imagine poverty of weapons. Both of us are in extreme weapons poverty ( we have no weapons ). You get a nerf gun and I get a shotgun. Weapons poverty is wiped out. We should celebrate right? It's "great" that poverty decreased, but the differential in power between me and you skyrocketed.
Look at china. Their poverty has decreased dramatically. But the power differential between the powerful and everyone else has increased dramatically as wealth inequality skyrocketed. Is this really a good thing? The wealth inequality funding "digital dictatorship" and tyranny?
This is the same diversion tactic some people use about wealth not being a zero sum game. In purely terms of wealth, it is not a zero sum game. But wealth translates into power. And power certainly is a zero sum game. So if you got $10 and I got $10,000,000, in terms of wealth, both of us are doing better. But in terms of power, my power increased drastically while yours barely budged.
> I really feel like it's a shame that word is almost toxic in intellectual circles.
It is because it's opinions based on political biases. But economists and political "scientists" do a great job lying to us that their field is a "science" with the same credibility of physics. It is not. There is no objective truth because it's not in the realm of the empirical but societal/political. You'd have less toxicity in a debate between a christian, jew and muslim on who is the one true god.
We've seen that before. The Thousand-year Reich lasted 12 years. Communism in Russia was untouchable... until it wasn't. Right now the government of North Korea looks unchangeable, and China and Iran look close. But I predict that, in a generation, at least two out of the three will be gone.
Say there's mass economic strife, and people want to revolt. Ten people suddenly get the idea to overthrow the government. They organize a get together in the woods, with no technology allowed. Facial recognition can tell the ten of them joined as a group, logs showed they all did not use any technology for a period of hours, they weren't seen in any camera or microphone database for hours... Hmm, very suspicious. An automated system can and will recognize these factors and the group will be quickly sent for reeducation.
Once the technology passes a tipping point, there's simply no way back. The technology enables the existing power structure to be maintained forever.
And that's assuming human soldiers are involved. At some point - maybe 50 or maybe 150 years from now - robotics will be advanced enough that you won't even need cooperation of soldiers, and at that point the entire population can be controlled with the push of a button.
The way new capital reaches the third world can be attributed to globalization of market circuits, for instance, China is currently investing into Africa much like the first world did to China in the past.
Of course, if you define the terminology differently, say you’re an Austrian Economist, the above explanation might appear unintelligable.
1. More people now live in a market economy which produces more goods and services for everyone, even poor people
2. Better leadership. Eg. In 1976 Mao in a single act greatly improved the trajectory of most of the world's poor - he died.
3. End of cold war meant end of US and Soviet support for many civil wars and ugly dictatorships.
4. Globalization and industrialization
5. Science and technology
What has changed is our idea of what wealth is, and what poverty is, and I think these notions will continue to change.
> Extreme poverty, abject poverty, absolute poverty, destitution, or penury, was originally defined by the United Nations in 1995 as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services."
IMHO, this is a very timeless definition as well.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
To be clear, if you earn $760 a year, by the World Bank’s definition, you’re not extremely poor. By that definition homeless beggars in the US don’t live in extreme poverty, because they make more than that panhandling.
I really do think it’s worth considering the degree to which this definition is designed primarily to produce “victories” like the ones being celebrated here.
@carlosdp: So one of the richest humans of all time approves of a book telling people that the world he helped to create is better than they think? Hm.
This is the book by Hans Rosling right? The one that cherry picks data shamelessly to make the point he clearly wanted to make before he researched it? The one panned by Business Insider, not the most notably loon left publication ever?
According to Business Insider, Rosling "misses critical wrinkles in the data" and has not presented "the whole story".
From Wikipedia:
Although Rosling argues that the future will be better than expected because birth rates are stabilizing, life expectancy around the world is increasing, the gender gap is nearly closed, and the extremely impoverished population is shrinking, others point out that populations are still expanding (with many still under-nourished), life expectancy in the US is decreasing, the gender gap is only nearly closed in education and not in employment, and extreme wealth has become more extreme.
It seems like being a bit skeptical of people selling Panglossian visions, given how much people want to believe them, might not hurt. That’s not to advocate the kind of doom and gloom which forgets that we have antibiotics, indoor plumbing, and electric lights. It is however worth keeping an eye on worrying trends like antibiotic resistance, climate change, and just how many people don’t have indoor plumbing, safe water, and electric lights.
