
Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong - bogle
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal
======
bovermyer
Unfortunately, the author of this piece seems to suffer from the delusion that
subsistence life is ideal.

He makes a valid point that our data about poverty prior to 1981 is lacking;
however, he completely ignores more telling data, such as infant mortality
rates correlated with infrastructure development.

Short version: life _is_ improving for the majority of people on the planet.

Recommended reading on the subject:

\- _Factfulness_ by Hans Rosling, et al.

\- The WHO's health trend data:
[http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/en/](http://www.searo.who.int/entity/health_situation_trends/en/)

~~~
avmich
The author discusses poverty, not health. We can argue that health is more
achievable in modern world, but the picture of poverty isn't changed by that.

~~~
hannasanarion
It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any
income. We should expect poverty to be directly corellated with health, and
the data agrees. Poke around on gapminder and see for yourself.

~~~
paganel
> It absolutely is. If you are sick and dying, you're probably not taking any
> income

That's the author's (main) point, i.e. that using money/income in order to
compare today's capitalist world with the one that came before it is
pointless, because money wasn't that much of a thing in a pre-capitalist world
and you could live reasonably well (and healthy) without having any access to
"income".

~~~
hannasanarion
Not being paid wages doesn't mean not taking income. In an agricultural
society, the produce of your farm, and profit from selling it is your income.
You can't work the fields or go to market when you're bedridden with
tuberculosis. Food didn't magically appear on people's plates ojt of thin air
before capitalism.

Also, why are we pretending that precolonial society was exclusively barter
driven and agricultural? Tradespeople go back to the dawn of time.

~~~
paganel
The first chart in Gates's tweet (which is what the article is all about) is
based on the idea that all incomes are converted into money for comparison
reasons, otherwise I have no idea how they managed to compare incomes going
back 200 years from different types of societies. How do you assign income for
shared grazing grounds? Or for shared forests? Or for rotating ownership of
the agricultural fields? (btw, rotating ownership is an idea very alien to
capitalism, if you propose it today you'll be treated as a communist). You
basically can't do all that, because these things don't have a very easily
computable money equivalent.

And, as such, comparing the rate of poverty in a capitalist society to the
rate of poverty from a pre-capitalist society is bogus. Again, this is what
the article is all about.

> you're bedridden with tuberculosis.

No, you can't, but your wife/uncle/cousin/aunt can until you get better. While
living in a capitalist society mostly means an atomic family unit where, if
you happen to be bed-ridden, you're basically on your own. Again, charts like
the ones tweeted by Gates don't assign any monetary value to this type of
close human relations, even though those close human relations greatly improve
our well-being. Afaik nobody has assigned yet any money value to the ease of
mind provided by thoughts like "hey, I'm not alone in this world, I'm not on
my own".

------
tdrgabi
This sounds like fantasy to me: "Prior to colonisation, most people lived in
subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land,
water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They
had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well –
so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor." They still fought over
resources and hunting grounds. They even had slaves. I don't understand how
that is a robust system of sharing and reciprocity.

~~~
makerofspoons
It's the 21st century and we are still propagating the noble savage
stereotype.

~~~
iguy
Right!

Not to mention erasing the pre-colonial civilisations of half the world. Delhi
is what, the 9th city on that site? The Guardian believes that none of those
palace builders employed tax-collectors?

------
agurk
It is probably worth noting that the author of this piece is also the author
of a book about global inequality and his solutions to it [0].

While I haven't read his book, I recently completed Factfulness by Hans
Rosling, which paints a more nuanced picture of how things are changing for
people, and how small increases in wealth at the bottom can bring about life-
changing differences.

Claiming that people lived in a situation where they didn't need money as the
author does, is taking the view that there are no benefits of the modern
world. It reminds me of the noble savages that previous generations praised.

I think the trend of bringing more people fresh water and access to healthcare
is something to be celebrated. Trying to bundle this with the ills of modern
society instead feels forced.

[0] The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

------
whack
> _" The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90
> (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US
> in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard... Earning $2 per day doesn’t
> mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty"_

If living on $3 per day is so bad, imagine how much worse it would be to live
on less than $2 per day. That's the entire point being made by the optimists.
The percentage of people living on less than $2 per day has shrunk by ~80%.
You'd have to be willfully cynical to deny that being a good thing.

> _" Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the number of people in
> poverty gone up..."_

Of course the "number of people" has gone up. The world population has
exploded. That's a completely unrelated topic, unless the author is advocating
forced sterilizations.

> _"... the proportion of people in poverty has remained stagnant at about
> 60%"_

Any idea where he's getting this 60% number from? He has not given any
citation whatsoever.

