"It is the research of hundreds of historians who have carefully assembled thousands of quantitative estimates that inform us about us about people’s living conditions that give us this global perspective on the history of poverty.
In public discussions of the history of poverty the extent of this careful work is often overlooked. Such a deceptively simple chart on the global decline of poverty may then be easily dismissed as being based on little evidence."
Similar to how the plots themselves contain and compress a multitude of information, and we've all learned some generally shared ways to process that information (what an upward sloping means, what diverging lines mean, and others), is there a way to add information such that we have a similar shared way to process the _source_ of the data? I know that listing of sources themselves are intended for this, but unless it's your actual job to process that type of information it seems unreasonable to ask a normal person trying to live their life to track down that final information.
Consider that summarizing it as a single quantity is already unwarranted and somewhat arbitrary. The question should be about the utility. What is the utility of having one major number that is supposedly quantitative and consistent rather than, say, five metrics related to material status? The latter will provide more opportunity to compare "like to like", after all, and there's no reason that the universe must conform to a single metric being in any way valid. This is made even worse by pinning it to a (controlled) dollar value rather than some aggregate quantity of material well-being.
For example, according to this metric, the vast majority of poverty reduction happened in China. What factors can we attribute to that development? Well even asking that question means we have to go back and look at other metrics and means by which to understand economic systems and the distribution of material goods. The moment we ask a pretty basic, but arguably more relevant and useful question, we have to throw this metric away and do something else.
And when I've encountered this information in this past, the utility seems to be more about propaganda and lazy inferences than anything else, and often among famous academics. While we all have our bubbles, it does make you question the point of trying to make poverty just one quantity.
For those interested in this topic, I found "Enlightenment Now"[1] to be a great read (the audio book is good too). We take so much of our progress for granted and often look at progress from too short a time horizon.
I didn't get much from it, except to the extent that I could imagine the lives of actual people in extreme poverty, which is not very much.
It did get me thinking though. Not about extreme poverty, but about just getting by.
If I was working multiple minimum wage jobs to feed my family and put a roof over their head, and had to put up with appalling behaviour from my bosses, and appalling conditions that did not consider my state of being, I might not be counted as being in extreme poverty.
And if I avoided any health crises that would terminate my employment for the rest of my life, I might die without having ever been counted as being in extreme poverty.
But what would be the difference between my life and the life of people who had more control over their circumstances, and experienced more respect in their workplace from their bosses and peers?
It’s a hard question, but in practice I’m not sure there’s a tradeoff. A hundred years ago, the least fortunate would have been working 12 hour shifts locked into in a sweatshop that doesn’t care if they burn to death, or putting in backbreaking labor to keep their farm barely above water before losing it all in the Dust Bowl.
Chronically overlooked point: “it is wrong to think of the last two centuries as being one where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The poor also got richer.”
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. This sort of boilerplate just leads to predictable, boring, and nasty discussion. It's also sensational and gets lots of upvotes, which fans the flames. It's a failure mode for large internet forums, which simply can't do anything interesting with this material.
It's a cliché of this ideological topic, and therefore flamebait, guaranteed to provoke a shallow, repetitive argument. That's what we're asking people not to get into here. Shallow, repetitive arguments are boring.
If you'd like to "challenge popular notions" in some more interesting way, that of course is fine.
You're completely missing the point. 200 years ago the majority of people were illiterate and uneducated, had no electricity or indoor plumbing, no telecommunications, food insecurity tied to local conditions, and on and on. Housing was a hovel or a few square meters in a shared dorm or family house. In much of the world, freezing to death and having enough food to survive the winter was an annual concern.
Today, the majority are literate and at least somewhat educated, have electricity and usually indoor plumbing, have telecommunications that communicate with at least half the world instantly, and today food insecurity mostly depends on market manipulation and international shenanigans rather than acts of god. Except for remote tribes that aren't integrated into modern society, across the world the poor are much better off than they were 200 years ago.
No, because the _actual reality_ is that reducing inequality makes the rich, slightly less so, and the poor significantly safer and healthier.