I highly recommend reading Factfulness.
This should be obvious even without the book. :)
You can tell from the percentage of the labour force who worked on farms that most people couldn't have been wealthy, and the industrial revolution changed everything.
https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
Being a peasant was awful too, mind.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agriculture-value-added-p...
Shocking that corn and cow producers in India are 90% less productive than in the US.
And 200 years ago most people were essentially homeless.
In a weird way, they had it better than our current homeless.
At least they had a fighting chance to better their condition?
Would I rather be in extreme poverty in California 200 years ago; Yes--on so many levels.
And yes, I would rather take my chance fighting Indians, then dealing with our "helpful" police squads?
(Miwok Indians were passive.)
I see the harrasement our homeless have to deal with, and it's ugly.
Edit: Evidence suggests thst it is indeed, semantic fuckery. The World Bank is really only saying that three quarters of a billion people earn less than $757 a year.
Based on my own experience of living in a poor neighborhood in a very poor country for a long time now, I am always skeptical of these claims for reasons that would be too long to list out. Inflation and increases in the cost of food and rent here have far outpaced the World Bank metrics ($1.25 in 2005, $1.90 as of 2015) and the incomes of the average person (~$100-150 a month).
But it's also ethically skewed. I have friends who have travelled through the poorest parts of Africa, and they universally return with stories about how "poor" Africans are some of the happiest, friendliest, most generous, and most contented people they've met.
That may be rose-tinted, but it's naive to dismiss it out of hand.
Economic metrics aren't necessarily humane, and the Western economic treadmill - with its precariousness, acquisitiveness, and narcissism - isn't necessarily the ideal destination for any culture.
But - their lives are incredibly hard. No protection from the state, no future, at mercy of anybody more rich than them (=anybody else), it doesn't matter how good you are, you will never be given a fair chance to achieve anything in society. Nobody cares if you live or die, how you suffer, how unfair your life is. There isn't even such a basic mentality that 'I deserve more in life than this', because countless generations before never achieved anything.
And specifically for India, the effin' idiotic caste system makes all others content with the situation, because 'this is how things are supposed to be', 'they accrued bad karma in their previous lives' and so on. It's extremely good that this system is slowly dying, but it will take far too long in my opinion, especially in rural areas.
Their life is reduced to day-to-day survival, which makes everything simpler. They don't have lofty goals for life, and surviving OK yet another day is a success. Is this a simplicity you want to have compared to western style of life? I don't think so.
However, people can be rich in relationships and materially poor, or incredibly wealthy and yet have a string of broken relationships. Look at divorce rates, or even simply people living together, then breaking up and finding new partners in the United States, where economically speaking people live in one of the richest countries in the world.
Does anyone know of economic metrics that attempt to measure and/or account for relational and/or community richness or poverty?
There is a huge difference between making 2 dollars a day and making 4 or 8. This is long before we get to the rich end of the scale.
- Is this because better communications makes them better reported?
- or are there really more natural disasters?
I suspect the effect of natural disasters is also greater because of more people. A larger global population means more people are likely to be in the vicinity of natural phenomena, and higher population density means more people can potentially get into trouble at one time.
One of your links refers to hurricane activity, where there seems to be less evidence of links with climate change.
30+ years ago (pre-CNN), an earthquake in Jakarta, or a typhoon reaching Thailand might get a blurb on an inner page of the NY Times. Those events certainly wouldn't have something like Weather Channel reporters on site pretending to brace themselves in the wind to dramatize the shot...
Beyond "if it bleeds it reads" media reporting, we now have exponentially more ways to observe the occurrence of natural disasters globally than we did even 20 years ago. Statistically these things should probably be observed and compared over climatological and geological scales before we can determine if there are abnormally more or less natural disasters.
I find this similar to how the over-reporting of child abductions and other black swan crimes led to helicopter parenting. Hyper awareness of every single one of these events, rare though they may be statistically, gives the appearance of "a lot more".