~~~
bryanlarsen
"About 60%" means 71.8% in 1990 and 58.1% in 2013.

[https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-
egregio...](https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-
egregiousness-of-poverty-is-worse-than-ever-before-in-history)

~~~
whack
That is a significant amount of progress to make in 23 years. Hiding this data
and calling the numbers "stagnant" is concerted misrepresentation on Hickel's
part

~~~
joveian
The 60% mentioned in the posted article excludes China, the numbers in the
link do not.

------
tryptophan
I wonder why it is so hard for so many people to accept that the world is
better than it ever has been, and is still getting better. You see this from
every side of the political spectrum. Is being super cynical just a bug in our
nature?

~~~
yogthos
Our planet is literally dying. We lost over 60% of land animals [1], insects
are dying out as well [2], and life in the oceans isn't doing much better [3].

The temperatures keep rising at an accelerating rate. We're about to get a big
methane burp once permafrost melts. That's gonna put 25 gigatons of a
greenhouse gas that's 4x more powerful than C02 into the atmosphere. Currently
there are about 4 gigatons of methane.

Complex life on this planet could literally go extinct in the near future. All
of this is a direct result of human activity. Thinknig that life around the
world is getting better, and everything is fine is the height of idiocy. We're
facing an unimaginable climate catastrophe that's going to affect every single
person in the world.

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-
wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds)

[2]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarm...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming-
study-shows-massive-insect-loss/)

[3] [https://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...](https://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(18\)30772-3)

~~~
jelliclesfarm
right. I agree with most of what you said.

Altho all this is the result of human activity resulting from exponential
increase in our population. And hence consumption.

It’s not capitalism. It is uncurtailed procreation. Altho’ one might suggest
that there is some correlation between capitalism and decrease in crushing
poverty(leading to higher survivability) ..which will result in our eventual
demise of our species(and others).

The planet..however..will carry on.

~~~
yogthos
It's both though. Growth is the core tent of capitalism, and it promotes
consumerism that in turn requires consumers. This ethos is what's killing us.
And just to contrast for you. I grew up in USSR, and the focus there was on
sustainability. Products were built to last because it cost the state a lot of
resources to produce them. There was no drive to make products for the sake of
making them, or to introduce insane ideas like planned obsolescence. A lot
less resources were devoted to frivolousness as well. So for all its faults it
was actually a much better system in this regard.

It's also perfectly possible to aim for sustainability and to manage our
population. Just look at how China managed to put a stop to its population
growth. The problem is that the capitlist economic system is completely at
odds with that because it requires constant growth.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I hear you and I don’t mean to be disrespectful in order to disagree...but it
seems like USSR didn’t stand a chance. Sustainablity is different from a
failed economy.

I grew up in India. One might say China and India’s population is more
sustainable than USA because they consume less and yet 2.5 billion sustainable
people consume a lot more than 350 million Americans. Life is certainly better
in the USA. For me. I must hasten to add that because my needs are different
from my kin and peers who prefer India.

My entire school years, I studied from Russian(USSR then) puzzle books and
text books and went to the counsul to learn chess. I have very fond memories
of what USSR was...from a distance. It was an economy of scarcity. It is not
the same as an economy of sustainability. And yet, it failed. It did not
create a better life for its citizens.

People leave communist countries for survival while Americans threaten to
leave their capitalist paradise because they are embarrassed by their first
term President. The priorities are very stark.

China forced the one child policy upon its citizens. Not by granting
incentives but punitively. I am not sure that I can be on board with that...I
think population control should still have the element of ‘free choice’.
People must choose to have smaller families because it benefits them first.

Capitalism will certainly have to change its flavor now especially with
automation., but it has done a great job building a foundation. We are already
fast approaching a world where there will be more people than jobs. It is
going to be possible to survive and even thrive without a work force. But not
with 10 billion predicted for 2050 because there is certainly a tipping point
to this planet and fixed resources.

I sometimes feel like we should step away from limiting labels like communism
and socialism and capitalism. I think those times are long gone..what we need
now is a new structure. A sustainable structure based on all that we learnt
from capitalism AND communism. Everything is going to change now ..not just
with automation but also with climate change.

Capitalism can and will morph. I doubt if communism can..it’s just too rigid
because it’s a philosophy of conformity for all while capitalism is a
philosophy of freedom for the majority.(not all)

I won’t pretend to know a lot about this...I know plants and animals more than
political systems. What do you think of the above and can you convince me to
change my position?

