This article seems... kind of strange? Like, first of all, I'm going to believe the UN's data over a website I've never heard of, and know nothing about, full stop. Secondly, for the sake of transparency I need to disclose that I've read Enlightenment Now (which I loved), The Rational Optimist (which I loved the prehistory stuff in, and how it broke down how trade works and can build wealth, but which I was also suspicious of some of the other claims in--the climate change chapter in that book in particular is
dodgy as all fuck), and Factfulness (which is a wonderful book), and I don't really remember the claim that capitalism is the "best of all possible worlds" as this author puts it, more like I came away from those books thinking that it's done a better job than anything else we've tried at raising global standards of living, (i.e. it's the best we
currently have). If anyone's actually claiming that it's the best solution possible, then yeah... that's nonsense. At
minimum it's got a glaring problem with giving way too few people way more power than they deserve or could ever be trusted to use in any good way at all, while leaving way too many people without much of the power they helped create, and only increasing the gap over time.
It also seems kind of strange to use China's accounting for most of the improvement against the data. Like here:
What's more, the vast majority of the gains that have been achieved over this period have come from one region: China and the East Asian tigers. Even if we take just China out of the equation, we find that the proportion of people in poverty today is almost exactly the same as it was in 1981, with no net progress at all.
You can't argue that gains have been achieved, but if we remove the region where they happened, then the proportion of poverty is the same. Like, huh? The rising standard of living in China (and India too, as far as I know) is still a huge number of people that are entering a middle-class standard of living. That's not nothing. As other regions industrialize, they will follow.
I'm finding it difficult to find the words to explain this, but it feels like the author wants to attack the ideology of how these "new optimists" define progress, but then couches it in attacking their data instead, in a way that doesn't totally jive. Like he spends a lot of time contesting their datasets, but then switches to an argument about morality instead, saying that:
The Yale philosopher Thomas Pogge argues that when it comes to global poverty, the morally relevant metric of progress is neither absolute numbers nor proportions nor even the trajectory of poor people's incomes, but rather the extent of poverty compared to our capacity to end it. By this yardstick, he says, we are doing worse than at any time in history, as our capacity to end poverty has grown rapidly, while poverty itself remains widespread. In moral terms, we have regressed.
Like, I just can't buy this at all. The world is unbelievably more moral than it used to be. When you're talking about massive societal change like this, it's going to be really slow, and there are going to be growing pains. I'd feel better about a claim like this sometime in the future--I don't know when, exactly, but having as much of the world be developed as it is (and therefore more capable of helping) is pretty recent, I'm pretty sure. I tried to find a chart of exactly how much of the world is developed or developing now vs 1970 (50 years ago) and had no luck, but it's definitely a much higher standard of living in more of the world nowadays.
I also tried to find global trends in charitable donations for how much of their wealth people donate vs how much they used to, but struck out there. :/
That's not to say we shouldn't do better, because we should, and I remember Pinker implying as much several times in Enlightenment Now
, and
especially Has Rosling saying so in Factfulness--over and over again Rosling reiterates that things can be both very bad, but also better than they were previously. The man helped found Doctors Without Borders for fuck's sake, he knows about needing to do more.
So yeah, I see some of the points the author here is trying to make, and I don't follow the New Optimist movement so I don't know about any particularly outlandish claims they've made, but based on what I've read, I just can't jive with a lot of this article. It feels like a messy argument to me.
