It's not very clever to just post a picture, as if that makes a very compelling argument for whatever you presumably are trying to make. It's nice that less people are living off the equivalent of $1.25 a day, but according to this:
50% of the world's population live off the equivalent of $2.50 a day. I guess we can cheer that 30% of the world's inhabitants have doubled their income and call it a day.
Woah! You're coming from the right direction I guess, but..
Yes, we can very much cheer for people living off $1.25 to be living off $2.50 now. The numbers might look stupid if you're living in luxury, but it quite literally means going to bed with a full stomach instead of going to bed hungry. It's a far bigger change for them and their lives than for your income to be increased by 10x (assuming $100k to $1m).
If you're all about increasing the well-being of the most people possible on the planet, then it is something to cheer for. Having that increase to $5 might be the biggest humanitarian change for the future that we could cheer for too.
Ugh. Don't post things that you haven't read as if they proved your point. You'll find that the word "capitalism" is used 3 times in that PDF. Let's grab those paragraphs, shall we?
"Privatization has been a major part of Mongolia’s transition to capitalism. Its move to a market economy has been accompanied by increases in poverty and income inequality. More than 10 years after it began its transition, Mongolia remains one of the poorest countries in the world."
This being an example cutout within the following quote:
"After reviewing the distributional impact of privatization activities involving utilities in a wide range of developing economies, principally in Africa and Latin America, Bayliss (2002) concluded that privatization had demonstrably harmed the poor, either through loss of employment and income, or through exclusion from, or reduced access to, basic services, as the result of private firms’ principal concern with profits, prices and costs. At the same time, weak governance and regulatory capacity in many developing countries led to poor control of market abuses by private utility companies."
The next two usages of the word capitalism is in the bibliography:
"de Soto, Hernando (2000). The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books."
"Robbins, Richard H. (1999). Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, chap. 5 (“The problem of population growth”), pp. 147-178."
I'm not sure how the second citation feels about capitalism, but the first one certainly isn't positive.
So no, your link doesn't say much about capitalism, and what it does say is that capitalism is not pulling people out of poverty; on the contrary, it sounds like that document thinks capitalism is causing some poverty.
Doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life.
Capitalism suffers from a plague number of social ailments, including epidemic levels of stress and mental illness, that aren't present in "poor" cultures.
Besides, terraforming our planet to make it less, not more, inhabitable, hardly counts as a big win.
> Doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life.
LOL. Easy for you to say rich man. Go tell that to someone in Mozambique or Haiti or Nepal who is using their newfound wealth to finally be able to feed their kids a healthy diet.
And many subsistence fishermen were able to feed their kids a healthy diet, until commercial fishing came along.
Capitalism is pulling people out of poverty, but it is also destroying natural ecosystems. Is the reduction in poverty sustainable, or will it come back when the resources are gone?
Overall, things are getting better for sure, but it's going in a trajectory that will settle into a shitty local minimum where poor people survive but are stuck with low quality of life. Getting people out of extreme poverty in the world is high priority, and we've been doing a pretty good job at that, as your graph shows. But there's a big rut after that that we need to work on removing too.
> it's going in a trajectory that will settle into a shitty local minimum
It's very hard to find evidence to support this point of view. You might hypothesize some future change in trajectory sure. But looking at the current trajectory? Pretty hard.
You're correct that doubling income is not the same as improving quality of life, but I don't think stress and mental illness are particularly good examples of this.
A better example might be African countries where increased income has not led to better access to healthcare, but has instead fed a growing market for fake HIV/AIDS medications.
Having worked in a nonprofit that works on obtaining foreign aid, it's my opinion that these improvements have occurred despite capitalism due to the hard work of people like me, not because of capitalism.
Even assuming that the money your spending is being put to good use (and there is at least some evidence that makes people skeptical), where do you think the money you're obtaining comes from?
> Even assuming that the money your spending is being put to good use (and there is at least some evidence that makes people skeptical)
This is a legitimate criticism of NGOs, but it's also one of the ways in which capitalism is counterproductive to reducing poverty. Many of the cases in which aid spending is misused result from corporate interests determining where the money is spent instead of the people who need aid. An ongoing example of this is the milk lobby pushing for milk in food drops in areas where nearly everyone is genetically lactose-intolerant, or water aid going to buy Coca Cola's bottled water instead of building sustainable water utilities and infrastructure. One of the reasons I left the NGO I worked at was that I felt they didn't do a good job of decoupling the aid programs they supported from corporate interests.
> where do you think the money you're obtaining comes from?
Governments, who in turn get it from taxpayers. The exact system that free market capitalists rail against. And if capitalist corporations didn't evade taxes so deftly, maybe I'd have obtained more. Certainly democratic-socialist governments give more aid per-capita than more capitalistic ones.
Instead of asking leading questions as if they proved your point, why don't you try actually making an argument? Yes, much of the revenue I've obtained is indirectly generated within a capitalist system. But if you want to argue that capitalism produces more aid than the alternatives would, that's ridiculous.
That trend started long before our society's current pillaging by the rich and their big businesses. The global elimination of poverty has more to do with grassroots technological and industrial development than it does with concentrating as much capital in as few hands as possible.
It doesn't seem like this chart takes inflation of the $ into account either, making it irrelevant over time. $1.25 was a lot more valuable even 30 years ago than it is today.
Yeah I see "PPP" in the picture but nowhere is there an explanation of how they accounted and adjusted for inflation on a yearly basis. A link to the actual study would be a lot more informative. At any rate it doesn't address the moral concerns brought up in the article.
no mention of inflation in your link, only PPP. The article author also goes on to state that this isn't enough / as meaningful as you're making it out to be...
"And making sure everyone's making at least $1.25 a day isn't the end of the fight either. The world's median income is still only $3 to $4 a day. By comparison, the poverty line in the US for a family of four is $16.61 per person per day. Once under-$1.25-a-day poverty is eradicated, the world needs to set about eradicating under-$15-a-day poverty, which will be a substantially harder task."
