He wrote a scathing article falsely claiming that the poverty rate was increasing (contra to Pinker's claim), when according to his own data in that same article - it was actually steadily decreasing.
This is interesting because Max Roser makes his case that he's implicitly not supporting colonialism because most economic expansion happened after colonialism.
Except that the established colonies of Canada, Australia, NZ did exceedingly well, as did the long standing colony Hong Kong.
Japan and South Korea (to some extent Taiwan), rebuilt after the war(s) under Anglo-American protection and reformation, also did very well, far better than most.
Singapore? Continued it's colonial style operations.
Vietnam? No so good.
The more colonialism there 'was' the better they've done in recent years, unconditionally. Colonialism for the most part, was an early form of economic globalization, however unfair it was is a different issue.
One general flaw with any of these historical graphs concerning poverty, standard of living, etc. is that we don't have good data for most countries going back that far. The graphs are making some big assumptions for the older, spotty data.
> Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless.
> The data for 1820–1970 comes from a source (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002) that draws on the Maddison database on world GDP. That data was never intended to assess poverty, but rather the distribution of GDP — and that for only a limited range of countries. Data for the Global South is particularly thin, and there is very little that exists for prior to 1900. The data is not robust enough to draw meaningful conclusions about what was happening to people’s livelihoods during the colonial period.
> First of all, if you want to assess the change in global poverty in an ideologically neutral way, why on Earth would you exclude China?
> is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation
Concisely stated, these people are talking past one another about whether "extreme poverty" is a static or dynamic measure. Yes the UN tries to keep adjusting "extreme poverty" by inflation but as others have stated and common sense dictates, extreme poverty is a matter of lack-of-access. By that measure, the entire planetary population has slowly integrated, which makes Noah's view seem correct to him. This is heavily skewed by subsistence farming being counted as in the same kind of extreme poverty, which doesn't mean much sense to me. Not sure why anyone would care about this kind of finger-wagging.
Yes, and Noah Smith never seems to address Jason Hickle's point that the evidence based poverty line should be $7.40. And it seems that if that point holds, as Smith never actually challenges the point that the population beneath that line has actually gone up while "extreme poverty" has gone down (a point both agree on), then Smith isn't left with much of a position.
Think about South Africa under apartheid. It was doing great financially. Much better than most (or all) African countries was it not? Yet much of its population didn't have a right to vote.
What good is financial progress if most of it goes to a minority and much of the population can not make things better because they cannot even vote?
And Southern States before Civil War, were also doing great financially. Is that all that's worth discussing?
The discussion isn't about GDP but about % of the population in poverty. If you have a country where the bulk of the population suffers in poverty while an elite does very well, that country will look great in terms of GDP, but the poverty stats will show the truth.
You're arguing a separate point entirely, which I wager is why you're getting downvoted. It doesn't follow logically.
The author isn't arguing that we should ignore all of the issues afflicting people across the globe and only look at the poverty line. He's countering the claim that people have not been lifted out of poverty.
When people switch from barter to market (currency), does that count as "making more money" and poverty reduction in these stats?
Some getting a job as a cleaner but paying someone else to cook their food, and paying for the commute, isn't a real improvement in quality of life and reduction in poverty. Specialization and economy of scale is great, but at the low end of labor skill, "dollarizing" work at the expense of home economics and barter, is a sham.
If you were a historian trying to estimate things like historical poverty rate then this (and the “gdp” of subsistence farming or home crafts like spinning and weaving cloth for one’s own clothes) would, I hope, be one of the first things you would consider. Fortunately historians do consider this and work hard to produce results that don’t naively apply today’s economic systems and metrics to the past.
See the note above the distribution curves in the post: “None market income (e.g. through home production and subsistence farming) is taken into account.”
> It seems to envision a world that is zero-sum, or close to it, with rich countries hoovering up the riches that should be flowing to the Global South.
Hickel's research makes the argument that this hoovering is exactly what is happening, on a massive scale:
> Rather than being drained dry, [the global south] are advancing, growing their share of the global pie even as they deliver better lives to their own poorest citizens.
Unfairness isn't good. They probably agree that things are unfair and should be better.
