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.
If you look at the below thread by Hickel, Roser is very uncivil (for an academic), childish and misdirecting. He also does not answer Allen's criticism. Hickel on the other hand remains very composed and courteous.
Roser also keeps constantly misrepresenting degrowth with a straw man that the global South needs growth. He has been told time and time again that every degrowth demand is only for the rich countries and everyone agrees the poorest countries needs growth, but still he makes the same claim over and over.
From this behavior, I've come to see Roser as a bad faith actor.
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.
These points look cherry-picked to support your argument.
To cherry-pick a few more points: Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Pakistan. All of these were British colonies prior to Hong Kong (which was a British territory from 1841 to 1997). All of these have populations >150M (significantly greater than the UK itself!). All of these are in the bottom third of countries in terms of GDP per capita (and in fact worse off than Vietnam).
(Well, okay, India hovers right around that 33%ile depending on your choice of measure.)
Next on the list of Commonwealth of Nations by population are UK itself (wealthy, but wasn't a colony...), Tanzania (poor), South Africa (wealthy!), Kenya (poor), Uganda (very poor).
Talking about "colonialism" in general terms obscures the very real variation in outcomes. Colonies that were mainly influenced by English-like institutions did better than average because they tended to be more trade-oriented and inclusive, whilst other colonies were more extractive and those countries ended up with bad institutional arrangements that affect them to this day.
We did well when the "mother country" treated us and our exports as special. We pioneered frozen meat shipments as part of that. [1]
When the UK started treating us less favourably as it moved towards the EEC, (And because we were outcompeting the UK's own farmers), our economy was hit hard.
We had to pivot the entire structure of our economy, away from a government subsidised agricultural model (like the EU, UK, and US are still running) to a free market one in a manner rarely seen in so called free market countries - no tariffs, no subsidies.
It caused a lot of pain, bankruptcies, and suicides.
And once we no longer had preferential access to the UK market, we had to go out and find our own markets.
So while we initially succeeded because of colonialism, once the apron strings were cut to suit the needs of the colonial master, we succeeded in spite of colonialism.
It's difficult to pull apart Correlation vs causation. For example, European colonizers choose to colonize countries that they saw as economically valuable.
India was very rich in gold and farm land pre-colonization, and the Europeans knew it. That's why it was the jewel of the British Empire.
Ethiopia was ignored by Britain and France because it was perceived to be dryer and poorer.
Some of the post-colonial success is tied to intrinsic value of the land itself.
It is widely understood that a you can be a slave or subject and be better off financially than a free man. A slave in the US South probably had better nutrition, food, technology, etc than many tribesmen in Africa, for example.
Is that an accurate description of your major point?
Doesn't mean it's also preferable, or that everything is about having more money...
Had much less focus on resource extraction than typical colonies. They were used more as a place for their own population to go and live.
> Japan and South Korea
Those weren't colonies. Those were more of puppet states used as buffers against nearby powers. The focus wasn't on extracting wealth it was focused on having a strong ally in the region.
The relation between colonialism and outside interference and the economic development of the east asian region is an interesting and complex one.
South Korea, along with Manchuria, was a Japanese colony. The region had been developed, along Stalinist economic lines, by Shinzo Abe's grandfather "the devil of showa" making heavy use of forced labour (more so than Stalin himself, perhaps).
Korea (like much of Asia) faced the prospect of "decolonisation" after the atomic bombs were dropped, but instead the country fell in to an extremely destructive civil war. But their redevelopment did not happen until decades after the war. North Korea redeveloped rapidly due to Soviet assistance, by the 80's South Korea had caught up and by the 90's the soviet union had collapsed, terminating and even sharply reversing North Korea's growth, while the south had managed to work their own development plan with only the IMF crisis as a setback (which also served to totally discredit the Washington consensus in the political culture and has cemented the mixed model with effective state interventions as the South Korean model).
The explanation for the differences in outcomes across Asia probably has a lot more to do with what role each nation played in the British/French/Japanese/etc. systems. Colonisation looked a lot different in Hong Kong than it did in India. Hong Kong was a city-state trading hub peopled with privileged elites whose role was to oversee the Imperial trade network in the region. India was a vast source of indentured agricultural labour and raw materials.