~~~
yogthos
>but it seems like USSR didn’t stand a chance

I don't really see how that follows. The primary cause of USSR collapse was
NATO, which chipped away at it on every front until the collapse. However, it
looks like USA isn't really going to outlast USSR by a big margin. Having
lived through the collapse I see many of the same signs, and I think the US is
much worse prepared to deal with it than USSR due to lack of public
infrastructure and services.

>It did not create a better life for its citizens.

It certainly did for me, and what's more USSR created decent life for most
citizens without exploitation. Everybody had access to housing, food,
medicine, and education. There was no concept of homelessness for example. I
have very fond memories of living in USSR.

>People leave communist countries for survival while Americans threaten to
leave their capitalist paradise because they are embarrassed by their first
term President. The priorities are very stark.

With all due respect, I don't think you have any idea of what you're talking
about here. Having actually lived in the soviet union, I can tell you that the
quality of life was very high for great many people. We had more free time,
better education, and the basic needs taken care of.

In the capitalist system, you have a large pool of people who are struggling
to survive and have no access to things like basic medicine. People die all
the time from preventable causes in the USA. People die because they can't get
things like insulin that cost nothing to make. Then you have places like Flint
where people don't even have drinking water.

It's also important to note that slave labor plays a very big role in the
capitalist system where large portion of the population produces goods for the
middle class to consume in horrible conditions.

This is reflected in the prison labor system in the states, as well as what's
effectively indentured servitude of many workers in third world countries who
have to work insane hours in horrific conditions to produce the goods consumed
in US.

>I think population control should still have the element of ‘free choice’.

I don't agree when the risk of 'free choice' is the whole species going
extinct.

>Capitalism will certainly have to change its flavor now especially with
automation., but it has done a great job building a foundation. We are already
fast approaching a world where there will be more people than jobs.

That doesn't make sense. The more jobs are automated the less people are able
to do meaningful work. The insane premise of capitalism is that everybody has
to work to live. Automation is completely at odds with capitalism. Nowadays
it's not just automation of manual labor either, machine learning is quickly
encroaching on many jobs in fields like medicine, law, and journalism. The
amount of jobs that people can do better than machines is rapidly shrinking.

>I sometimes feel like we should step away from limiting labels like communism
and socialism and capitalism. I think those times are long gone..what we need
now is a new structure. A sustainable structure based on all that we learnt
from capitalism AND communism. Everything is going to change now ..not just
with automation but also with climate change.

I think the new system has to be much closer to communism than to capitalism.
We need something that's sustainable and not rooted in materialism if we are
to survive as a species.

