Thank you: I too found the post a simple summary of obvious things. And I too am skeptical of Facebook's motives here: though part of it must surely be 'let's find causes for poverty that allow us to continue to be Facebook, and allow internet 'unicorns' to continue to be unregulated industry-devouring titans'.

Basically, Facebook needs to find a solution to poverty that ends with them consuming and disseminating the data of billions of people who happen to not be desperately poor. In many ways their best case is all the better if their data is of solvent people.

You’re completely right. This belongs in the same class of disgusting PR moves to grow userbase as Zuckerberg offering for Xie to name his firstborn son.

> cover their callous complicity in disinformation campaigns.

They've been on the defensive for years now. Recall how vehemently they downplayed Russian attempts to influence via Facebook ad buys and troll accounts

But to the general point, we've known how to fix the problems for decades but actually attacking issues of income and wealth disparity is asking for the people who are currently benefitting most from the system to give something back. And if history tells us anything, it may take violent revolution to see a real fix.

Not necessarily. William Barber and others are resurrecting Martin King's "Poor People's Campaign", and it probably follows that non-violent resistance of some sort can work, and is the best path both practically and on principle.

Also I believe in empathy as an intellectual response, i.e. in some sense the "enemy" can't help the way they are and should be given complete amnesty after they lose.

The claim of the OP is "We don't need more big data studies to figure out what is causing poverty or how to fix it." Then a list of other things that have nothing to do with that. If the OP wanted to prove his/her assertion about the lack of need for further studies then they should have explained why there is no need for further studies. Their post says nothing about that, just makes a bunch of statements about "settled claims."

I never once claimed there was no evidence for the list of claims about inequality made above. In fact I agree with most of them. But they have nothing to do with the main claim that "We don't need more big data studies to figure out what is causing poverty or how to fix it." That's a controversial statement if you ask me, but the OP managed to distract everyone from it by posting a bunch of generally agreed-upon claims about inequality. (Which arguably will be re-enforced by more data driven studies.) It's a pretty good rhetorical technique for getting people to implicitly agree with you about something you actually disagree on: say something that is controversial and then quickly say a bunch of stuff the other person agrees with.

Along the way guess what, now everyone is implicitly defending the claim that there should be no further research on inequality. If the OP's post consisted entirely of "We don't need more big data studies to figure out what is causing poverty or how to fix it" then they'd have people disagreeing with them, but you should note they've literally said just that, since they have provided no evidence to support it.

Could you please tell me how amazing Facebook's big data will help to deal with Comcast and butchered net neutrality, for-profit prisons, incredibly criminalized society, insurance/out of network healthcare prices and a gig economy slowly taking the job market over?

Where did I claim that? I think using Facebook's data for social studies is a stupid idea. Again that has nothing to do with the OP's post.