Likewise in Korea, the north (and parts of Manchuria) were a manufacturing base in the Japanese system, linked in with nearby raw materials by railroads. South Korea was more a source of enslaved agricultural labour (concentrated in Jeolla province), with some exceptions like the strategically important port in Busan.
I think Hickel’s point looks something like “Roser claims colonialism was good because it supports his argument that poverty declined, but poverty was low before colonialism, therefore it was bad” (surely I’m missing something here?) I think Roser’s response is basically that “colonialism was bad and probably led to more poverty than there otherwise would have been. Also poverty was still high before colonialism compared to today, so I don’t need to rely on any heightened colonialism-induced poverty level to say that poverty has gone down”
You seem to be replying to this with “well actually colonialism was good because blah blah blah blah blah blah.” This seems to be irrelevant to everything in scope but I guess you just wanted to get it out of your system. FWIW, I think the earlier inhabitants of the former colonies you claim as successful might not have such a rosy view of the consequences of colonialism, and while eg white farmers in Zimbabwe might have preferred colonial Rhodesia sticking around, the majority of the population are probably happier that the colony didn’t become more “established,” as you put it. Hong Kong is a pretty unique case as it was tiny, important, already somewhat developed when taken, and able to avoid taking part in the suffering of the communist revolution in China.
> Japan and South Korea (to some extent Taiwan), rebuilt after the war under Anglo-American protection and reformation, also did exceedingly well, far better than most.
Japan and South Korea were never American colonies, unless you're going to twist the term until it makes no sense. They're definitely not independent from the US (as they can't really ask the US to remove its military bases) but they're not "colonies" either.
> Canada, Australia, NZ
These were sparsely inhabited lands populated by un-industrialized societies that were mostly wiped out. Compare that to India or SE Asia, regions with well developed societies and economies, which were brutally subjugated, prevented from industrializing and whose economies were reduced to relying on primary and extractive sectors.
Colonialism absolutely hampered economic expansion in these societies.
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.
1. We shouldn't use static, arbitrary lines. Going from $7.39 to $7.41 doesn't help much, whereas going from $1.50 to $7.00 helps immensely. An argument over where the single arbitrary static line should be drawn utterly misses the point.
2. The overall income distribution is shifting right, as people become richer.
These things both seem to be entirely correct, and they are devastating to Hickel.
> Noah Smith never seems to address Jason Hickle's point that the evidence based poverty line should be $7.40.
I found his debunking of the idea that we should be drawing a line at all utterly convincing.
> 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.
One of the points that Smith is making is simply that using a fixed threshold for deciding on whether there has been meaningful progress in alleviating poverty is somewhat meaningless and misses what is actually going on. In the article, he shows how the distribution of per-capita income has changed, with larger parts of the population having more income than before, which seems to indicate that we are making progress in alleviating poverty.
If you were to look at the fixed threshold, you would miss this "shift" in distribution and thus conclude that hardly any progress has been made.
I think this is a meaningful argument, in that it points to us that we are "doing something right".
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.
I'm not arguing against the author. I'm just saying as a general notion that measuring only financial well-being is not the only thing we should care about. Not sure if logic has anything to do with that
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.~
This exactly is the much more important second point Hickel is making. Even if growing GDP does mean tiny scraps of wealth are left to lower the number of the extremely poor[1], it's nowhere near resource efficient enough to be feasible within constraints of climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and resource depletion.
Pumping up GDP is not a sustainable way to reduce poverty. Gates and other people who benefit the most from the status quo continuing to advertise for this graph gives a very false sense of optimism.
1: $1.90/d is lower than the consumption level of slaves in the US in the 19th century. Helping people get slightly above the level of slaves is of course better than not doing that, but it is hardly enough.
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.
I suspect that, being enormous, things in Russia would still look different to Finland if they had taken a liberal democratic path. Perhaps more similar to America or the EU.
Finland was not nearly as traumatized by the war as the Soviet Union was. Finland did not fight a brutal civil war. Finland didn't have U.S., and British forces trying to subvert it's government during a civil war. Finland is much smaller and homogeneous than the Soviet Union. Finland after the war was never the recipient of embargoes (that I know of).
I think it is not possible to state what most probably would have happened had Russia established a liberal democratic government. For one, without the forced industrialization instituted under communism would Russia have survived the Nazi invasion?