>Capitalism can and will morph. I doubt if communism can..it’s just too rigid
because it’s a philosophy of conformity for all while capitalism is a
philosophy of freedom for the majority.(not all)

Not really sure what you mean there to be honest. I think you might be
conflating communism and totalitarianism which are orthogonal concepts.

So, to sum up I'm not really convinced by the argument. I think that
capitalism is fundamentally at odds with long term survival of humanity as a
species.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Thanks for your response and you have said a great many things..I have
numbered them for my ease.. I hope that’s ok.

1\. Y: I don't really see how that follows. The primary cause of USSR collapse
was NATO, which chipped away at it on every front until the collapse. However,
it looks like USA isn't really going to outlast USSR by a big margin. Having
lived through the collapse I see many of the same signs, and I think the US is
much worse prepared to deal with it than USSR due to lack of public
infrastructure and services. JF: we do have public infrastructure and services
in the USA and perhaps you are right, but I have a harder time imagining a
collapse like the one in Soviet Russia.

I remember the narrative behind USSR collapsing differently. I still remember
the day I read it in the newspaper and I was in high school. We had 30 minutes
of discussing the day’s news and I still believe what I believed
then..Gorbachev introduced perestroika to a people and nation that wasn’t
ready for it. Russia was already weakened and destabilized and it was too
much. You cannot blame NATO without looking at the internal mechanics and the
role Gorbachev played.

2\. Y: It certainly did for me, and what's more USSR created decent life for
most citizens without exploitation. Everybody had access to housing, food,
medicine, and education. There was no concept of homelessness for example. I
have very fond memories of living in USSR.

JF: Yes, I have heard this over many many times. My close friend is from
Georgia and she is here now. I want to beckon the concept of survivability.
When any system is so weak that it cannot recover from a severe blow, it means
that it is not the optimal for survival. Which automatically(to me) makes the
good times ephemeral.

Colder countries generally have a lesser degree of homelessness than those in
warmer tropical climes because it is certain death to be homeless in winter.

I do believe that it comes down to personal notions of what freedom means to
individuals. The men and women lined the streets and wept when Stalin and also
Mao died. They ran regimes. Not governments. They were responsible for some
brutal inflictions upon their own people and yet, like how a child cries when
an abusive parent dies..they felt bereft and lost. There was suppression of
thought and an iron hand on how people were expected to think and act..they
were free within the spheres of state control and it is freedom nevertheless,
but outside was a world with a feral freedom as befits the human spirit.

3\. Y: With all due respect, I don't think you have any idea of what you're
talking about here. Having actually lived in the soviet union, I can tell you
that the quality of life was very high for great many people. We had more free
time, better education, and the basic needs taken care of.

JF: you might be right. I can only speak from my perspective.

5\. Y: In the capitalist system, you have a large pool of people who are
struggling to survive and have no access to things like basic medicine. People
die all the time from preventable causes in the USA. People die because they
can't get things like insulin that cost nothing to make. Then you have places
like Flint where people don't even have drinking water.

JF: that is only one side of the United States. There are many facets of a
capitalist society.

There will always be people working for others. There will always be some who
are richer than others..smarter than others..more wily than others..more able
than others. The game of life ...as I see it..is evaluating the cards you hold
and play them well for the best possible outcome for oneself.

6\. Y: It's also important to note that slave labor plays a very big role in
the capitalist system where large portion of the population produces goods for
the middle class to consume in horrible conditions.

JF: one of my replies got flagged because I objected to the use of the term
‘slave labour’. That is not slavery.

When I spot that word, I step away from any discussion. Because it’s
connatations are horrific and is not really suitable to be borrowed to fit
unrelated arguments.

I find that I am at a loss of words when I am confronted with such black and
white perspectives of capitalism.

7\. Y: This is reflected in the prison labor system in the states, as well as
what's effectively indentured servitude of many workers in third world
countries who have to work insane hours in horrific conditions to produce the
goods consumed in US.