Hickel is saying ~you're wrong about poverty because the situation is unfair~
Noah Smith is saying ~OK. But I'm not wrong about the fact that poverty is decreasing and the situation is improving.~
I do wonder if there will ever be a reevaluation and integration of the Soviet Union in Western thought, one free of the context of needing to prove ourselves better than that system.
For all its horrors and atrocities, the Soviet economy grew, and worked. Oh, not very well. But better than 0% growth. In 1910 the average Russian was an illiterate peasant. In 1980 the average Russian was a literate urban dweller with electricity and indoor toilets on their floor with twice the life expectancy of their great-grandparents.
This is, again, not intended as a defence of that monstrous system. It can be condemned on purely moral grounds alone, in my opinion. And it was not as efficient by most analyses, either. Still, I bring it up because, as a counter-example, it complicates both of the commonly made assertions mentioned in the article: that poverty hasn't decreased in any meaningful sense, and that the capitalist system is the only means of greater than 0% growth in material production.
From 1919 to 1959 the Soviet Union fought a civil war, a world war in which they bore the brunt of the fighting in the European theater, faced famine, and purges and also managed to be the first to put a man in orbit. Tragedy and triumph all in the span of 40 years. They had impressive accomplishments along with some truly dark human rights abuses.
> In 1910 the average Russian was an illiterate peasant
On the eve of World War I, Finland and Russia were on near parity in terms of GDP per capita. It's GDP per capita was only 12% higher than the rest of the Empire. By the end of the Soviet Union, Finland has nearly three times the GDP of the USSR.
If the Russian Revolution had installed a liberal democratic government (as it did in the case of Finland), Russia would most probably look like a Nordic country today.
One might argue that the vastly increased computing power and big data systems of today have made the Soviet central economy more feasible than ever. Gigantic multinational firms generally operate internally as a planned economy in and of themselves in just such a fashion. This is often cited as a reason for firms to grow in the first place; efficient allocation of capital and resources within the firm.
The trick is to subject that system to democratic control in a sustainable way.
The Soviet economy improved early in 20th Century, as did most thanks to industrialization, but by the end of the Cold War the economy was largely an illusion outside of the military spending. That's why the Cold War ended -- non-"revolutionary" leaders realized the Soviet Communist system was an utter failure economically.
The author made the assertion that it was 'not due to free market capitalism' while essentially using facts to demonstrate that this was the case.
When a nation is poor and backwards, due to, gosh, 50 years of 'Central Planning' inspired by Marx, well then it's not that hard for the state to do things like 'build roads'.
But factories in China, Tencent, DiDi etc. are not state creations. State supported, yes, and ultimately 'state controlled' (i.e. they state can do as they please with them), but it's considerably more 'free market' than otherwise.
It's ridiculous to split hairs by pointing out 'some of India's growth started in the 1980's' or that 'some things in China are state directed' when overwhelmingly the change was towards free markets, in some cases, with state oversight and control but not direction or planning by and large. China is one of the most 'free market' places on earth, lacking in all sorts of regulation - you just have to remember that 'for the important things', the CCP is in charge. (I should add that the banks are state owned and their loans are directed, however, they are backed by the Central Bank which is entirely politicized and is a primary driver of actual influence.)
The Communist Manifesto starts with a chapter praising capitalism for bringing unheard of increases in productivity, growth. Even for trade serving as a "battering ram" that drives down xenophobia. Here's a quote praising capitalism:
> The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
He goes on to praise the advances brought by "free competition". Then he turns the tables and argues that the reason capitalism will eventually fail is that it is too efficient: That it will eventually bring crises of simultaneous over-production and under-employment; that it will automate away employment to the point that the proportion who can afford to buy their products will be unable to consume all that it can produce.
"Central Planning" has no basis in Marx.
Central planning is a largely Stalinist conception, developed out of ashes of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War. Lenin saw how it failed, hence New Economic Policy, which re-opened some markets and allowed for a softening of planning similar to what Deng later did in China. It was Stalin who undid most of those reforms again after Lenins death, and who went even further in making centralised planning a dogma, and it was based on his wilful misinterpretation of Lenins ideas, not on Marx.