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 system didn't fail because of unsuitable science, but due to human nature. Let any man or woman centrally decide the economy and you're implicitly positing that bias and corruption will fare better than a (relatively) free market of competing ideas.
The issue is that the current direction that big data is going doesn't do much to help planned economies like that. The big issue is really calculating preferences, which a market economy does through prices. If you don't have prices set by markets it's extremely difficult to calculate preferences from first principles.
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.
In a way, though, the cold war forced the Soviet Union and its satellites to be more economically self-dependent and develop.
By the end of the 1980s, they were producing home computers, stereo equipment, and televisions. Much of it may have been low-quality and/or knock off of Western gear (see: the myriad ZX Spectrum clones) but they actually did develop the manufacturing base.
A lot of Western countries of similarly low or developing economic position would just import American, European or Japanese goods. Interestingly, you did see something similar in places like Brazil where the import restrictions led to a fair amount of license-built and local manufacturing.
You cannot ignore the military spending, though. It is wealth production as with anything else. I am not suggesting the wealth was fairly or reasonably distributed. (Then again, is it truly under any system?) I am pointing out that wealth was produced and existed. And that there was a fairly steady rate of growth sustained for about half a century in all. Of course the 70s onward stagnation was real, and coupled with unsustainable military spending, it eventually collapsed in on itself.
Still. The USSR produced about a billion tonnes of steel or so while it existed, with production exponentially increasing over time. That fact is a serious problem for a theory that claims this cannot happen under such a system. And many popular wonks do effectively make such claims.
Readit News
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
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.
Roser also keeps constantly misrepresenting degrowth with a straw man that the global South needs growth. He has been told time and time again that every degrowth demand is only for the rich countries and everyone agrees the poorest countries needs growth, but still he makes the same claim over and over.
From this behavior, I've come to see Roser as a bad faith actor.
https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1376097068251541504?s...
https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1380548416082735107
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.
To cherry-pick a few more points: Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Pakistan. All of these were British colonies prior to Hong Kong (which was a British territory from 1841 to 1997). All of these have populations >150M (significantly greater than the UK itself!). All of these are in the bottom third of countries in terms of GDP per capita (and in fact worse off than Vietnam).
(Well, okay, India hovers right around that 33%ile depending on your choice of measure.)
Next on the list of Commonwealth of Nations by population are UK itself (wealthy, but wasn't a colony...), Tanzania (poor), South Africa (wealthy!), Kenya (poor), Uganda (very poor).
We did well when the "mother country" treated us and our exports as special. We pioneered frozen meat shipments as part of that. [1]
When the UK started treating us less favourably as it moved towards the EEC, (And because we were outcompeting the UK's own farmers), our economy was hit hard.
We had to pivot the entire structure of our economy, away from a government subsidised agricultural model (like the EU, UK, and US are still running) to a free market one in a manner rarely seen in so called free market countries - no tariffs, no subsidies.
It caused a lot of pain, bankruptcies, and suicides.
And once we no longer had preferential access to the UK market, we had to go out and find our own markets.
So while we initially succeeded because of colonialism, once the apron strings were cut to suit the needs of the colonial master, we succeeded in spite of colonialism.
[1]: https://teara.govt.nz/en/sheep-farming/page-5
It is widely understood that a you can be a slave or subject and be better off financially than a free man. A slave in the US South probably had better nutrition, food, technology, etc than many tribesmen in Africa, for example.
Is that an accurate description of your major point?
Doesn't mean it's also preferable, or that everything is about having more money...
Had much less focus on resource extraction than typical colonies. They were used more as a place for their own population to go and live.
> Japan and South Korea
Those weren't colonies. Those were more of puppet states used as buffers against nearby powers. The focus wasn't on extracting wealth it was focused on having a strong ally in the region.
South Korea, along with Manchuria, was a Japanese colony. The region had been developed, along Stalinist economic lines, by Shinzo Abe's grandfather "the devil of showa" making heavy use of forced labour (more so than Stalin himself, perhaps).
Korea (like much of Asia) faced the prospect of "decolonisation" after the atomic bombs were dropped, but instead the country fell in to an extremely destructive civil war. But their redevelopment did not happen until decades after the war. North Korea redeveloped rapidly due to Soviet assistance, by the 80's South Korea had caught up and by the 90's the soviet union had collapsed, terminating and even sharply reversing North Korea's growth, while the south had managed to work their own development plan with only the IMF crisis as a setback (which also served to totally discredit the Washington consensus in the political culture and has cemented the mixed model with effective state interventions as the South Korean model).