If you tell people you want to reduce inequality we tend to correctly assume the intent is to make the poor better off, we're not AI searching for the most absolutely effective solution to reduce inequality to 0 by killing everyone or something.
I think there is something to be said for the danger of losing or stagnating the progress of the poor and middle class if the wealthy become so rich and powerful that we effectively revert to a fuedal system.
The worsening social mobility measurements are one reason to be concerned.
I don’t see this as a problem, so long as the poor get richer too. The obsession with “wealth inequality” is jealousy when refusing to acknowledge how much better the poor have it than ever. As the article notes, much of what we take for granted as baseline today (vaccines, HVAC, lights, rapid transport, etc) were simply not available to even the extremely rich until recently.
I contend many rich are rich precisely because they improved life for so many poor. Earn $1 for improving life for each person on the planet and you reap billion$ - that’s fair & laudable.
If trust-fund babies can coast through life without working, and those are taking over everything, when the poor still have to put in 12 hour days to live, even if they have it better than the past--that's not jealousy, that's simply asking why does person X have to work so hard when person Y doesn't under a system that supposedly claims all men are created equal.
The rich do not achieve anything on their own. They do so by employing a lot of labour and natural resources. And we know for a fact that the rich have disproportionate influence on regulation of labour practices and resources, skewing it drastically in their favour.
If we all worked together to make the world better, why should only a few benefit so much?
If you improve the lives of others (including by creating employment and reasonably leveraging resources), fair reward to reap a fraction of that improvement. Improve lives of billions, reap billion$.
The "fraction" of the reward that the investor/owner/manager receives compared to the person doing the actual work has become outrageously high though. And the destruction of natural resources has gotten ever cheaper/less penalised and its effects foisted on the world's poor with no recompense.
That would be true if income was proportional to your added value to blowback wellbeing. I would welcome a citation on that but to me it does not seem like that would hold at all. The greatest minds of the past centuries and the ones who contributed to the progress you are talking about were not billionaires, and for some of them were even quite poor. Your wealth depends on what you can extract from the market and what you can extract from the past wealth of your family.
If I inherit 1 billion dollar and place it in the SP 500 I will increase my wealth progressively compared to basically everybody, but my productivity is 0. The state could have taxed my inheritance 100% and done a similar investment with the same effect to the economy except inequality would be lower instead of higher.
However we are not covering the basic needs of the poor. People are still dying of hunger, exposure and disease.
We have more than enough collective wealth and resources to solve those issues, by securing housing, food and healthcare for everyone. Yet we choose not to, because it isn't profitable enough for those who already have plenty.
The "not even medieval lords had access to HVAC" argument ignores that the baseline changes as society evolves. And a lot of people in first world countries still don't have access to the things you mentioned. That is an absolute travesty.
Pedantic. That not literally everyone lives at a given baseline doesn’t disqualify fact that we’ve raised 90% of everyone from under to over that baseline in a few decades.
Maybe I’m misreading you, but it doesn’t sound to me like you have any concrete disagreement with the parent comment. It sounds like you’re saying we just shouldn’t talk about the topic of poverty reduction because it will distract attention from your concern about wealth inequality.
Poverty is relative. Compared to billionaires we all live in poverty. True poverty is not being able to attain food or shelter. Indeed many who are considered fabulously wealthy by neolithic standards are not able to find shelter or are barred from it by society (getting run off by police from public areas, national parks etc).
Define poverty as something than just income from wages. Can you "fix" poverty? Compared to my living standards I know people who I consider living in poverty but to them it is just life and they are used to government help. While a noble or laudable effort, giving them money holds them back.
In general, welfare benefits cement or create a lower class. I think our view of poverty is really just class guilt and fear.
Can you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN? You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately, and we're trying for something different here.
Through the history of the study of history there have been several ways of doing history (ie historiographies). One is Marxist historiography, trying to find the class struggle in everything. Another is whiggish historiography, named after the Whig history of Britain which viewed history as an inevitable progression towards constitutional monarchy, but which more generally refers to seeing history as intentionally leading to the present day.