Industrial government controlled policy based capitalism is how all Asian Tigers became rich. Big Chinese companies grow in in government controlled financial environment that supports them.
The reduction in poverty is linked to the overwhelming expansions of science and technology. Most of the modern economy was impossible due to knowledge constraints in 1700.
And it isn't so much that capitalism is a cause, as all the things that aren't capitalism absolutely scupper technological progress. Eg, in extreme cases bureaucrats literally ban technological progress because it is too disruptive (see, for example, encryption).
> all the things that aren't capitalism absolutely scupper technological progress
This is wildly wrong. Technological progress has literally existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Even under capitalism, technological progress often happens in universities with government money, often for military or claimed military purposes. For example, everything to do with the base of computer science has been created in academia and the military sector, before it was donated by government to private corporations.
[+] [-] _Microft|5 years ago|reply
https://www.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1378730932308471809
If you prefer blog-style formatted text over the Twitter UI, look here:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1378730932308471809.html
[+] [-] hntrader|5 years ago|reply
He wrote a scathing article falsely claiming that the poverty rate was increasing (contra to Pinker's claim), when according to his own data in that same article - it was actually steadily decreasing.
I've come to see him as a bad faith actor.
[+] [-] ttiurani|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1380548416082735107
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
Except that the established colonies of Canada, Australia, NZ did exceedingly well, as did the long standing colony Hong Kong.
Japan and South Korea (to some extent Taiwan), rebuilt after the war(s) under Anglo-American protection and reformation, also did very well, far better than most.
Singapore? Continued it's colonial style operations.
Vietnam? No so good.
The more colonialism there 'was' the better they've done in recent years, unconditionally. Colonialism for the most part, was an early form of economic globalization, however unfair it was is a different issue.
It's only be controversial to ideologues.
[+] [-] sacomo|5 years ago|reply
> Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful, and going back to as early as 1820 is more or less meaningless.
> The data for 1820–1970 comes from a source (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002) that draws on the Maddison database on world GDP. That data was never intended to assess poverty, but rather the distribution of GDP — and that for only a limited range of countries. Data for the Global South is particularly thin, and there is very little that exists for prior to 1900. The data is not robust enough to draw meaningful conclusions about what was happening to people’s livelihoods during the colonial period.
[+] [-] lwansbrough|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Supermancho|5 years ago|reply
> is due not to the neoliberal markets that you espouse but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation
Concisely stated, these people are talking past one another about whether "extreme poverty" is a static or dynamic measure. Yes the UN tries to keep adjusting "extreme poverty" by inflation but as others have stated and common sense dictates, extreme poverty is a matter of lack-of-access. By that measure, the entire planetary population has slowly integrated, which makes Noah's view seem correct to him. This is heavily skewed by subsistence farming being counted as in the same kind of extreme poverty, which doesn't mean much sense to me. Not sure why anyone would care about this kind of finger-wagging.
[+] [-] albatruss|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galaxyLogic|5 years ago|reply
What good is financial progress if most of it goes to a minority and much of the population can not make things better because they cannot even vote?
And Southern States before Civil War, were also doing great financially. Is that all that's worth discussing?
[+] [-] lolinder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|5 years ago|reply
The author isn't arguing that we should ignore all of the issues afflicting people across the globe and only look at the poverty line. He's countering the claim that people have not been lifted out of poverty.
[+] [-] barry-cotter|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lupire|5 years ago|reply
Some getting a job as a cleaner but paying someone else to cook their food, and paying for the commute, isn't a real improvement in quality of life and reduction in poverty. Specialization and economy of scale is great, but at the low end of labor skill, "dollarizing" work at the expense of home economics and barter, is a sham.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ma8ee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttiurani|5 years ago|reply
Hickel's research makes the argument that this hoovering is exactly what is happening, on a massive scale:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2021.18...
If Noah Smith wants to rebuke this argument, he can't just "as if" it away. He needs to do the research that proves otherwise.
[+] [-] calt|5 years ago|reply
In the very next paragraph:
> Rather than being drained dry, [the global south] are advancing, growing their share of the global pie even as they deliver better lives to their own poorest citizens.