The explanation for the differences in outcomes across Asia probably has a lot more to do with what role each nation played in the British/French/Japanese/etc. systems. Colonisation looked a lot different in Hong Kong than it did in India. Hong Kong was a city-state trading hub peopled with privileged elites whose role was to oversee the Imperial trade network in the region. India was a vast source of indentured agricultural labour and raw materials.
Likewise in Korea, the north (and parts of Manchuria) were a manufacturing base in the Japanese system, linked in with nearby raw materials by railroads. South Korea was more a source of enslaved agricultural labour (concentrated in Jeolla province), with some exceptions like the strategically important port in Busan.
You seem to be replying to this with “well actually colonialism was good because blah blah blah blah blah blah.” This seems to be irrelevant to everything in scope but I guess you just wanted to get it out of your system. FWIW, I think the earlier inhabitants of the former colonies you claim as successful might not have such a rosy view of the consequences of colonialism, and while eg white farmers in Zimbabwe might have preferred colonial Rhodesia sticking around, the majority of the population are probably happier that the colony didn’t become more “established,” as you put it. Hong Kong is a pretty unique case as it was tiny, important, already somewhat developed when taken, and able to avoid taking part in the suffering of the communist revolution in China.
Japan and South Korea were never American colonies, unless you're going to twist the term until it makes no sense. They're definitely not independent from the US (as they can't really ask the US to remove its military bases) but they're not "colonies" either.
> Canada, Australia, NZ
These were sparsely inhabited lands populated by un-industrialized societies that were mostly wiped out. Compare that to India or SE Asia, regions with well developed societies and economies, which were brutally subjugated, prevented from industrializing and whose economies were reduced to relying on primary and extractive sectors.
Colonialism absolutely hampered economic expansion in these societies.
> 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.
> 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.
1. We shouldn't use static, arbitrary lines. Going from $7.39 to $7.41 doesn't help much, whereas going from $1.50 to $7.00 helps immensely. An argument over where the single arbitrary static line should be drawn utterly misses the point.
2. The overall income distribution is shifting right, as people become richer.
These things both seem to be entirely correct, and they are devastating to Hickel.
> Noah Smith never seems to address Jason Hickle's point that the evidence based poverty line should be $7.40.
I found his debunking of the idea that we should be drawing a line at all utterly convincing.
One of the points that Smith is making is simply that using a fixed threshold for deciding on whether there has been meaningful progress in alleviating poverty is somewhat meaningless and misses what is actually going on. In the article, he shows how the distribution of per-capita income has changed, with larger parts of the population having more income than before, which seems to indicate that we are making progress in alleviating poverty.
If you were to look at the fixed threshold, you would miss this "shift" in distribution and thus conclude that hardly any progress has been made.
I think this is a meaningful argument, in that it points to us that we are "doing something right".
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 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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.~
Pumping up GDP is not a sustainable way to reduce poverty. Gates and other people who benefit the most from the status quo continuing to advertise for this graph gives a very false sense of optimism.
1: $1.90/d is lower than the consumption level of slaves in the US in the 19th century. Helping people get slightly above the level of slaves is of course better than not doing that, but it is hardly enough.
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.
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...
I think it is not possible to state what most probably would have happened had Russia established a liberal democratic government. For one, without the forced industrialization instituted under communism would Russia have survived the Nazi invasion?
The trick is to subject that system to democratic control in a sustainable way.
Deleted Comment
By the end of the 1980s, they were producing home computers, stereo equipment, and televisions. Much of it may have been low-quality and/or knock off of Western gear (see: the myriad ZX Spectrum clones) but they actually did develop the manufacturing base.
A lot of Western countries of similarly low or developing economic position would just import American, European or Japanese goods. Interestingly, you did see something similar in places like Brazil where the import restrictions led to a fair amount of license-built and local manufacturing.
Still. The USSR produced about a billion tonnes of steel or so while it existed, with production exponentially increasing over time. That fact is a serious problem for a theory that claims this cannot happen under such a system. And many popular wonks do effectively make such claims.