JF: I am departing from this discussion. I disagree with you on majority of
the points. But I respect your right to pursue your deeply held convictions.
Have a good day.

~~~
yogthos
>I remember the narrative behind USSR collapsing differently.

That's the difference though, you remember a narrative while I remember
actually living in USSR, and living through the collapse as a personal
experience.

>When any system is so weak that it cannot recover from a severe blow, it
means that it is not the optimal for survival. Which automatically(to me)
makes the good times ephemeral.

This is the case for literally every single system of government we've had.
Every empire that ever existed has collapsed. Entropy is literally a law of
thermodynamics.

>Colder countries generally have a lesser degree of homelessness than those in
warmer tropical climes because it is certain death to be homeless in winter.

There is plenty of homelessness in US and Canada, and there is no mandate to
prevent that under capitalism. Soviet Union actually saw things like shelter
and food as human rights.

>The men and women lined the streets and wept when Stalin and also Mao died.
They ran regimes. Not governments.

You're once again confusing communism with totalitarianism.

>There will always be people working for others. There will always be some who
are richer than others..smarter than others..more wily than others..more able
than others. The game of life ...as I see it..is evaluating the cards you hold
and play them well for the best possible outcome for oneself.

The point was that you have a double standard for communism and capitalism.
You're saying there were poor people in USSR and that's what made communism
bad, but people suffering under capitalism are themselves at fault. The
reality is that capitalism creates a system of exploitation, and if you happen
to be a member of the exploited class, there's no easy way out.

> one of my replies got flagged because I objected to the use of the term
> ‘slave labour’. That is not slavery.

It's slavery in anything but name. If you object to the term, then please
justify what you're basing this assertion on. When you chain up children in
factories to make things like clothing, that's slavery plain and simple. If
you're not comfortable discussing capitalism factually, then I don't know what
else to say here.

Have a good day.

------
CompelTechnic
The article claims that a large number of people formerly lived cashless
lives, but now live a lower-quality life that depends on cash. This claim
doesn't have a lot of data for it, but is maybe believable. A data-driven
discussion of quality of life, regardless of cash income, would clear this up.
Looks like other commenters are dispelling the notion pretty quickly.

Regarding cash income though, I feel that this article disrespects the actual
data by cherry-picking. For a less sensationalized presentation of it, I
recommend reading about the elephant curve. Most of the world's poor are doing
much better in terms of cash income than they used to be.

[https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-
wo...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-world-income-
distribution-the-elephant-chart-revisited/)

~~~
iguy
I think it's well beyond "disrespects the actual data", more into science
denial territory.

We have had decent data about this for a long time. It's a lot easier to
gather than climate data, on which the same people will profess great
certainty. But it doesn't fit everyone's preferred view of things.

------
blattimwind
Classic "noble savage" / "everything was better in the past" article. Why is
this on HN?

~~~
alistairSH
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.[0]

0 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
bryanlarsen
Note that the author uses absolute numbers rather than relative numbers, nor
does he give the value of the increase. Hint: the increase is measured in
millions rather than billions.

The relative numbers are 71.8% in 1990 vs 58.1% in 2013

[https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-
egregio...](https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2018/8/30/the-moral-
egregiousness-of-poverty-is-worse-than-ever-before-in-history)

~~~
bogle
That is a really interesting article, thanks. Through asking good questions
about the relationships between the relative and absolute numbers it casts an
uncomfortable spotlight onto our current responses to inequality.