To only present 'Marxism' and 'Whiggism' as the schools of thought is very silly and a very unflattering explanation of historiography. Neither are really studied in academia anymore and you should read more if you think they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography
I definitely didn’t mean to suggest that that those are the only possibilities. Only that they are relatively common examples of (what I would consider) bad ways of looking at history, and that I disagree with your claim that history is all about class struggle.
> To only present 'Marxism' and 'Whiggism' as the schools of thought is very silly and a very unflattering explanation of historiography. Neither are really studied in academia anymore and you should read more if you think they are.
And yet your first comment is asserting that Marxist historiography is the definition of the study of history:
> The study of history is the study of struggle between classes.
Marxism is everywhere in the american university system. If you've taken classes in the sociology, comparative literature, philosophy, anthropology, or any of the -studies fields (e.g. gender studies) chances are that you've been taught by many openly marxist professors.
Marxism for the american academy refers to the liberal strand of it (e.g. the kind that John Bellamy Foster advocates for) rather than the authoritarian flavors.
The left-wing bias in parts of the academy is real.
For the sake of the argument. Consider a planet inhabited exactly by two humans. They would be in extreme poverty by our standards and there would be no rich class to contrast them against. Ah, it becomes obvious now, poverty is a product of nature. You are born poor by nature. Your children are born poor as well.
Those 2 humans give birth to 6 children. 2 of them die because of a disease. Are the children who grew up to adulthood the rich class? Repeat this until there are 100 people. They organize, they build and invent things. The rich are born, not by nature but by society. Wealth is a product of society.
> For the sake of the argument. Consider a planet inhabited exactly by two humans. They would be in extreme poverty by our standards (...)
Not true. Our standards define poverty either as the inability to afford lower-tier living expenses, or as the inability to ensure an income higher than a certain quantille of the population's income distribution (typically around 60% of the median income )
Both interpretations of poverty imply that none of your hypothetical examples represent poverty.
I urge you not to use food insecurity in argument. Even outside food stamps, food is extremely affordable to eat perfectly healthy. If nothing else it's an education issue, not a food issue.
There are other issues other than money with regards to the cost of food. Time is one of them. The poorer I was the less time I had. No the recipes would not have worked. Healthy food also not readily available. It is not typically an education issue. It also can be a form of addiction in a manner. Many people get addicted when they are young to eating a certain type of way. It can become virtually impossible for someone to break that addiction as they get older. They often get addicted as a child. Lack of healthy foods in many places is a real issue. I live and grew up here tight in the US. If there is a solution for this please do share. I have seen this trap of thought before, I was in it for a while.
In Britain, where food is more expensive than in the US, ignorance about how to eat affordably and well is a shocking poverty trap. Anecdotally, a family getting pizza delivered will be spending almost an order of magnitude more than they would need to by cooking a nutritious meal from easily available basic ingredients; that's fine for a treat, but if you are relying on it regularly to put food in your kids' stomachs it quickly becomes ruinous.
I downvote all comments that complain about downvotes and so do many other people so please don't take the crushing you're taking on this comment as an indicator of disagreement
I found this very painful to read, it's painfully slow to get to the point...actually, it doesn't even answer the question posed in the title.
> Just as we need to adjust for price inflation, accounting for non-market sources of income is an essential part of making meaningful welfare comparisons over time.
The article never says how they account for non-market sources of income, i.e. those things without a price. I'm sure there's a dozen links to various papers, but I expect the question posed in the article to be answered in the article, rather than be fobbed off with pat tautologies such as "historians know about history"!
They actually do. He describes in detail how agricultural production is estimated using historic data in farmland, yields and how it is painstakingly adjusted per region. In other words the tedious work needed to actually do this.
Similar to how the plots themselves contain and compress a multitude of information, and we've all learned some generally shared ways to process that information (what an upward sloping means, what diverging lines mean, and others), is there a way to add information such that we have a similar shared way to process the _source_ of the data? I know that listing of sources themselves are intended for this, but unless it's your actual job to process that type of information it seems unreasonable to ask a normal person trying to live their life to track down that final information.