- lots more people, so if there is a natural disaster, someone is going to be there to be affected by it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
I haven't yet read the book, but I recently heard opposing statistics that washing machines don't necessarily free up much time, but they dramatically increase the amount of laundry done and expected cleanliness of clothing. (Jevons paradox)
I suspect the truth is mixed, and that at lower income levels, it probably saves a lot of time, and at higher income levels, "consumption" of clean clothing dominates.
There is a lot more development, infrastructure, happiness and success here than the majority of "First Worlders" have any notion of. Even when I tell my family directly they don't really believe me.
4G Internet, chip n pin (or contactless) Credit card payments, multi lane freeways, high rise buildings and of course electricity and drinking water. That's not just South Africa either, all of those exist in Rep. Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Zambia just to name a few examples of where people think of "poverty".
I have come to the conclusion that anyone who hasn't actually set food on this continent (and ventured outside a guided "safari") has no way to discover the truth about this place. There is no media outlet that actual portrays an accurate picture, I have never even seen one that gets close.
In conclusion, I don’t dispute what you say, there is a great deal of wonderful progress on the continent, but the narrative should not be either/or, and of course varies by country, but it’s neither dystopian famine, or development utopia.
I don’t write this because I’m a doom and gloom merchant. It’s because we need to get real about investing sufficiently to course correct.
Edit: here’s Grantham’s essay:
https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-comment...
I certainly am not pro-development at all costs. Heck, I choose to live in the Yukon precisely because it's not Vancouver or Toronto.
I hope "Africa" can see what the West has done, learn from it, and do a better job instead of just blindly going down the same path and screwing things up in the same ways.
For ages, I've been trying to think of way to monetize this ignorance (or information asymmetry, if you're feeling generous). The only advantage I know is that this ignorance results is lack of first-world competition, which can be huge advantage
Related: Some fun questions I like to lead with when discussing Africa and the coming miracle there are:
Where is the Great Wall of Africa/Nigeria? Hint: It's not on dry land ;)
In numbers of Californias, how many people will live in Kinshasa by 2099?
How fast is the bullet train from Nairobi to Mombasa? Who financed it?
However as Jeremy Grantham (the British Warren Buffet) warns, these current improvements may have been bought at the expense of future losses as we have destabilized the climate and mined the soils to achieve the gains of recent years.
Grantham projects 40% loss in soil productivity in a much more populated world.
This is not to knock these fantastic advances, but we now need to double down on ensuring they are sustainable.
Here’s Grantham’s paper. It’s a long but fascinating and wel-written read.
https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-comment...
Re CO2 production, as per Grantham’s paper, there is a radical increase in renewable energy supply taking place. It still only gets us 1/3 of the way to avoiding 2 degree warming.
Edit: Just to anticipate the obligatory "Venezuala communist -> bad outcome" comment: Yes, but why are they communist?
Compare how? What do you mean will happen?
Even in its deepest crises, India's army did not play kingmaker. Furthermore, India's federated structure–while annoying to reformers–checks the power of aspiring dictators. Every uneducated population, it seems, elects populists from time to time. The damage they can do in India appears to be more limited than the damage done to Venezuela by Chavez and Maduro. Venezuela will probably be an impoverished nation for decades; India has a chance of becoming a middle-income or even developed country by 2050.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2018;&mar...
Or maybe you can't understand the world with a few simple abstract high level concepts.....
And this didn't used to just be a story of Mideastern nations. This was the story of the world. The one thing that changed this was nukes. Mutually assured destruction is why the Cold War is now called the Cold War, and not World War 3. And it's why direct confrontation between developed nations has really become a thing of the past. Countries like China would never have been able to develop if not for the peace and stability that nuclear weapons have enabled. We can even look to nations like India. It's surreal to imagine that until 1947 that entire nation was just a property of the British Empire. Even the notion of a British Empire is surreal! But now that they have gained their independence and are a nuclear nation, they are also gradually increasing in prosperity as Indian decisions are being made to put Indians first. And as a nuclear power their decisions, independence, and developments are all effectively guaranteed, at least until we develop technology that can effectively render nukes harmless.
Possessing nuclear weapons is a powerful Peace hack. Once you have them no one can really invade you without the threat of suffering massive collateral damage.
If we want to talk about the raw numbers of people getting out of extreme poverty, it follows that India and China acquiring a nuclear deterrent specifically had the biggest impact as their populations are so large.