Unfairness isn't good. They probably agree that things are unfair and should be better.
Hickel is saying ~you're wrong about poverty because the situation is unfair~
Noah Smith is saying ~OK. But I'm not wrong about the fact that poverty is decreasing and the situation is improving.~
[+] [-] zuhayeer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retrac|5 years ago|reply
For all its horrors and atrocities, the Soviet economy grew, and worked. Oh, not very well. But better than 0% growth. In 1910 the average Russian was an illiterate peasant. In 1980 the average Russian was a literate urban dweller with electricity and indoor toilets on their floor with twice the life expectancy of their great-grandparents.
This is, again, not intended as a defence of that monstrous system. It can be condemned on purely moral grounds alone, in my opinion. And it was not as efficient by most analyses, either. Still, I bring it up because, as a counter-example, it complicates both of the commonly made assertions mentioned in the article: that poverty hasn't decreased in any meaningful sense, and that the capitalist system is the only means of greater than 0% growth in material production.
[+] [-] syops|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcolkitt|5 years ago|reply
On the eve of World War I, Finland and Russia were on near parity in terms of GDP per capita. It's GDP per capita was only 12% higher than the rest of the Empire. By the end of the Soviet Union, Finland has nearly three times the GDP of the USSR.
If the Russian Revolution had installed a liberal democratic government (as it did in the case of Finland), Russia would most probably look like a Nordic country today.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...
[+] [-] wffurr|5 years ago|reply
The trick is to subject that system to democratic control in a sustainable way.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lupire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
When a nation is poor and backwards, due to, gosh, 50 years of 'Central Planning' inspired by Marx, well then it's not that hard for the state to do things like 'build roads'.
But factories in China, Tencent, DiDi etc. are not state creations. State supported, yes, and ultimately 'state controlled' (i.e. they state can do as they please with them), but it's considerably more 'free market' than otherwise.
It's ridiculous to split hairs by pointing out 'some of India's growth started in the 1980's' or that 'some things in China are state directed' when overwhelmingly the change was towards free markets, in some cases, with state oversight and control but not direction or planning by and large. China is one of the most 'free market' places on earth, lacking in all sorts of regulation - you just have to remember that 'for the important things', the CCP is in charge. (I should add that the banks are state owned and their loans are directed, however, they are backed by the Central Bank which is entirely politicized and is a primary driver of actual influence.)
The answer is 80% capitalism.
[+] [-] vidarh|5 years ago|reply
The Communist Manifesto starts with a chapter praising capitalism for bringing unheard of increases in productivity, growth. Even for trade serving as a "battering ram" that drives down xenophobia. Here's a quote praising capitalism:
> The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
He goes on to praise the advances brought by "free competition". Then he turns the tables and argues that the reason capitalism will eventually fail is that it is too efficient: That it will eventually bring crises of simultaneous over-production and under-employment; that it will automate away employment to the point that the proportion who can afford to buy their products will be unable to consume all that it can produce.
"Central Planning" has no basis in Marx.
Central planning is a largely Stalinist conception, developed out of ashes of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War. Lenin saw how it failed, hence New Economic Policy, which re-opened some markets and allowed for a softening of planning similar to what Deng later did in China. It was Stalin who undid most of those reforms again after Lenins death, and who went even further in making centralised planning a dogma, and it was based on his wilful misinterpretation of Lenins ideas, not on Marx.
[+] [-] nabla9|5 years ago|reply
Industrial government controlled policy based capitalism is how all Asian Tigers became rich. Big Chinese companies grow in in government controlled financial environment that supports them.
[+] [-] roenxi|5 years ago|reply
And it isn't so much that capitalism is a cause, as all the things that aren't capitalism absolutely scupper technological progress. Eg, in extreme cases bureaucrats literally ban technological progress because it is too disruptive (see, for example, encryption).
[+] [-] simiones|5 years ago|reply
This is wildly wrong. Technological progress has literally existed for thousands of years before capitalism. Even under capitalism, technological progress often happens in universities with government money, often for military or claimed military purposes. For example, everything to do with the base of computer science has been created in academia and the military sector, before it was donated by government to private corporations.
[+] [-] lupire|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lallysingh|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]