------
cryoshon
the perspective that i think is missing from the article is that a lot of the
drop in extreme poverty isn't the result of organized work by the world to
curb misery. it's a result of the chinese economic boom which created the
world's biggest middle class while also nearly erasing extreme poverty in the
world's biggest country.

a lot of the numbers we see regarding "world poverty" are misleading because
of how impressive china has been able to do over the last 20 years. "world
poverty reduction" data sans china looks much worse than any of us would like.

i'm parroting these thoughts from a talk that i attended by the former
secretary of the UN, ban ki-moon. he said the world had failed to reduce
poverty, but that china had succeeded, giving the rest of the world a chance
to feel good when it hadn't done much.

now, directly to the article's point: yeah, forced participation as a laborer
in the neoliberal world economy could be considered coercive and detrimental.
but subsistence living is very far from desirable for many reasons. i don't
think this is an argument we can really have in good faith -- there's no
putting globalization back in the box at this point, so we need to make the
best of it for the people who are doing the worst.

~~~
iguy
Indeed "organized work by the world" has little to do with it. The aid
industry may sometimes do good in a crisis, but has nothing to do with the
overall trajectory.

But while China is the poster-child for this (in the last 30 years), it's not
just China. The life of many people in many smaller countries has been
meaningfully improved.

~~~
neolefty
And the effort in China was definitely deliberate.

Maybe not having world wars for 70 years has helped — Steven Pinker's renaming
of the Cold War to the Long Peace resonates!

------
maw
I'm still waiting to find someone who uses the word neoliberal as a slur and
who hasn't benefited enormously from it.

It could be a while.

~~~
neolefty
Or even accidentally turns it into a username. Honestly, it wasn't political
when I picked it.

~~~
maw
Hah, yes. I noticed your username just after I submitted my comment.

(Although, of course, left and liberal are by no means synonyms.)

------
mrits
My first reaction was that such irresponsible writing shouldn't be allowed
here. But it's a good reminder how an expert with a narrative to fit is much
worse than someone misinformed with good intentions.

~~~
bogle
The data in the graphic was misleading. Given the data corrected for China
from 1981 it shows a flat line. I'm sure that is a useful takeaway, even if
the politics isn't to your tastes.

------
travisoneill1
Subsistence farming societies today: poor

Subsistence farming societies before: not poor!

Anybody who looks can see that poverty has increased!

------
tossaccount123
100 years ago the richest man in the world could die from a simple infection
because there were no such thing as antibiotics.

People take for granted so many things we have in the modern world, they want
some form of utopia right now. Perfect is the enemy of good

~~~
CamTin
And now the poorest man in the world will die from the same infection because
he can't afford the antibiotics, or has no access to a doctor who can
prescribe them to him. What's the difference between something existing but
being impossibly expensive vs not existing at all, except for the ultra rich?

~~~
b_tterc_p
When you say ultra rich, you really mean not third world country poor.

~~~
neolefty
One thing that _Factfulness_ does is take a more nuanced look at wealth.
Rosling makes 4 categories of prosperity — the majority of which by population
are in the middle, neither ultra-rich nor ultra-poor.

Something he wrote that helped me understand: From the point of view of the
wealthiest societies, everyone else looks poor. But there's a huge difference
— in quality of life — between subsistence-poor and bike-to-the-market poor.
In the second category, your children are probably going to finish high school
and have a chance at professional careers. In the first category you're one
injury or bad harvest away from disaster.

------
ackfoo
Why do people listen to Bill Gates? He had the good fortune to be in the right
place at the right time and he cut a deal that has become the sine qua non of
bad deals (for IBM).

Then he went on to produce the worst OS in history, held together by gum and
bits of string. It was only successful initially because there was no other
viable choice. Its later success was fuelled by inertia and predatory trade
practices.

Windows created enormous suffering for an unprecedentedly large number of
people because of poor design choices. Anyone trying to use a computer had to
spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to fix that computer.

All of which resulted in a guy with billions but no particular insight into
reality. If you want Bill Gates-level ideas, ask any other old family member
around the table at Thanksgiving.

Getting lucky in business and having a lot of money doesn’t qualify you to run
the world, and it doesn’t confer insight or wisdom.

~~~
CompelTechnic
Bill Gates is more well-informed than most people about the conditions of
extreme poverty because he is actively attempting to fix it and is in charge
of one of the largest charitable organizations ever assembled for this
purpose.

