OP
OP
Even though i haven't seen Death Of Stalin yet. I thought this was a good review, and thought you guys might be interested in it.
I still need to see this!
In other news, I found two pretty good articles that take head on the notion that neoliberal capitalism has helped severely reduce world poverty though they're drawing on a lot of the same data.
https://www.alternet.org/economy/only-capitalists-think-poverty-down?utm_content=buffer28551...
According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2016, the median wealth of the world's adults is $2,222, down from $3,248 at the end of 2007. While the rich people of the world have taken more than their share of the $35 trillion wealth gain since the recession, the world median has dropped by over $1,000!
There are other recent indications of rising poverty. Based again on Credit Suisse wealth data, in just seven years the world's Gini Coefficient, the most widely accepted measure of inequality, has surged from 88.1 to 92.7. Wealth inequality between countries has grown dramatically. It's a stunning rise, further evidence of a world splitting into two.
A widely held misconception is that global inequality between countries is declining because of growth in China and other developing countries. But that claim is generally made with respect to income inequality, and it is only partially true. Global income inequality is down only in relative terms, in the sense that an income boost from $1 to $2 a day is greater in percentage than an income boost from $1,000 to $1,500 a day.
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The world poverty threshold was recently increased by the World Bank from $1.25 to $1.90 per day. Numerous sources have recognized the absurdity of this dollar amount for day-to-day survival. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development argues for a $5 minimum; ActionAid says $10; even the World Bank admits that the $1.90 poverty line is "too miserly for middle-income countries," and that"more than 50 percent of the population in IDA [the world's poorest] countries live on less than US $6 a day and are considered at high or moderate risk of relapsing into poverty."
In addition, the poverty threshold has not kept up with inflation. The World Bank set the first poverty threshold to $1.01/day using 1985 purchasing power parity. It eventually raised the threshold to $1.90/day at 2011 purchasing power parity. But with inflation, $1.01 in 1985 is equivalent to $2.10 in 2011. The World Bank's most recent threshold adjustment falls far short of realistic human needs.
Most of the so-called "escape from poverty" has occurred in China, where starting in the 1980s millions of residents of farming communities moved en masse to the cities for jobs in the factories of technology and in service-related positions.
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China may have pulled millions "out of poverty," but in reality they've gained a few dollars a day while the country has become increasingly unequal in terms of wealth....
It goes well beyond China. BBC journalist Paul Mason writes that the developing world middle class is characterized by life in a "chaotic mega-city, cheek-by-jowl with abject poverty and crime, crowding on to makeshift public transport systems and seeing your income leach away into the pockets of all kinds of corrupt officials.." In a review of Mike Davis' "Planet of Slums," urban areas are described as "horizontal spreads of unplanned squats and shantytowns, unsightly dumps of humans and waste, where child labour is the norm, child prostitution is commonplace, gangs and paramilitaries rule and there is no access to clean water or sanitation, let alone to education or democratic institutions." And, ironically, this is caused in great part by the policies of neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank, which would have us believe that conditions are steadily getting better....
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/neoliberalism-works-for-the-world/...
China's economy is an example of successful neoliberal economic policy!? In several posts I have shown that China is not a free market economy by any stretch of the evidence and may not even be described as capitalist. It is state-owned and controlled with investment and production state-directed, with profit secondary to growth as the objective. Indeed, the IMF data on the size of public investment and stock globally put China in a different league compared to any other economy in the world.
As for India, the state sector also remains significant, something which continually upsets the World Bank and neoliberal economists. The policy measures of the 1990s can hardly be used as the explanation of the pick-up in economic growth in India. During the 1990s, productivity growth in all the major 'emerging economies' picked up – only to fall back again after the Great Recession. Globalisation and foreign capital were drivers then everywhere.
Anyway it is not really true that Indian government policy is 'neo-liberal' – on the contrary. In contrast, the clear shock switch to neoliberal capitalism by Russia's post-Soviet governments and its oligarchs was a total disaster (Smith calls it a 'mixed success'!). Growth, living standards and life expectancy collapsed. Indeed, the conclusion that might be drawn is not that 'neo-liberal reforms' have driven the relative economic success of China and India in the last 30 years but their resistance to such policies.
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Now Marx was the first to note the tremendous boost to production that the capitalist mode of production delivered compared to previous modes. But as I have shown in previous posts, there is another side to capitalism's early years: the immiseration of the working class. And that is a different reality from Smith's claims.
Back in 2013, the World Bank released a report that there were 1.2bn people living on less than $1.25 a day, one-third of whom were children. The World Bank raised its official poverty line to $1.90 a day and Smith refers to sources based on this threshold. This merely adjusted the old $1.25 figure for changes in the purchasing power of the US dollar. But it meant that global poverty was reduced by 100m people overnight.
And, as Jason Hickel points out, this $1.90 is ridiculously low. A minimum threshold would be $5 a day that the US Department of Agriculture calculated was the very minimum necessary to buy sufficient food. And that's not taking account of other requirements for survival, such as shelter and clothing. Hickel shows that in India, children living at $1.90 a day still have a 60% chance of being malnourished. In Niger, infants living at $1.90 have a mortality rate three times higher the global average.
In a 2006 paper, Peter Edward of Newcastle University used an "ethical poverty line" that calculates that, in order to achieve normal human life expectancy of just over 70 years, people need roughly 2.7 to 3.9 times the existing poverty line. In the past, that was $5 a day. Using the World Bank's new calculations, it's about $7.40 a day. That delivers a figure of about 4.2 billion people living below that level today; or up 1 billion over the past 35 years.
Some argue that the reason there are more people in poverty is because there are more people! The world's population has risen in the last 25 years. You need to look at the proportion of the world population in poverty and, at a $1.90 cut-off, the proportion under the line has dropped from 35% to 11% between 1990 and 2013. So Smith is right after all. But this is disingenuous, to say the least.
The absolute number of people in poverty, even at the ridiculously low threshold level of $1.25 a day, has still increased, even if not as much as the total population in the last 25 years. And even then, all this optimistic expert evidence is really based on the dramatic improvement in average incomes in China (and to a lesser extent in India).
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Exclude China and total poverty was unchanged in most regions, while rising significantly in sub-Saharan Africa. And, according to the World Bank, in 2010, the "average" poor person in a low-income country lived on 78 cents a day in 2010, compared to 74 cents a day in 1981, hardly any change. But this improvement was all in China and India. In India, the average income of the poor rose to 96 cents in 2010, compared to 84 cents in 1981, while China's average poor's income rose to 95 cents, compared to 67 cents.
Moreover, poverty levels should not be confused with inequality of incomes or wealth. On the latter, the evidence of rising inequality of wealth globally is well recorded . The latest annual report by Credit Suisse on global personal wealth found that top 1% of personal wealth holders globally now have over 50% of the world's wealth – up from 45% ten years ago. Actually, the majority of people in the major advanced capitalist economies will be in the top 10% of wealth holders because billions of people have no wealth at all!
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The empirical evidence supports Marx's view that, under capitalism, poverty (as defined) and inequality of income and wealth have not really improved under capitalism, neoliberal or otherwise. Any improvement in poverty levels globally, however measured, is mainly explained by in state-controlled China and any improvement in the quality and length of life comes from the application of science and knowledge through state spending on education, on sewage, clean water, disease prevention and protection, hospitals and better child development. These are things that do not come from capitalism but from the common weal....
My primary problem with the second article is that he continues to harp on China being not "really" capitalist, but I think it does serve its point in making note that much of China's improvements stem from some kind of central involvement. Wonder what the place would look like if they had followed Russia off the deep end in the 90s.
